How Are Digital Talent Development Platforms Incentivizing Sports communities?

There are a host of digital talent development platforms where you can invest, collect and trade signed cards from star athletes and trade talent successfully. This article is about what you need to know and how companies are giving power back to the players and their talent.

The great Roman poet Juvenal is known for saying ‘panem et
circenses’ or bread and circuses in English. What he meant by this is that even in times of economic depression, food and entertainment continue to grow. The acquisition of talent in music and sport continues to grow regardless of the financial climate. This doesn’t mean, however, that professions like sports recruiting cannot be improved through modern technology.

Today, most projects are looking at the Metaverse or Web3 solutions as a means to attract users into their online community with short-term incentives like money-making opportunities or digital collectibles. Therefore, there is a serious need for education in the metaverse space, simplification of value advantages, real-world case studies, and tangible benefits.

While initial excitement and buzz are exciting, trends transform into solid long-term solutions when they solve a real need or forge strong connections. Projects with the most potential are ones that inherently recognize both opportunity and uncertainty in the space all the while providing a platform to build and develop because they believe in education, transparency, and being the conduit to providing a need and resolving a problem. Companies, worldwide, including those scaling quickly with a burgeoning community like TalentIDO are working to build on current models and smart contracts using blockchain technology.

TalentIDO or Upland for example of two projects that have seized on education, transparency, and their communities in the Metaverse. Both are large and virtual platforms that are mapped from the physical world.

Both projects provide a platform for users to build solid communities by providing strategic gaming activities that are mapped to the physical world. Users contribute to a virtual, community-based environment through education and community support while linking them to existing physical communities like FIFA (the international soccer body), for instance.

We all have our go-to sports, football, baseball, cricket, basketball, and so on. Beyond that, we all love to see our favorite players making the most of their talents. Often, however, we tend to forget the long road need to become a star athlete, and even less about the inner workings of contracts or what is involved in athletes getting traded from one team to another throughout their careers.

The sports business is said to account for some €450 billion annually. That is a lot of money by any standard. The most important cut of that is the acquisition of new and existing talent in a process called sports recruiting. 

It all starts with scouts that search the fields and nurseries of the world for adolescents that are making a name for themselves at a young age. Talent acquisition professionals go to huge lengths to find the best up-and-coming players to sign on to teams. They are making lots of
money in commissions from these contracts Afterall. 

Scouts will then present their findings to the clubs that
they represent and start the process of signing new players. This includes
lawyers drafting contracts, agents dealing with those contracts, and a lot of
lost time and effort, which often leads nowhere anyway. 

Above all else, this system lacks transparency and largely seeks out top-level players, and ignores other talented individuals. The system also routinely wastes a lot of money on outdated processes while keeping players out of the loop until final onboarding. This aspect of sports recruiting, scouting, acquisition, and signing is called the sports chain.

What are the Challenges and Problems for Young Football
Players?

With so much new talent entering an expanding market, it is
worrisome that the industry still fails to keep up with the times by relying on agents and scouts to build the dreams of young, emerging individuals.

Amateur sports enthusiasts struggle to set off in their
careers for a variety of reasons, including:

• Overly competitive scouting process in which only the top
  players are signed;
• Lack of access to the marketplace with any efforts to reach
  out on their parts being largely ignored;
• The challenge in trying to reach out to agents
  directly;
• Lack of time and money for scouts to find talent.

Few effective resources are available for upcoming athletes
to showcase their talents. As a result, young people have little say in shaping their futures in the sports industry and even less insight into what to expect once inducted.

The lack of transparency in the sports recruiting process
means that finding new talent is costly. The result of which often ends in lost opportunities and wasted money.

Even if a person is signed to a club, most top-class clubs have an even larger sports recruiting network dealing with the sports chain. This means less money for the player, more money lost for the clubs, and a smaller chance for most young players to get chosen and make the most out of the deal.

For those clubs with less capital, the networks for scouts and talent acquisition is limited and produces entirely different issues for
entering the market.

What is being done to solve the issues surrounding sports
recruiting and the sports chain?

Companies like TalentIDO are building a platform to support growth and
existing sports professionals to reach their full potential. The project is
built on blockchain technology, a network of distributed ledgers that attests to and maintains records. Smart contracts are records and agreements that are built into the blockchain and provide a canvas on which transparency can
flourish in business.

Scouts have direct contact with players and can track
progress without showing up in person unless they see someone of particular interest. 

Finally, clubs have direct access to the profile of players
on offer and more transparency to see what they are buying into.

For everyone involved, smart contracts make the signing
process simpler and keep everyone on the same level. It can make commissions clear and give more independence to athletes and clubs so they can feel their needs are taken care of.

All in all, demonstrating a strong connection to the sports community is only part of the value proposition metaverse and Web3 projects hope to gain. Ideally, fans are able to have their own shops on metaverse domains, where they can sell assets they have purchased or collected, thus enabling other community members to learn how to become a metaverse entrepreneur.

By participating, users will also have the opportunity to win unique prizes, NFTs, collectibles, or digital replicas of physical world properties associated with the sport they're invested in.

Because building strong communities are foundational to the metaverse’s value proposition, it makes sense that companies like TalenIDO, Upland, and others aspire to be the biggest Web3 platforms. Through their Web3 experience, their communities will be able to socialize with similar players and collaborate on strategies that extend beyond sports.

TalentIDO invites new users to join its current community of thousands of users' digital fandom in a virtual metaverse experience where they can able engage with each other, invest in mementos, and learn the details, including metrics or stays of individual games in the real world

As the real-world celebration of the FIFA World Cup 2022™ champion approaches, the legacy of this year's event will be preserved eternally in the sports metaverse through the community and the digital assets users acquire and engage with. This represents a literal game changer.