A Chat with Tim Mangnall, CEO at Sports and Entertainment NFT Agency: Capital Block

Capital Block is the only dedicated Sports and Entertainment NFT agency. NFTs are digital image, video, sound clips or any piece of digital content owned by one person through a unique digital code that is stored on the blockchain.

Our focus is helping clubs engage with NFTs, which we believe are the most powerful fan engagement tool. Using our experience and deep understanding of what works and also the best NFT platforms to partner with, we are helping clients create NFT strategies and communities.

For example, working with Galatasaray  we advised the club on its creation of a limited number of NFTs honouring club founder, Ali Sami Yen. We then built out the strategy, the marketing plan and built their NFT community partnering with the relevant NFT marketplace. On the 1^st October, the foundation day of the club, at 19:05, the year the club was founded, the NFT project went live and sold out in 59 seconds.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Capital Block is the evolution of Capital Sports Media, which owns and manages Sports inventory and general media activity for football clubs in Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. The idea for Capital Block came from our vision to build an exciting future for teams in the NFT space and create seamless experiences for the highly sought-after digital centric audience.

I have been investing in cryptocurrency myself for the last five or so years, so I know the space extremely well. Having worked with sports clubs in previous roles, I saw that NFTs – and the wider cryptocurrency sector – were a huge, but misunderstood entity at boardroom level at clubs across Europe.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic has brought many opportunities for the tech space, everything we did in our daily lives as well as cultural experiences was transferred online. Crypto, NFTs and the blockchain exploded into the public consciousness at a similar time – by the end of the year, the marketplace had been valued at around 41 billion USD, valuing the market almost as high as the global art market, and NFT was named the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year!

The fact that everybody was at home, fully online, and – let’s be honest – looking for new things to get stuck into helped intensify people’s focus on digital developments and specifically crypto and NFTs. As a result, interest in this technology and these currencies, which have existed for years, boomed. The pandemic fast-forwarded the adoption of technology in more traditional markets such as art where NFTs are now thriving.
 

What can we hope to see from Capital Block in the future?

 
We have some partnerships to be announced in the coming weeks with major Champions League and Premier League clubs, which is in addition to us working with almost every major club in Turkey.

We will also be working with a range of new blockchain agencies who we will collaborate with to achieve the best results for our clients. This year, we’re focusing on ensuring fans get utility from NFTs. NFTs cannot be the ‘end game’ themselves – they need utility, which is applying real-world benefits to ownership. We’re looking at what NFTs give you access to as a fan. It could be a signed shirt or a meeting with the manager.

When it comes to sports, music and entertainment, we haven’t even scratched the surface but the biggest growth in NFTs will come from sports clubs and entertainment in 2022.

Oh yes, and there’s this thing called the Metaverse that you may have heard of. Sports in the metaverse, It’s happening without a shadow of a doubt – watch this space!