Web3 Athlete Monetization Opportunities

Share this Inspiring Episode:
                   

Web 3.0 Sports Model 2023 | How Athletes, Coaches & Gamers Can Make Money

In today’s Web3 video, we’re with Justin Lacche, the Commissioner of the Omniverse Sports League and we’re going to discuss some business use case examples of the types of sports and athletes that make up the one hundred and thirty plus athletes and these sport gamers and thirty one countries of the Omniverse Sports League.

Justin, can you please provide examples of the types of sports and athletes and coaches that are making up the one hundred and thirty plus athletes and gamers in the thirty one countries as a business use case for Omniverses Sports League

I see the power and the beauty in all countries. I would say one advantage of the United States, because of its geographic size, is that we have people from every country on earth and that makes it very open for business opportunities for different cultures.

So we had a very unique opportunity during the coronavirus and again, nothing ever good comes from a pandemic, but we had world class athletes who were going for master’s degree in the States or who were playing here with different sports. So we had amazing second division level quality cricket players, volleyball players, soccer players, basketball players and some beach athletes. So we had an extremely talented ecosystem of athletes, gamers and coaches who were in the USA and allowed to work here when the pandemic hit. That’s not a luxury that every country has so we were very fortunate in that space.

With my background in a Fortune 500 Company for my entire adult life, I had a deep roster of people, so we basically knew coming in that these sports leagues were failing. We decided to launch this league so that the product itself could be built and defended globally.

While we were never going to take over from the top tier administration sports, we had names of athletes that have competed in the Olympics or World Championships for their country.  We could put on tournaments in beautiful locations such as ocean beaches where people could come and watch these world class players for low cost or even free.

So we had a great product. We were also fortunate we could attract coaches with a master’s degree in teaching classes or in sports teams and we were even able to attract in the global gaming community institutional business side e-gamers with ties to  the USA so the ecosystem was perfect. The demand was there because many of the lower tier leagues in these sports went bankrupt.

Justin, can you please provide us with a business use case for Omniverses Sports League?

So the first business use case for the Omniverse Sports League was to explain to the athletes and coaches why their existing league failed them.  It was because the league had a single point of failure and went bankrupt during pandemic lockdown.

We then said to them we can get you back to a league but we’re going to run it in a different way.  We told them you’re not going to rich from payments from us, but we’ll teach you how to earn a living wage by using Web 3 technology to market yourselves.  We want limit you in who you can talk to, other than it has to abide by the league’s ethical standards, so no sponsorships that promote issues such as war, racism, pollution or corruption.  You also have to turn up each day as a good human being such as having dignity, honor, not taking drugs etc. But outside of this, we won’t hold you back or take a cut from how you make your money.

Because all of us cresting the league came from Fortune 500 companies, we knew how to get our athletes and tournaments certified and our licenses and intellectual property sanctioned in quick time so we could get the Omniverse Sports League up and running.

So in summary, the business case was to amplify the talent already available but use the Web 3.0 decentralized paradigm, to say we’re going to be about common opportunity, but create a business acumen to help our athletes, coaches and gamers be successful rather than just tell them to go off and get your own job and play and train when you have time.

How Is The Omniverse Sports League Different To A Traditional Sports League? 

Using a real world example of the traditional business model, you would have a sports team and they would have their brand. There would be league rules about who you can sign and how much they can be paid and where they can play, and then they have to honor only playing for your team. By the way, that’s true for just about everywhere top sporting organization.  They may have a digital department that might have an online store or sell some things, and they may even license the likeness of that league to a video game place.  But really there are so many areas where, basically, you are restricted to those paradigms and legally, if you go out of that you get sued and lose your money.

In an omniverse model, the flavor is the same but the back end is different. So you still have a sports team and a common brand. In one ecosystem we have a real life time but also a metaverse e-gaming team which is tied to the real world team.  Both the real time and metaverse team compete in tournaments at the same time all over the world.

So an omniverse having a real world sports team with real human beings that do their sport and own their intellectual property also have the digital side which is blockchain protected and visualized through a metaverse where there’s gaming but there’s also the tokens and information and the creativity the comes from that.

