England's crypto club takes plunge into the unknown

So, an American consortium has bought an English soccer team with the ultimate aim of winning the Premier League title.

Nothing especially new there, right?

Well, when it comes to the recent purchase of Crawley Town, an unheralded club located 28 miles (44 kilometers) south of London, there’s a huge catch.

“The Dallas Cowboys of the NFL are America’s Team — no matter where you live in America, there are always Dallas Cowboy fans,” said Preston Johnson, one of the businessmen fronting WAGMI United’s acquisition of the team which plays in England’s fourth division. “We want it to be wherever you live, if you have an internet connection, you are a Crawley Town FC supporter.”

That’s because WAGMI United is a group of investors pledging to “shake up the status quo” by using the world of cryptocurrency and “Web 3” technology to fuel the rise of a sports team.

Cryptocurrency is a kind of digital money — bitcoin is the best-known example — that use decentralized databases known as “blockchains” to record encrypted transactions. Web 3 is a trendy technology term used to describe an idealistic goal for a more democratic internet enabled by the growing use of blockchains and blockchain-based items such as nonfungible tokens, known as NFTs.

Cryptocurrency's rising popularity — and meteoric increase in value — has been viewed with widespread skepticism because it is unregulated, making it ripe for wide-eyed speculation among unsophisticated investors and market manipulation by scam artists.

By purchasing Crawley Town, WAGMI United is among about a dozen American owners in English soccer but the group is believed to be the first from the crypto space to buy an entire professional sports team.

“That crypto, NFT, Web 3 audience …...