The sports industry took a hard hitting from the coronavirus pandemic. Most leagues got suspended, and then teams played without the audience for an extended catamenia. Sports clubs started to seek out new revenue streams, and the crypto industry arrived to aid with juicy deals.

Numerous partnerships betwixt major sports clubs grabbed headlines over the terminal year. Even national teams and major club unions joined the tendency. Then, information technology became even more surprising when FC Barcelona and Manchester City, two of the biggest soccer clubs in Europe, terminated their crypto-related sponsorship deals in the same week.

FC Barcelona canceled its partnership with nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace Ownix following the arrest of Moshe Hogeg, an Israeli crypto entrepreneur who was amid the company's consultants. Ownix was quick to deny any organic link to Hogeg in a Twitter alluvion. Cointelegraph reached out to Ownix but the company declined to comment further on the issue.

Manchester City also suspended its deal with 3Key, which the club had announced equally a regional partner in "decentralized finance trading analysis and informational technology" just a calendar week earlier.

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The sports industry is eager to join the NFT hype, which Morgan Stanley predicts to become a twelve-digits market by 2030. Timothy Mangnall, who helps sports clubs improve sympathize crypto and the NFT earth through his NFT bureau Capital Block, told Cointelegraph that it is piece of cake for clubs to forget to do the basic due diligence on companies and professional person backgrounds earlier jumping into long-term commercial deals.

Barcelona had been approached by a number of NFT marketplaces in the months leading up to the annunciation of the deal with Ownix. Many of the contenders already had strong track records in the NFT space, all the same Barcelona chose to go with a rather unknown brand in this infinite, Mangnall explained:

"What this shows me is that is Barcelona solely looked at the coin on the tabular array rather than doing what they would do for every other sponsorship agreement which is proper due diligence."

The crypto marketplace is total of small-scale NFT firms who are ready to dash out ten times more than money than major exchanges but to score large deals with sports clubs, he added, alarm that this should be a red flag for any order, who should so double down on its internal review procedure and deep dive into the company and the owners.

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Tokenization is a product of blockchain engineering science that attracts huge companies with massive brand values and fan bases, adds Ahmet Usta, co-author of Blockchain 101 and co-founder of Avaxtars and Crypto Mandala NFT projects: "Clubs are naturally aiming to get high returns from fan tokens and NFTs as early on adopters. Yet, they should focus on calculation value with innovation and solid business organisation models to their token and NFT offerings."

NFTs are not going anywhere and will be role of our future, Timothy Mangnall summarized, adding that "clubs should not be scared to miss out on the hype at the moment, but take a stride dorsum to sympathize the sector and plan for the next three years minimum."