OIG Partners with SportsIcon

7 min readNov 25, 2021

Creating the world’s leading platform for sports entertainment, knowledge transfer and digital collectibles.
Through lovingly filmed insights with athletes who also curate their own bespoke digital art collection, SportsIcon is building the ultimate platform for fans to get closer to their sporting heroes.

Sports have an interesting effect on people; they simultaneously invoke incomparable moments of joy and pain so extreme that the experience cannot be replicated. Sports also tap into our emotions. For example, most can remember key sporting moments that have left imprints on their lives. Watching England lose on penalties in the Euro 1996 Semi-Final. Seeing Liverpool come from 3 goals down to win the Champions League Final. Witnessing Tyson Fury rise up off the canvas against Deontay Wilder. These moments ingrain themselves in our memories and are associated with incredibly powerful emotions that rush back when we think of them…

There is also a communal element to why we love sports because we all are naturally drawn to form groups. Sports fulfills this need and provides us with an avenue to feel connected to something — sometimes part of something grand. Alongside this, the individual athletes themselves are heroes, role models, influencers, and often the character of these people is what we are most drawn to.

It is therefore not surprising that people are drawn to collecting Sports memorabilia. The U.S. sports memorabilia market alone amounts to $5.4 billion annually!

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have a natural fit with sports memorabilia, another category of a speculative asset whose value is primarily dependent on the prices its adherents are willing to pay. NFT sales volume surged to $2.5 bln in the first half of 2021 alone! These two industries are a match made in heaven. Using the technology behind NFT’s, collectors and fans can now verify and own truly unique moments and collections that connect them to their passion, heroes and memories.

This decade is a vital era for the digital revolution, and NFTs, in collaboration with sports, will produce significant moments and experiences for sports lovers. The coming decade will be remembered as the Age of Digitization, and as if often the case with technological innovations, it will be led by the sports industry. NFTs provide the most passionate fans with the ability to own a unique piece of sporting history in a manner previously unavailable.

With an increased demand for NFTs and a generation keen to own digital assets, SportsIcon has emerged to provide consumers with a means to enjoy their favourite sports, Icons and moments at another height. SportsIcon was founded with the goal of becoming the most important destination for sports NFTs. It was established with the help of Dapper Labs, its CEO Roham Haregozlou and recently implemented on the Flow network — the NBA Top Shot-supported blockchain.

Their platform provides high quality, cinematically filmed chapters with Sporting Icons, packaged as NFTs, where fans can learn insights, knowledge, and untold stories from an iconic life and career. Supplementing these insights, fans can own an expression of a career through rare, beautiful, athlete curated digital art.

SportsIcon’s aim is to assist the expression of athletes through immersive NFT videos and art, as well as moments of their lives and careers that made them the icons they became; the desired outcome being to unite fans with their heroes by owning moments from an Iconic career. This is all done by leveraging the latest advances in Web3. SportsIcon is more than just a simple sports memorabilia project, they are rolling out a number of exciting and innovative ways to connect fans to their icons.

SportsIcon is situated in between two booming industries. This ambitious project has incredible potential to position itself as a leader in this space, there is a huge demand for what they are setting out to achieve. There are a number of reasons why we think SportsIcon will succeed and become a dominant industry leader, we will outline some of them now!

The Team, Advisors and Partners

When aiming for the dizzy heights that SportsIcon has set out, it is imperative that there are the right people involved in every area. This includes the core team, the advisors and the partnerships with the right athletes. SportsIcon fills us with confidence when we analyze this area further.

Firstly, the team and advisors are packed full of experienced, successful and influential individuals. Their core team is full of experienced high calibre individuals from relevant and diverse backgrounds that will be able to steer this entity into the dominant and grand position they envision.

The team is completed by amazing advisors and investors such as Chad Hurley (founder of youtube), Roham Gharegozlou (Founder of Dapperlabs), Andrew Masanto (Co-founder Hedera Hashgraph), as well as cultural influencing iconic individuals like Nas and sports stars such as Andrew Bogut. These are just a few to mention, but you can see they have gathered support from an eclectic range of excellence that no doubt will have the quality and experience to advise this project every step of the way.

More importantly, is the quality and relevance of the athletes they collaborate with. Without the right Icons, this project falls flat on its feet. This is one area that SportsIcon has excelled in. They have captured and partnered with a vast array of different superstars in the most popular sports from a range of cultures, therefore encompassing and connecting with a very large base of fans. The athletes they have chosen so far have an incredible following, at iconic clubs and are uniquely interesting with amazing stories. We are excited to see who comes next!

The $ICONS Coin & SportsIcon Lion Club

An important part of the SportsIcon project will be how they allow fans to access their amazing offerings. One of these ways is through their $ICONS token.

$ICONS will help the SportsIcon mission of creating an extraordinary community by connecting fans with the greatest sportspeople and sports IP of all time.

ICONS will have several uses, and its use cases will grow over time. With ICONS, you can:

Buy NFT’s for a discount on the SportsIcon website
Queue jump for Icons holders
Vote on Proposals
Buy athletes creator coins
Participate in a liquidity pool
Access exclusive Telegram groups through our community membership program
Pay for items in our Sports Metaverse
Access exclusive content
Take part in SportsIcon’s ecosystem governance by voting on proposals with ICONS.
And much more to come!

With the SportsIcon Lion Club, they are setting out with an ambitious goal to create the greatest sports club in the world. This exciting NFT concept has a whole host of exciting benefits and potential.

Think of a sports version of BAYC and Vee Friends and then you will start to understand what SportsIcon Lion Club is. There are 9000 memberships available, and that’s all there ever will be. They will look to create a Lion Club DAO and use this to buy sports-related NFTs, real-world memorabilia, real-world sporting tickets and much more.

Some planned benefits:

Zoom and AMAs and chats with some of the greatest sportspeople of all time
In-person meetups with the greatest sportspeople of all time
Airdrops of exclusive sports-related NFTs
VIP sporting event tickets
Real-world sports outings
Free entry to $ICONS stadium to view NFTs in VR
Private discord community channel.
The NFT acts as a ticket to certain SportsIcon events

We believe that SportsIcon has created two excellent methods in their token and NFTs that allows fans access to some incredible offerings. The huge potential of these two aspects is evident: sports fans will be drawn to being immersed in SportsIcon’s ecosystem and thus, this demand will create a natural surge in value.

Closing Thoughts on SportsIcon

SportsIcon has all the ingredients to become an industry leader and pioneer. Their team is of the highest quality, being guided by a group of elite advisors with an unparalleled experience. The connections and partnerships with athletes is a core element to their product and they have so far excelled in this aspect so we are excited to see who is next! The token and NFT’s they have designed are well thought out, allowing fans a unique and interesting way of gaining access and connection to their icons like never before.

This is just the beginning of this exciting concept. The SportsIcon roadmap shows their plans to invest in real-world and digital utility for their NFT and token holders by offering exclusive programs that can’t be found elsewhere. Previously SportsIcon NFT holders have enjoyed box seats at Wembley Stadium and Madison Square Garden, and attended Q&As with Roberto Carlos, Luis Figo and Baron Davis. But this is only the start of their ambitions for NFT utility: coming soon will be “Meet Your Hero” events in the sports metaverse, multi-year tickets to watch your hero play in person, the chance to receive personalized training sessions from your icons and much more. Do not miss out on these incredible events, join SportsIcon now!