Arsenal soccer club blamed for irresponsible advertising for fan tokens

The British advertising supervision has pronounced a complaint against the advertising of the Arsenal football club for "fan tokens" in the recent attempt by the regulatory authority to restrict the marketing of cryptocurrencies and related products.

The Advertising Standards Authority announced on Wednesday that she examined two Arsenal advertisements that were switched online in August, and found that they were "irresponsible" and violated the British marketing rules.

The judgment against Arsenal, which follows a series of similar measures last week, falls at a time when an increasing number of cryptodic service companies and tokens themselves expand their advertising for sports fans.

The ASA announced the Financial Times last week that the expansion of its cryptocurrency regulations to cryptoassets in general, such as fan tokens, would be at the top of her agenda for the new year.

Arsenal carried out an action on its website and Facebook this summer, which according to ASA advertises his fan token under the ticker symbol $ AFC. Fans who want to buy token that allow the owners to have official club decisions must first buy a digital currency called Chiliz via the crypto platform Socios. The more token has a fan, the more weight its voices have.

The display on the Arsenal website contained some revelations, including a warning that the price of the fan token "depends on supply and demand and can therefore rely on and therefore can fall". It also pointed out that the owners should "be aware that they could lose part or all of the money invested". The later published Facebook advertising did not contain these warnings.

The ASA found that the ads "Trivialized investments in crypto-assets" and that they were "misleading" by not raising the investment risk.

In a answer published by the ASA, Arsenal said that his campaign aimed to increase the "consciousness" of the advantages of possession of the products, of which the club claimed that they are "usage stamps that are used to promote fan participation and therefore differ significantly from cryptocurrencies".

The club based in London said that he believed that the tokens themselves and their relationships with cryptocurrencies would be "largely understood" by the clubs of the club and that the football community had already become aware of social by the partnerships of the platform with other European clubs.

Although the tokens were not advertised as financial products, the watchdog claimed that Arsenal should have pointed out that crypto-assets in Great Britain are not regulated, since this means that the products do not offer consumer protection that is connected to many regulated financial instruments.

Socios has created fan tokens for more than 40 football clubs, including Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City. It has more than 1.3 million users from 167 countries.

The platform enables crypto enthusiasts and dealers to speculate with fan tokens and act. The cryptocurrency chiliz is the most important exchange unit on its platform, but the digital coin can also be traded on large crypto base such as coinbase and bony.

While the income of the football clubs suffered a break-in in pandemic, fan tokens have gained popularity. According to the data aggregator Coingecko, its overall market capitalization is $ 225 million.