In a single season, we have a methodical schedule that our teams compete for championships and we collect that data and publish the data create the omniverse.

How Does The Omniverse Sports League Make Money?

So institutionally, we have three core ways that the Omnniverse Sports league as a brand makes money.

Firstly, the value of our franchise because we’ve won a lot of championships so far so businesses want to partner with us. Our brand has value because we can actually produce the championship trophies we’ve won in the real world and in gaming. So there is an intrinsic value, the fact that we have six teams that have won multiple championships individually.

The second one is, and I think this is the real superpower, is the metadata. So our stats are data. Our story is exciting to people in sports and in business and in technology. So actually they can produce different use cases on demand about how we function under different scenarios. Universities will want to work with us to understand how to do this research and how it is protected in the league’s blockchain.  So there’s actually a science value to what we produce in terms of how we demonstrate use cases for how businesses can profit, offer reduced friction points and how we can survive real world scenarios such as a pandemic. So the Omniverse Sports League is in demand from Fortune 500 companies to research institutionally how they want to launch a business and how they can partner with us on their use cases.

The third is the actual events themselves. We are extremely efficient at putting on exciting venues and a lot of times will compete on the ocean.  We’ll get licensed to play on the beach with the beautiful ocean where everything is solar powered so we can do the environmental story.

The same thing with our gamers. We try to have as much gaming happen at events as possible. Of course, we’re a global organization but when people see a gamer using a solar recharger on a seventy dollars phone and their actually competing on Web 3, people are happy to pay to see that because they feel that they’re part of a movement.

So a lot of times, a young league actually goes bankrupt in debt, just renting an arena so they have a nice photo opportunity. We pick the best places in our areas and around the world for the photo opportunity and we actually do tournaments at a profit.

How Do Athletes, Coaches and Gamers Get Paid?

The athletes get paid in a combination of prize money, sponsorship and through being trained how to have better business acumen by going out and selling their own NFTs and creating their own training program.  They are not paid a salary by the league.

To add more clarity, the amount of prize money and sponsorship deals a player can earn will be dependent upon the physical location or the legal jurisdiction of a tournament.  However the owners and investors in the Omniverse Sports League have made a moral decision that they are creating a world class asset will go up manyfold in value and are so are not siphoning off prizemoney and sponsorship.

The first priority is to make sure all athletes, coaches and gamers earn a living wage and they have so many more avenues to do this than in a traditional league.  Justin is helping teach participants how to create their own likenesses and monetize them.  They are also encouraged to create their own training camps or offer fan experiences, with all revenue going directly to the athlete, coach or gamer.

It is all about sharing the wealth that is a win for owners, investors, athletes, coaches and gamers so that everyone gets a fair share.

Can You Tell Us More About The Other People Behind The League?

We are very diverse in terms of both the countries and philosophies but there there’s a common sense of in we have a couple of artists, some bankers we have some athletes, we have computer scientists, entrepreneurs, but we all have a common passion, which is, we believe, that if you democratize a good business model, if you have a very strong business model that can stand, the test of challenges of time and you share the wealth, you can make more money and feel good about it.

We believe that the fundamental old paradigm of business is incorrect, which is, I need to steal from you to be rich or I need to hold you back to be successful. We think that that’s barbaric and wrong, and we don’t also think that saying things like democratizing opportunity makes me a weak person.  I just believe fundamentally if people want to work with me and if they understand the model and I put out a product, they will choose to stay with me and not go somewhere else or they’ll choose to stay with me and go with someone else, and I’m cool with that, so I think that that’s really where the eclectic mix of our board comes in, because even though we all came from large Fortune 500 sports company’s, our life stories are very different but that common fabric is for all people to have a fair chance to be their best selves.

We believe our business model is better than our competition, but I don’t need to steal people from you to prove it.

Can You Tell Us More About The Gaming Side?

