Ken Early: Into cryptospace and beyond – John Terry bursts forth

Few former footballers have ever seemed quite as spellbound by their own legend as John Terry. A good share of the posts on the Twitter account he started in November 2021 are retweets of praise from fans. It seems likely that you could get the former England captain to retweet #tiocfaidharla if you appended it to some sufficiently eye-catching flattery.

Sometimes Terry praises others, but often in such a way that the glory ends up reflecting on himself. "Happy Birthday @GaryJCahill," he wrote over a picture of his former Chelsea team-mate. "Get on the size of the big man's arms. I always had to make the arm band bigger every time I passed it to him." Ah yes, the captain's armband. No sportsperson is more inextricably associated with armbands than Terry, pioneer of the bare-chested-but-still-wearing-the-armband after-match interview.

A post in praise of Ronaldinho was accompanied by a graphic showing the Ballon D'Or top 10 of 2005, featuring Ronaldinho in first place and – ah – Terry in 10th. It seemed odd that he would be excited enough about Michail Antonio's achievement of becoming "second all-time top scorer among Premier League players who have scored 100 per cent of their goals from inside the box" to tweet about it, until you saw the accompanying graphic showing that Terry was also there among the top five.

Sometimes his posts betray a flash of resentment at the amnesiac world that no longer supplies him with respect in the quantities a retired Captain of his dimensions surely continues to deserve. On New Year's Day he bridled: "Can someone explain why Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Ashley Cole, Nicky Butt, Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell, Jamie Carragher, Wayne Rooney, have never been honoured for their services to football. We are talking the BEST of the BEST EVER?" Hmm, whatever could he be driving at.

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Maybe that sense of grievance fuels the apparent restlessness which means Terry is not content simply to kick back and retweet praise, play golf, and occasionally dress up like Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby for clay-pigeon shooting with friends. Instead he has burst forth into the cryptospace and become English football’s most visible booster of NFTs [non-fungibile tokens].

Within a day of opening the Twitter account he’d got straight down to business: “Talk to me about NFTs. I’m intrigued and keen to get involved in the NFT community?” Nearly three months on, he is regularly touting NFTs from the range called Ape Kids Football Club – where Terry is ‘head coach’ – and enthusing when former team-mates like Willian, Tammy Abraham and Bobby Zamora do likewise. “Love the artwork you’ve done and what your project is about giving back to football in this web3 format,” wrote Zamora.

The game is already hustling fans towards forms of 'cryptoinvesting' that make conventional gambling look like bingo night

It is unclear how this “project” is about “giving back to football”. Last week the Daily Telegraph reported that Chelsea, the Premier League and Uefa were unhappy with the use of their logos and trophies in Ape Kids NFTs. “Absolutely plum” was Terry’s comment on the story, but sure enough, the Chelsea, Premier League and Uefa symbols have been removed from the images.

Typically, the football bodies sprang into action to defend their intellectual property: nothing horrifies them more than the thought that somebody out there might be making money and not giving them their proper cut. Football has no problem with crypto initiatives per se. Six Premier League clubs have “fan token” associations with Socios, while Watford took on Dogecoin as a shirt sleeve sponsor.

Does any of this matter? Well, it is ironic that while authorities debate whether to ban betting sponsorship in football, the game is already hustling fans towards various forms of “cryptoinvesting” that make conventional gambling look like bingo night at the nursing home.

Imagine you are a football fan who loves John Terry and are as impressed by the Ape Kids artwork as Zamora claims to be. How can you join the club to be like your heroes? First, you must change some euros or dollars or pounds into Ether, the currency of the Ethereum blockchain in which the Ape Kids are priced. Over the last two years Ether has traded at prices ranging between $100 and $4,500, so speculating on Ether alone would be enough of a roller-coaster ride to satisfy many investor-gamblers.

Football is now one of the biggest channels through which cryptomania is being mainlined into the culture

But when you take the next step of converting your Ether into an NFT such as an Ape Kid, you’re adding a whole extra level of uncertainty – like riding a roller coaster while wearing a VR headset through which you are simultaneously experiencing an entirely different roller coaster. Good luck anticipating where the next lurch is taking you. Like the cryptocurrency in which it is priced, the NFT’s value can fluctuate according to obscure market forces that are difficult to fathom or predict. Unlike a share in a company, it represents no real-world economic activity that generates revenue or profits. It is not even a risky contract, like a bet, that promises to pay out on the fulfilment of some defined condition. It is just a thing that you can theoretically sell if someone wants to buy it from you.

Could its value go up? Sure, if new investors keep pouring in looking to buy apes. What if the apes prove not to have enduring appeal and it turns out that nobody wants to buy your ape? Then it’s effectively worthless and your money is gone. It would be inaccurate to say your money had disappeared, because somewhere out there, the initial dollars or euros you put into the crypto system have found their way into someone else’s pocket. You do at least get to keep the ape - nobody can (or would) ever take that away from you.

Whether you see cryptomania and the metaverse as portents of liberation or morbid symptoms of civilisational decay, the questions posed are undeniably fascinating. Why design a virtual world, the advantage of which is that it is limited only by the imagination, only to embed scarcity in it artificially? It’s like creating the Garden of Eden from a blueprint by the snake. Is it because without scarcity you can’t have bubbles and market manias? Is this ultimately all about opening up every aspect of life to gambling and speculation?

According to a survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 13 per cent of Americans report buying or trading in crypto during the last 12 months, with 61 per cent of those getting involved in the last six months. In some ways the blurring of the line between “investment” and high-stakes gambling is understandable and perhaps even rational. When every scandal reinforces a pervasive sense that the game is rigged, what could be riskier than patient hard work and playing by the rules? At least in the kaleidoscopic snakes and ladders game of cryptoinvesting, there’s the slim chance you might actually win.

But you probably won’t, and in the coming times a lot of money is going to be lost by a lot of people who can’t afford it and who are going to be angry about it. The trend is bigger than football, but the game is now one of the biggest channels through which cryptomania is being mainlined into the culture. It’s too much to expect moral leadership from a sport governed by a man who last week appeared to enlist drowned Mediterranean refugees into his campaign to hold a 48-team World Cup every two years. But those players who are making themselves the faces of the moment might want to think again, especially if they are the type to worry about what others think of them.