Sports Giants Embrace Bitcoin as Athletes Turn Web3 Entrepreneurs

KEY POINTS

• Paris Saint-Germain has become the first top-flight club to add bitcoin to its treasury, marking a decisive shift toward treating digital assets as core strategy rather than speculative side projects.

• A new initiative—the Crypto Athlete Collective—trains players in disciplined investing, blockchain literacy and on-chain collaboration so they can build and manage Web3 ventures instead of acting as mere celebrity endorsers.

• Together, PSG’s bitcoin move and the Collective’s education platform illustrate sport’s wider transition from one-off crypto gimmicks to an integrated, leadership-oriented embrace of Web3 by both institutions and athletes.

👉 Bonus: Below you will find five ChatGPT prompts that you can use to develop your expertise in this area.

The marriage of elite sport and cryptocurrency has entered a new phase. Gone are the celebrity endorsements and flashy NFT drops that marked crypto's early courtship with athletes. In their place emerges a more serious proposition: sports organizations treating digital assets as core business strategy, while athletes position themselves as builders rather than mere ambassadors in the Web3 economy.

Paris Saint-Germain, fresh from their Champions League triumph, exemplifies this shift. The French football powerhouse has become the first major sports club to publicly confirm holding bitcoin as a treasury asset, marking a departure from the speculative ventures that characterized sport's previous crypto experiments.

"We took our fiat reserves and we actually allocated bitcoin," Pär Helgosson, head of PSG Labs, revealed at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “We still have it in our books. And as one of the largest clubs in the world, we’re the largest player in the sports ecosystem to do that.”

The move signals more than financial diversification. PSG's strategy reflects a fundamental realignment with its global fanbase, where more than 80 per cent are under 34 years old. This demographic shift drives the club's broader Web3 ambitions, including the launch of PSG World, a digital fan platform built in partnership with Web3 infrastructure company RTB DIGITAL, INC.

Beyond Social Media Giants

The platform addresses a critical challenge facing modern sports organizations: audience ownership. Traditional social media channels provide reach but limited data control, leaving clubs dependent on external platforms to connect with supporters.

"We have all these fans running for us but they're not always in our platforms," Pär explained. "The challenge is to build a direct channel — to capture more data, understand our fans better, and engage them in more relevant ways."

PSG World represents this direct engagement strategy, offering supporters a home for post-match commentary, content co-creation, and exclusive media access. The platform integrates physical, digital, and blockchain-based tools to create what Pär describes as domination offline, online today — and on-chain tomorrow: “We dominated in social, online today. And we also want to dominate in on-chain and in all tokenized ways. We want to engage our fan base across what we do offline, online today — and on-chain tomorrow.”

With more than 90 per cent of PSG's fanbase outside France, the platform aims to serve the club's global reach while maintaining independence from social media intermediaries. The scale is substantial: PSG claims over 550 million fans worldwide, a figure that includes supporters drawn by the club's long-standing international squad with stars from Argentina, Brazil, Italy, England, or Germany. “In large parts of the world, we're as big as we're in France, if not bigger,” Pär added.

Athletes as Active Participants

While PSG pioneers institutional crypto adoption in sport, a parallel movement targets individual athletes. The Crypto Athlete Collective (TCAC), initiated by athlete entrepreneurship hub Patparius` managing partner Irg Torben Bührer, aims to transform elite performers from passive investors into active digital economy participants.

The initiative addresses a persistent problem in professional sport: financial mismanagement. Too many elite athletes have fallen victim to complex investments they failed to understand or advisors who prioritized their own interests over their clients'. TCAC's approach applies the discipline and precision that creates champions on the field to investment decision-making.

"The habits that make you a champion on the field — discipline, focus, precision, drive to learn, resilience — are the same habits that make you a winner in business and investing.“

Rather than treating athletes as celebrity endorsers, TCAC emphasizes financial literacy, critical thinking, and collaboration. The platform combines institutional-grade market analysis with blockchain-based community governance, offering members access to educational workshops covering everything from DeFi protocols to tokenized real-world assets.

