Non-league football isn’t the obvious home for a cutting-edge digital currency revolution. Let’s face it, debit cards feel way too sci-fi at lots of clubs. Wave the contactless and you risk being burned as a witch. Blockchains? That’s what they stick between the gates to stop kids sneaking in for free.
But look out Bedfordshire: Peter McCormack is here to shake things up. McCormack is one of the world’s best-known bitcoin investors, host of a globally popular podcast called What Bitcoin Did, and – slightly off-brand – the new owner of 10th-tier Bedford FC. Last year he strode into his hometown team, currently in Spartan South Midlands Football League Division One, renamed them Real Bedford and announced a big push for the Premier League.
“My first goal really was to bring League football to Bedford,” says McCormack, who once claimed that his bitcoin portfolio had rocketed to $1.2 million (before losing it again). “The Premier League thing was more of a joke: let’s try to poke people and see. Is it likely? No. Is it impossible? No.”
Say what you like about the future-finance people now getting into football, but they talk a good game. You’ll have noticed a lot more talk about bitcoins, NFTs (non-fungible tokens; more on them later) and blockchains on sports pages recently, and some mighty mission statements. That’s just the crypto way. WAGMI, the US NFT company who recently bought League Two’s Crawley Town, takes its name from crypto slang: ‘we’re all gonna make it’. Which is certainly positive.
Then again, McCormack is also brutally honest when things go south. “What I will tell you is that in the first six months of doing this, I have got it absolutely f**king