All of our gamers are actually professional in other gaming leagues. They’ve been very excited, though, about a business model where they could be owners of a league and so their experience and connections along with us kind of talking about the minimum standard for what a Web 3.0 cricket match has to look like for us to sanction and cover those stats has been what we’ve been doing.

I’ve actually been very impressed with the advances they’ve been able to coach up to, not just for us but in their own leagues, about the web versus metaverse stats. So that’s why I want to stress to people that the gaming site is not about wearing goggles. It’s not about logging in into a closed system. It actually is being driven by, as we say, the entire community, the street, and I am very optimistic that actual gaming will make virtual businesses such as virtual medicine and virtual education much more realisticistic because this is actually the most progressive use of it so far.

But right now it’s more getting the gamers to organize the type of sporting tournaments the league is happy to sanction, which have the minimum viable stats for the quality of it. And then, if the league signs off, the tournament is good to go and then the gamers report back on the final stats. The league then publishes those stats and many gamers involved in the tournament then get to claim points or credits for being part of the community, and so everybody wins.

Most of the gamers already have credibility and earn money off their reputation, so doing well in Omniverse Sports league sanctioned tournaments and improving their stats just adds to their value.

How Is The Omniverse Sports League Making A Difference?

One of the easiest metaphors to talk to people about is sport has the power, even at Olympics level, for countries to stopping armed conflict for fourteen days to compete.

We have ten athletes. We have rules. We have four tournaments. We have to make sure that there’s health standards and we make money. Each competitor could be as far apart in any other ideological way is possible but that analogy about a cricket match, a soccer match, that surfing contest, everyone is equal.

That’s the superpower of the Omniverse Sports League. It brings people together who would normally be warring with other people. For example, we have a handball team we are starting. We have starting players from israel and saudi arabia. How often do you think that they would hang out in the Middle East, so the fact that that not only are they great team members, but they work together to win championships.

I also get choked up when I receive an email from an athlete who is on inactive duty and was allowed for one hour in lunch to escape his situation and play in a Web3 tournament.  That’s powerful. It’s far more than just making a buck off somebody.

Going outside of the sports sphere, ultimately what I want is on the back of Web 3.0 technology is for people to experience being able to go to college if they want to, paying for their own apartment, make a vote that counts or on even a little girl in Tasmania finding a cure for cancer because her blockchain science class from around the world let her be able to visualize data in stem cell research in a way that’s ethical.

Why Is Data So Important? 

Fans love to read data about their favorite sports players.  What the Omniverse Sports League is creating is a way for the data to be verified and certified on the blockchain in a way that it cannot be tampered with.

It can provide a much better fan experience while allowing athletes to monetize this data through sponsorships and fan experiences and coaching clinics because the data backs up what they have achieved.

Can You Give Us An Example Of How Beach Volleyball Doubles Players Could Monetize Themselves using Web 3 Technology?

As a starting point, by being part of the Omniverse Sports League, each tournament they play in will be officially sanctioned.  The players will have their career history stats, a list of all tournaments they have won and other positions they have finished all available as metadata.

The athletes could make an NFT out of any of this information, and also create a physical trading card.

With this information, you could go to sponsors and say these are our results, this is our story about how we only play on beaches that promote renewable energy or removing plastics from the ocean and here is the exposure we can give you.

They could also offer coaching clinics or fan experiences such as a free dinner where you teach them how to play volleyball.  This NFT could be then tradable.

The athletes could also monetize events where they have previously won.  They could re-stream the footage and say, randomly award a free restaurant meal to every 750th viewer. They could also then interview someone watching the stream and provide a free give-away.  The events do not always have to be happening live.

How Could Other Businesses Such As A Butcher Benefit From Blockchain and Web 3.0 Technology? 

For existing businesses, the key is to play to your strengths. For butcher’s, you want to be able to show your insurance is up to date and you can confirm provenance of your meat on the blockchain. You may even want to accept different types of altcoin currency up and down your supply chain.

Once you get the ecosystem system evolved, it will start unlocking opportunities. You can sort of be bold quickly, without excessive amounts of risk, that’s how I would start as a butcher.