Institutional Expertise Meets Athletic Discipline

TCAC's credibility is based, among other things, on its collaboration with experts from both the traditional financial world and those from the Web3 industry. We are also supported by Claudio Schneider, Chief Executive of Switzerland-based Web3 asset manager DCAP. Claudio will provide support with his extensive expertise and demonstrate why his original 10+ year vision: “The end goal for crypto is a global, programmable smart contract layer for all economic activity,” is likely to be realized more quickly with recent developments in crypto infrastructure and adoption.

This institutional backing distinguishes TCAC from typical celebrity crypto engagements. The platform provides investment briefs, detailed market insights, tools, and opportunities for portfolio development discussions to better align portfolios with individual risk profiles. An AI companion called Crypto Athlete Buddy provides continuous access to conduct market analysis and investment simulations, while the blockchain-based community “Playmakers Squad“ enables peer learning and (in the future) collective governance in collaboration with Common Ground.

The comprehensive approach reflects elite sports training principles: success stems not from pursuing every opportunity, but from executing disciplined, well-informed strategies. Members can assess market conditions, run investment scenarios, and participate in regular workshops designed to build genuine expertise rather than surface-level familiarity.

Structured Path to Web3 Leadership

TCAC's methodology transforms passive recipients into active participants through its "Playmakers Squad" — a curated, on-chain community enabling collaboration and potential co-investment. Blockchain voting mechanisms will allow members in the future to influence community development, determining guest speakers, investment priorities, and potentially future treasury allocations.

The platform's expansion strategy emphasizes selectivity over rapid growth, beginning with a carefully selected initial cohort. Future initiatives include virtual launch sessions and immersive Crypto Athlete Retreats (for example, in together with MetaBrewSociety at their own brewery), creating frameworks for continuous learning and collaboration.

This structured approach addresses Web3's maturation timeline. As infrastructure improves and adoption broadens, the window for athletes to shape digital finance transformation rather than simply react to it continues to narrow.

5 PROMPTS THAT ATHLETES CAN USE TO DEVELOP AND BUILD EXPERTISE

• Explain the strategic benefits and potential pitfalls for a top-flight club like Paris Saint-Germain when reallocating part of its cash reserves into bitcoin.

• How can I, as an athlete in business, apply a bitcoin treasury strategy similar to PSG's to preserve wealth and build long-term financial resilience? What steps should I take to start and what risks should I consider?

• Act as a Web3 business mentor. Explain the core concepts of Web3, tokenization, and blockchain in a way that's tailored for elite athletes transitioning into entrepreneurship. How can these technologies empower me to build long-term business value and direct fan engagement?

• Critically assess how fan-owned digital platforms such as PSG World can solve the ‘audience ownership’ problem in sport, and draft a specification for launching a similar blockchain-enabled hub around my personal brand.

• Train me in disciplined crypto investing using the same principles that apply in elite sports. How can I combine resilience, critical thinking, and market analysis to evaluate opportunities in DeFi, tokenized assets, and bitcoin responsibly?

👉 Check out AthletesBusinessGPT and Web3AthletesGPT for your prompts.

The Broader Transformation

PSG's bitcoin treasury adoption and TCAC's educational collaborative platform represent two sides of the same evolution: sport's transition from crypto experimentation to strategic integration. While clubs like PSG position themselves as institutional early adopters, platforms like our TCAC prepare individual athletes for entrepreneurial leadership in the digital economy.

The timing proves significant. As Web3 infrastructure matures and regulatory frameworks clarify, sports organizations and athletes face a choice: lead the transformation or follow established precedents. PSG's treasury strategy and TCAC's educational approach suggest the industry increasingly chooses leadership.

For athletes whose careers are brief and financial security uncertain, this represents more than investment diversification. It offers a pathway to leverage competitive mindsets in emerging markets, extending athletic discipline beyond playing fields into business strategy.

The question facing today's sports industry is not whether digital assets will reshape finance — that transformation accelerates regardless. The question is whether sports organizations and athletes will shape that change or simply adapt to decisions made elsewhere.

Early evidence suggests they intend to lead. From our side, we are definitely doing everything we can to play our part and develop athletes into the Web3 personalities and entrepreneurs they can actually be.

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I really appreciate you reading my note today.

Happy Monday,

Irg

Irg’s work is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should always do your own research and consult advisors on these subjects. This work may feature assets and entities in which the author has invested.

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