The global stadium: metaverses, Web3 and sports

Sports clubs have traditionally struggled to monetize fans beyond shirt sales and tickets – could the metaverse change that?

Transport yourself, for a moment. You are standing in the cavernous Camp Nou, surrounded by steep stands packed with football fans in blue and purple, bouncing, beating drums, waving banners, singing the names of the Barça players on the pitch in front of them: Gavi, Pedri, Ferran Torres, Lewandowski. The air is crackling with the feeling that anything might happen, at any moment. Down at the other end of the ground, a block of brilliant white in the stands demarcates the dedicated madrileños who have travelled to Barcelona for this, El Clasico, the traditional match between FC Barcelona and their own club, Real Madrid – an event where some of the best footballers in the world have announced themselves with moments of brilliance. Whilst it’s the height of football as an artform, it is far more than just a game. It is an expression of the competitive axis between Madrid and Barcelona, between royalty and republicanism, Castile and Catalonia, the centre and the periphery. It's theatre, and you’re there, watching it.

Except, of course, you aren’t. You’re at home in your bedroom in a small apartment in Yokohama, Japan, and you have never been to Spain in your life. The year is 2035 and instead, you’re watching the game in the “Barçaverse” – one of many virtual metaverses run by various football clubs that allow you to experience a game on the other side of the world in real time, surrounded by other – real – fans in a virtual recreation of Barcelona’s famous stadium. The noise is real, the game is real, and the people around you are real, but they are all watching it virtually, too. They are represented by digital avatars who speak and react to your every move. To your left is a Barça fan from Bangladesh. Behind you is a family from Cameroon. In the stand in front of you is a couple from Limerick.

The potential of the metaverse to heighten memorable experiences is clearly massive, not least because virtual digital worlds can transport people to places they otherwise would never have access to. Last year, in Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience, the Web3 entrepreneur and founder Herman Narula outlined a philosophy and vision for what the metaverse might look like. “A metaverse is akin to a game that society plays together,” he wrote, “albeit one that has real consequences and is designed for fulfilment, not escapism…the basis for this productive social game is that we all agree to treat it as if it is real.” In the context of football the point of a metaverse would not be whether you are actually at the Camp Nou in the city of Barcelona for El Clasico, so much as that you feel like you are, surrounded by other fans who also feel like they are.

So who will benefit the most? In his book, Narula notes that some brands are going to find the metaverse more useful than others. Among these are fashion houses, whose brands rely on artificial scarcity and but who need to find new ways to monetise them (it’s not hard to imagine someone buying Balenciaga or Miu Miu products, say, to wear in a metaverse). Another industry will be music – the rapper Travis Scott held a gig in the universe of the game Fortnite in 2020, and again, it’s not hard to imagine that rather than forking out $1,000 to see Madonna’s greatest hits tour, in fifteen years it could be the norm to buy a $20 ticket to watch the gig in the metaverse, surrounded by others who are watching it in real-time with you. People would still pay for the physical tour, but access would be expanded massively, and Madonna would make that much more money at no real extra cost.

And then there’s sports. Arguably the best example of how the metaverse could work, sports teams and franchises around the world could, theoretically, use metaverse technology to maximise the income they make from fans. Says Narula, again: “The defining characteristic of a metaverse is the way in which it generates a network of meaning and value between the real world and the half-life world or worlds that are all linked.” And this is exactly the same phenomenon that underpins being a football fan: ultimately, it makes no difference who scores more goals to win El Clasico, except that tens of millions of people in Spain and around the world have simply decided that it does.

The problem is just how to monetise those people beyond merely selling shirts or a limited number of tickets per game. There are tens of millions of fans who would love to watch Barcelona play football in a more immersive way than just on TV, but they can’t afford flights and tickets to a real game. If you are Chelsea FC, how do you make money from your fanbases in Ghana, South Korea or the USA?

The answer may already be here. In 2021, Covid-19 restrictions meant that the Women’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Barcelona was played behind closed doors in Gothenburg, Sweden. In response, metaverse company PixelMax created a virtual fan event in which fans could walk down a digital recreation of the stadium tunnel and talk to players via video link before kick-off. Registrations reached capacity less than an hour after launch. And last May, the LA Kings ice hockey team partnered with volumetric technology firm Tetavi for an NHL first, capturing the team’s players on film and then essentially beaming 3D versions of them onto the ice at half-time (though purists may describe this as augmented reality rather than a metaverse per se…)

Football has always been quick to embrace new technology, as have other sports – one only has to look at VAR, Hawkeye in tennis, or the TMO in rugby to see how tech impacts the experience of watching sport. Or else, to flick over to Sky Sports or Match of the Day, where pundits can access key data about how far any one player on the pitch has run, or how many goals they should probably have scored (known as xG). And in fact, one of the oldest and easiest stats to come by for commentators has traditionally been attendance. How long before there’s an El Clasico where the attendance, rather than reaching 70,000 – the capacity of the Camp Nou – is instead in the millions?