In August 2021, Paris Saint-Germain signed Lionel Messi and their Fan Token became, for a few days, one of the most traded assets in the crypto world: more than 1.2 billion dollars in cumulative volume, a price that rose more than 130 per cent in five sessions on pure speculation about the signing, and new token sales that generated around 30 million euros, of which the club received, according to Reuters, at least half. Five years later, that same token trades approximately 99.2 per cent below its all-time high. The two preceding sentences describe the same transaction, and that is everything one needs to understand about this business: the club monetised at the exact peak of euphoria and the buyer was left holding the decline. It was not a market accident. It was the design.
The current picture is relentless in its arithmetic. As of 20 August 2026, the four emblematic tokens of European football — those of Barcelona, PSG, Manchester City and Juventus — all trade around 99 per cent below their all-time highs, according to CoinGecko data. Barcelona's BAR once reached 72.55 dollars and today hovers around 0.27; PSG touched 58.79 and sits at 0.48; CITY reached 36.19 and trades at 0.36; JUV hit 37.83 and today is worth 0.31. Together they represent a circulating market capitalisation of around 25.5 million dollars. In other words, the four Fan Tokens of four of the most valuable sports brands on the planet are worth, in aggregate, less than the market price of a rotational right-back.
What is striking is that the market is still alive. Those same four assets still move around 7.5 million dollars daily. The secondary market is not dead: it has been brutally repriced. There is sufficient liquidity to trade, but the price the market assigns today to the future utility of these tokens is a minimal fraction of what was paid during the boom. And here it is worth introducing the first methodological caveat that the industry systematically avoids: trading volume does not measure committed fans. In 2021 Reuters was already documenting that Jump Trading was providing market-making for Chiliz tokens, meaning part of the volume came from professional liquidity providers and not from club supporters. Kaiko recorded in May 2024 daily trading peaks above 170 million dollars ahead of the Euros and the Copa América, compared with ranges of 25 to 57 million for much of January, with the classic pattern of buying the rumour and selling the news. Fan Token liquidity is episodic and event-driven. Volume and engagement are distinct quantities, and conflating them was one of the most profitable rhetorical operations of the cycle.
The destruction of value is not limited to these four names either. An academic paper places the aggregate peak of the Fan Token market at around 555.3 million dollars on 21 October 2021; the equivalent CoinGecko category today stands at around 222.6 million, approximately 60 per cent less. The comparison is indicative, because the universe of classified tokens has changed and today includes more assets, but precisely that expansion makes the inability to recover the initial capitalisation more significant: there are more tokens and less value.
The economically relevant question, however, is not how much the price fell but who bore that fall. And that is where the model reveals its true nature. The individual contracts between Socios.com, Chiliz and each club are not fully public, so it cannot be stated with certainty that Barcelona, PSG, Juventus and Manchester City signed exactly the same clauses. But contemporary sector reports allow the general architecture to be reconstructed. SportsPro described, based on interviews with Socios, a split of roughly equal shares of revenue from sales and trading between platform and clubs. Sifted documented an equivalent scheme: a minimum payment to the club plus a share of around half of certain sales, settleable in cash or in tokens depending on the case. Translated into financial language, the club received an upfront brand licence fee and captured variable upside linked to token demand, while price risk was deposited entirely in the secondary market.
From this follows the consequence that is almost never explained well: a 99 per cent fall in the token is not equivalent to a 99 per cent loss for the club. The secondary market buyer bears the capital loss; the club had already monetised the initial sale, the sponsorship, the royalties or the commissions. What the club loses when activity collapses is future variable income and part of the commercial appeal of the product, not its investment. The analysis by the British Parliament reached the same conclusion in institutional language, identifying a relatively limited financial exposure for sports entities compared with the ability to monetise their brands and their fans. PSG even included a significant amount of Fan Tokens in Messi's welcome package, which demonstrates that variable upside linked to token demand existed, but not that the club held on its balance sheet an equivalent position permanently exposed to the price.
That does not mean the club was free of risk, only that its risk was of a different nature. A guaranteed payment is worth exactly as much as the solvency of the counterparty, and the law firm Wiggin recommended at the time that clubs review the financial position of providers, apply enhanced due diligence and consider payment guarantee mechanisms, as well as monitoring exclusivities against other sponsors in investment, gambling or crypto-asset categories. A contract with a crypto-asset platform is not just a sponsorship: it is also credit risk.
