NFTs in football could quickly become a scandal if authorities don’t act

If you are following any footballer on social media, you have likely been greeted in recent weeks by an array of cartoon apes. 

Celebrities sharing them include Shaquille O’Neal, Snoop Dogg, and Neymar, using social media to boast about their investments.

Don’t pinch yourself, Cbeebies haven’t taken over Twitter, but illustrated primates have. 

Following in the footsteps of revolutionary artists such as Banksy and Salvador Dali, the developers of said animals believe them to be the future of art, utilising theBlockchain, Metaverse and web 3.0.

They are NFTs, and they are making people lots of money. Promised by many to make you rich quick, they also pose a danger to young fans, as well as problem gamblers who are most at risk from such promises. 

Myself and many others believe they simply exist to trick the buyer into a purchase until there are no buyers left, with the person at the bottom of the ladder left to pick up the pieces.

It’s worth quickly explaining what NFTs actually are. It stands for non-fungible token; non-fungible meaning that the object, or in this case digital item, cannot be copied. An example of a similar thing that is fungible is Bitcoin. All Bitcoins are identical; no NFTs are.

NFTs are all stored on the ‘Blockchain’, a way of storing digital information in an ever-expanding array of servers and code. They are a way of selling anything digital, from genuinely impressive art that has sold for tens of millions of dollars to the first ever tweet from ex-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey, which fetched $2.9million at auction.

Billed as the next step in digital ownership and a way to decentralise, and democratise the art world, NFTs have diluted this future into digital mush. Simply put, they’re all just plain ugly.  

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