Crypto's Journey to The Premier League | WAGMI United

imagine if the new york jets had a public vote on who they were going to go after in free agency a couple weeks ago and that was public domain that would have hurt them well gary doesn't matter what the jets do we can't hold on this could blow up real fast right now the garyvee audio experience evan preston great to see you guys hope you're well uh super excited about our collaboration and uh the innovations we're doing in sports uh for the people that don't know you guys you want to give yourselves a little intro here preston while you go ahead you're more exciting than i am i don't know about that look my background is somewhat in sports i was a sports bettor for about a decade and then i was a tv analyst on espn for a few years and then actually left to prioritize web3 last year in march um and started pixel vault with the punk's comic project with sean gierin and gary thank you i know you were supportive of me from the get-go there so just appreciative to be here extremely lucky and excited that uh we get to talk to you a little bit awesome yeah my name is evan smith i was a former options trader lost the licensing battle around nba top shot got into nfts pretty early and just kind of back again with the past year and see a lot of stuff to build and really excited about it what's the most exciting part of this project from your perspective for me it's that you know we've seen all of these communities gather that are digitally native first around intellectual property around community storytelling and there's all this excitement and often it feels like you know it's without the spine of a story it's really it's amazing that it's happened without the story already pre-told but with sports you have season after season where you have a game every saturday to gather around a team to follow you know from starting with a team in the fourth division we have a place to go it's a natural goal it's just um it should be really exciting to take all the parts that have worked so far and try to apply it to a sports franchise press yeah to go a step further i mean people have been talking about it online for seven eight months like hey we should buy a sports team or do something right in just the crypto web 3 space as a whole i'm excited about actually trying to do that right like we got this club we want to bring it to the people and they can help us via digital first community stuff build it into something that's great that actually has a chance because i mean you've done a great job of e-friends by the way of actually bringing utility and what evan's alluding to 99 out there to say hey you might have a hoodie one day or a character into central land like we have a sports club right we have a team let's build from there and so i think it's everyone's pretty excited because they've been asking for this anyway and we've been able to kind of deliver at least so far yeah gary i would actually be interested in what you have to say but to me it's like it's a blank space and figuring out what it means to have a digitally native community-owned sports team right that's exactly what it is it's not i mean for me it's a clean canvas around an interest graph that i'm obsessed with that can tap into new technologies to create new outcomes yeah 100 you know this team um has been bound by its region for 126 years and they've gotten as high as league one and there's uh there's really no pathway for them to grow beyond that if they go the old-fashioned way but we have the ability to try to find fans from all over the world with a new branding and with a new approach and if we're successful at that we're just going to have a much larger growth opportunity than the rest of the teams around us and that should lead to outsized outcomes which will hopefully attract more fans i mean that's really what we're trying to do when your friends in real life hear a whiff of this and they're like wait what are you doing because i wanted a lot of people to hear this what um how do you answer them preston sure i mean that's actually most people just think it's really cool because i was like oh that's always the dream when you're a kid how do you actually explain it to them press like mundane like button from around the way he's like breast did i just see your name on this what is what's going on go i basically tell them i'll say hey we have this club in crawleytown it's near london it's great proximity there we're excited about the prospects of the efl and potentially moving up a proper football team yeah we're bringing the internet a team and now we have a chance to attach all of these fans across the internet across the world to this club that's local near london that's what we're doing if you want to be involved like we'll talk more about the details you don't even need to get nfts or web3 it's sports and look sports fans they're communities as is anyway like we're just doing that but we're doing it for the internet i say that we're doing kind of a real life lasso

where we're buying a sports team and we're trying to bring an outsized audience to it and if we're successful we're going to move up and it's going to get crazier from here i say it's the adventure when you say move up to americans they don't know what you mean yeah you have to start by explaining promotion relegation which is the whole reason we're starting over there as opposed to over here you we have an entry ticket to the highest league in the world even if we're not in that league right now this would be like if you bought the hudson valley renegades the single a baseball team and then had a plan to become the yankees right it seems impossible here because you're not allowed to do it i mean god would the nba be a better product if they had promotion of relegation but that's a story for a different day uh you know like there's no tanking over there you tank you go down so it's a purely capitalist uh structure whereas over here it's actually quite socialist in the way that we approach sports where it's a club and you can't get out of the club once you're in so that's what makes it so exciting to me