If the financial argument was fragile, the political argument was even more so. The word that did the heavy lifting throughout the entire expansion phase was governance. Manchester City announced at the time that CITY holders could participate in certain binding and non-binding surveys. The current regulatory white paper for the very same token, notified in September 2025 under the MiCA framework, is far less poetic: CITY grants no dividends or financial return whatsoever, and confers no right to participate in votes on the club's management, corporate structure or strategic decisions. A binding survey may mean the club commits to executing the winning option of that specific consultation. It does not, under any circumstances, mean the token confers corporate governance rights.
The inventory of what has actually been voted on in six years confirms this without need for interpretation. Holders have decided the design of a mural in Barça's dressing room, the design of the captain's armband, the corner flags for a Clásico — a vote the club was still holding in May 2026 — the matchday music, photographs and commemorative elements. They have never voted on a signing, a budget, a level of debt, a salary policy, the appointment or removal of a director, or anything that remotely resembles institutional power. The most honest acknowledgement from the sector came from Arsenal in its own defence before the British Advertising Standards Authority, when it admitted that Fan Token surveys would not direct critical business decisions, but primarily activities and cultural elements. The regulator, for its part, concluded that a paid, transferable, tradable token with fluctuating prices had the characteristics of an investment and required adequate warnings.
At Barcelona the contrast reaches its sharpest form, because the club offers the perfect term of comparison within its own structure. A member who meets the statutory requirements is part of the electoral roll that elects the president and the board of directors, and the assembly of delegate members intervenes in the institutional and financial decisions of the entity; the club itself detailed those conditions again in the elections called in 2026. A BAR holder, by contrast, depends on the functionalities the platform offers and the questions the club chooses to put to a vote. One holds an associative right born of the statutes. The other holds a revocable contractual functionality. Presenting the second as the digital equivalent of the first was, in all likelihood, the greatest commercial excess of the entire cycle.
There is even a final regulatory irony in the City document: although commercially the language of utility is used, the white paper establishes that CITY does not even meet the legal definition of a utility token under MiCA, because the access it provides is not limited to goods or services supplied exclusively by the issuer or related entities. This does not mean the token lacks utility in ordinary language. It means that utility, governance and corporate rights are three legally distinct concepts that the advertising of the boom period had every incentive to blur. Traditional fan organisations saw it from the start: Football Supporters Europe opposed turning supporter participation into a monetised activity, and the English Football Supporters' Association has criticised the imposition of financial barriers on forms of participation it considers inherent to the normal relationship between club and fan.
None of this was illegal in 2021, and that is precisely the point: the regulatory environment of then bears no resemblance to that of now. The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation entered full application on 30 December 2024, and in Spain the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores has established that from 1 July 2026 only providers authorised by it or by another competent authority of the European Union may operate; Socios Europe Services Limited appears in the corresponding register. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority has required since October 2023 specific warnings for crypto-asset promotions directed at British consumers, clear and non-misleading communications, restrictions on incentives, suitability assessments on certain customer journeys and a minimum 24-hour cooling-off period for certain new buyers, with a scope that may extend to websites, apps and social media even if the entity originating the communication is outside the country. It is also worth not confusing notification with approval: the CITY white paper has not been approved by any European authority and responsibility for its content falls on the offeror.
The Arsenal precedent demonstrates that the club cannot offload that risk onto the platform by claiming the token is issued by a third party, because the sanction fell on the club's own advertising. And that permanently alters the economic equation of the product: from the gross income derived from the agreement one must now subtract a structurally higher compliance cost, including legal review of campaigns, geographic segmentation, warnings, control of player and influencer communications, know-your-customer procedures where applicable, third-party governance and continuous regulatory monitoring. The new framework favours those who use the Fan Token as a discreet loyalty layer and penalises any return to aggressive advertising based on scarcity, price or implied appreciation.
What is remarkable is that this tightening has not triggered an institutional withdrawal. Barcelona was still running Fan Token votes in May 2026, Manchester City published new experiences and consultations for holders in November 2025, Socios was maintaining Juventus activations during the 2025-2026 season, the Spanish football federation announced an alliance with the platform in June 2026 and Inter had renewed its relationship shortly before. The institutional business continues. What has died is not the product but the investment narrative that accompanied it. Though caution is warranted here too: the fact that a token remains active does not allow the conclusion that the economic terms signed in 2020 or 2021 remain intact. The Barcelona case illustrates this well, with Chiliz investing 100 million dollars in 2022 for a 24.5 per cent stake in Barça Studios, the club signing in 2025 with another crypto-asset company as a blockchain technology partner, and BAR nonetheless remaining present in official activations in 2026. Blockchain, Web3 and Fan Token rights can be segmented and renegotiated without extinguishing the original token.
