Inter Miami has agreed a training kit sponsorship deal with blockchain platform Polkadot in what is claimed to be the first-ever sports sponsorship agreement with a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).
The blockchain is understood to have signed a one-and-a-half-season agreement with the Major League Soccer (MLS) club, which includes branding rights on the front of the club’s training shirts, starting with the upcoming away match against Chicago Fire on Saturday.
Although all of the parties involved in the deal declined to comment, SportBusiness Sponsorship understands the brand is paying an average of around $5m (€4.5m/£3.8m) per season for the rights, with a lower pro-rata fee for the current season to reflect the fact that more than two thirds of the campaign had already elapsed by time the deal was announced.
Under the deal, players and technical staff will also wear Polkadot-branded tops during training sessions at the club’s Florida Blue Training Center. The shirts are likely to receive a significant amount of exposure in the coming days as the club’s star player Lionel Messi returns to training following an injury lay-off.
The Polkadot blockchain is a Layer-0 open-source platform that allows multiple blockchains to connect and operate within itself. The platform was founded by Gavin Wood, a prominent figure in the blockchain industry who also founded the Ethereum blockchain and the Solidity programming language. Polkadot is described as the world’s biggest DAO, an entity with no central authority in which DAO-issued token holders can vote on initiatives.
The agreement was brokered by the Orsen sports marketing agency, which also acted as the intermediary in the Miami club’s last two sleeve sponsorship deals (with XManna and the Fracht Group).
ANALYSIS: Messi deal puts Inter Miami out in front of MLS shirt sponsorship market
Sean O’Reilly, chief executive of Orsen, said the training kit deal broke new ground for the blockchain category and could create new sponsorship opportunities for rights-holders.
“It’s been really, really complex putting this deal together. The only deals that have really been done in the crypto space to date are with the exchanges like Crypto.com, Kraken, Coinbase or Gate.io that just announced the deal with Inter Milan,” he said. “They’re all the exchanges where a crypto company may sell a financial product. No one’s been able to do a major sponsorship deal with a DAO before because there’s no company to sign a contract with.”
To put the deal together, the agency sought approval from the Polkadot community via a referendum process where holders of its native token have the right to vote on how to deploy community funds. The agency identified Inter Miami as a strong fit for the blockchain brand because a significant proportion of the crypto and developer community is based in the city while the club plays in pink kit which aligns with Polkadot’s own distinctive brand identity.
After securing the votes from the community, O’Reilly said the agency took the sponsorship proposal to the club, as well as explaining it to MLS. It then offered to sign the contract and underwrite the upfront cash payment on behalf of the community because of the absence of a central authority at Polkadot. Orsen then ‘off ramped’ its own payment from the platform, converting the native DOT currency into US dollars.
“There were a lot of sleepless nights,” O’Reilly said. “We weren’t answerable to an individual. There was no marketing director, there was no marketing team. We were answerable to a community and the sponsorship is on behalf of a community.”
In a statement to announce the deal, Chrissy Hill, chief learning officer and interim chief operating officer of Parity Technologies, Polkadot’s leading technical contributor, said: “We’re thrilled the innovative Polkadot community is continuing its strong commitment to the future of entertainment with its sponsorship of Inter Miami.”
As a ‘Main Partner’ of Inter Miami, the brand is expected to engage fans of the club with interactive fan zone activations and will receive prominent branding at the club’s training centre and on LED and stadium signage throughout its home Chase Stadium.
As reported by SportBusiness Sponsorship, Inter Miami has reaped the benefits of signing Argentinian superstar and Fifa World Cup winner Lionel Messi, to agree the most lucrative shirt sponsorship agreement in MLS. As previously reported, Royal Caribbean’s three-year sponsorship deal with the team, which took effect this year, is worth $18m per season and could rise to as much as $20m per season with escalators and bonuses.
The Messi effect also allowed the team to more than double the value of its sleeve sponsorship rights. The Fracht Group, a Swiss-based international freight forwarder, announced a three-and-a-half-year deal with the MLS expansion team on July 2023, in full confidence the club would unveil the player five days later.
The deal is worth between $5m and $5.5m per annum, a substantial uplift on the $2m commanded in the team’s previous sleeve sponsor deal with Xmanna, which fell through when the blockchain software provider experienced financial difficulties.
The Nyon-based Orsen is also having a successful year having landed the contract to handle the global commercial rights to Fiba 3×3 basketball and, more recently, standalone sponsorship packages for beach volleyball under an agreement with Volleyball World.