Below the official market there exists another that operates under radically different rules and which should not be confused with the former. On a permissionless chain, any developer can deploy a token evoking a club, a player or a sporting event without having signed any contract with the brand owner. The Kylian Mbappé episode in August 2024 showed the extreme: following the apparent endorsement from his X account, a token using his name was promoted, whose price and valuation surged for minutes before collapsing. The association with the celebrity was exactly what the attacker was trying to make the market believe.
Juventus left on this terrain the most legally useful precedent of the entire sector. In 2022, the Court of Rome granted interim measures against Blockeras for the production and commercialisation of non-fungible tokens reproducing the club's trademarks, ordering the cessation of activity and the withdrawal of the infringing assets from channels controlled by the defendant. The decisive detail is that Blockeras did hold authorisation from former player Christian Vieri to exploit his image, and that did not grant it any rights over Juventus's trademarks. A player's image rights, a club's trademark and authorisation to issue a digital asset are three legally independent layers, however much meme coin markets present them as one. The limitation is more technological than legal: a court can act against identifiable issuers, promoters, domains, marketplaces or centralised intermediaries, but it is far harder to erase from the world a contract already deployed on a public network. The effective strategy is to cut off distribution and trust points, not to pursue the code. Paradoxically, all of this reinforces the main commercial asset of the official token: the licence functions as a signal of authenticity, which in turn obliges the club to be extremely clear about which token is authorised and which is not.
Viewed from the desk of a chief financial officer or a risk committee, the conclusion is that the mistake would be to evaluate a Fan Token by its price. The token may have failed as a store of value for the buyer and simultaneously been a profitable contract for the club. The correct question in 2026 is a different one: whether it produces sufficient recurring income and loyalty value to offset the regulatory cost and the risk of associating the brand with an asset that has lost around 99 per cent from its peak. And the partial answers point in different directions. The fixed licence income remains attractive if guaranteed and the counterparty is solvent. Primary sales of new tokens are today far less attractive, because replicating the FOMO of 2021 is extraordinarily difficult. Trading-linked commissions are variable and cyclical, more dependent on sporting calendars than on stable loyalty. Loyalty and experiences are the only genuinely defensible economic justification for the product. Governance has low real value and should not be presented as institutional power. And appreciation for the fan simply should not form part of the commercial proposition, because its track record is devastating.
That also requires changing the way the contract is valued. In a new agreement it would make no sense to project in the base case the token's appreciation or the 2021 volumes. The minimum guaranteed payment should be treated as contractual income subject to platform credit risk, and revenue and commission sharing should go into the variable scenario with a severe discount against the boom-era historical record. Nor should traded volume be used as the primary engagement indicator: far more informative are the number of unique active holders, actual participation in surveys, reward usage and redemption rates, recurring users, acquisition cost, net income per fan and the percentage of holders who use the token rather than merely trading it. And on the contractual side, the priorities are payment guarantees, audit rights over income sharing, precise brand usage rules, compliance obligations by jurisdiction, indemnities for unlawful advertising, restrictions on player and influencer communications and, above all, an exit plan that determines what happens to the brand and to holders if the agreement ends. That exit plan is not a minor legal detail: the CITY white paper itself envisages that the token may continue to exist and be traded even if the commercial relationship with the club ends, while certain functionalities are modified, expire or disappear. The token can outlive its own utility. For a sports brand, that creates a residual reputational risk capable of outlasting the sponsorship.
The Fan Token experiment, in short, has not ended: it has normalised. What was sold in 2021 was an asset that would allow the fan to own a share of their club's decisions, with built-in appreciation potential. What has survived is a tradable digital membership, officially licensed, that unlocks rewards, experiences and some promotional surveys. The second proposition has legitimate commercial value and probably a future. The first is supported neither by the legal rights embedded in the token nor by six years of market behaviour.
And the relevant risk for clubs has also changed shape. It no longer consists of losing money because their Fan Token falls, because the contractual design protected them from precisely that. It consists of having been paid to lend to a speculative financial product the asset that generates the most trust among their fans, which is the club's brand, and remaining reputationally associated with the public's losses even though the contract was profitable for the entity. The British parliamentary warnings, the criticism from supporters' associations and the European and British regulatory tightening all point toward that same ledger item, which appears in no income statement and which is today the true cost of the business. In football, as in finance, the correct question was never how much was made. It was who assumed the risk. And in this case the answer has been written in the price chart for six years.
