Student-athletes are always struggling for the much needed funding required to keep up with their highly demanding competitions. Universities, especially in Europe, lack the resources to enroll, fund, and help student-athletes have a more balanced university life that involves good grades and a fulfilling sports career. Our solution will seek to encourage, fund, register, certify, and track the academic and sports career of young prospects, while creating a long-lasting relationship with their angel investors, who will benefit from the use of the athletes’ growing brand images.

We believe the Stellar blockchain can work as the platform upon which most of these functions will be carried out, not only because of the need to account for academic and sports performances in a public and transparent way, but also, as a reinforcing mechanism between investors and student-athletes. We think of our solution as a win-win-win for all the parties involved. Students, for obvious reasons, as receivers of financial support and encouragement; investors, as agents of change that profit on the athlete’s brand image they help create (e.g. via its tokenization); and the university, as a hub of innovation that welcomes prospective elite athletes.

Specifically, we expect to rely on the Stellar blockchain to:

• Certify academic records
• Certify sports milestones and awards
• Generate wallets (connected to Metamask) for business angels and student-athletes, along with their accounts on a university platform, so they can make transactions
• Manage the student-athletes’ university payments and bonuses with a Stellar virtual POS, which includes: enrollment fees, internships, scholarships, investments
• Manage the student-athletes – business angels transactions in the platform (account deposits and benefit withdrawals)
• Manage the investments and acquisitions through tokens on the Stellar blockchain.

We believe this project can be developed into a sustainable business model that can be offered to universities with an inclination for sports and internationalization.

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Our sketch below provides a simple walk-through of our solution.

We are currently at ‘Technology readiness level 2’, TRL2 (Technology concept and application formulated). In the past three months we have been building a database of prospective students and investors as to produce the corresponding matchups, and are tapping into alternative funding opportunities and engaging our closest stakeholders by means of a media campaign which includes sessions, interviews, and teaching.

We have also been working closely with our partners HashingDNA and Myoo to lay out the main features our Stellar-based solution will offer. This resulted in a more nuanced description of our solution, a more down-to-earth and quantifiable set of objectives, and a more reasonable budget for SCF #11.

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Target market

Our target market will at first be rather limited. We are unaware of anyone implementing this idea in the university sphere yet, nor there is any serious effort at the academic level in Spain to fund and support prospective student-athletes. Our project will revolve around these students and their potential angel investors who will ideally “meet” on the blockchain, as to create a long-lasting relationship. The selection of student-athletes will be rather easy, as their enrollment numbers are very low. Precisely, one of the goals is to see this number go up as a result of our implementing the blockchain to track down performances, both academic and sport-related. On the investor’s side, even though the university is well connected with its layers upon layers of stakeholders, it will be no understatement to say that we will be sailing on uncharted waters. Our aim is, on the first year, to have a few students partially funded, both in terms of their enrollment fees and their sports-related activities. Hopefully, we can expect to build our base of both students and investors every year. Starting on the second year, after our first-year of getting familiar with our business model, we will be targeting universities as to see our model implemented across the educational sector.

Revenue model

We do not expect to generate revenue on the first year, as the university will be performing as an intermediary between student-athletes and angel investors. However, we believe this business model can be easily extrapolated to other like-minded universities that would likely pay to have this service implemented in their own spheres, once it has shown a modicum of success in our own institution. In the end, our project can become a good mechanism to attract students with a potential in the field of sports as to become enrolled in a university program. Thus, we aim at generating revenue after the first year once our blockchain solution is implemented at UIC Barcelona. Hopefully, we will offer our business idea to those universities that would like to see their number of student-athletes increase. A few academic institutions will be tapped during the first year, both in Spain and abroad.

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Pricing strategy

Due to the disruptive nature of the project and the latent business niche we will try price skimming as a first strategy once we have set our idea moving in the first year. Price skimming happens when goods and services are priced higher so that fewer sales are needed to break even. We will rely on ‘skimming’ first as to reimburse the cost of investment of the original research, as early adopters typically show a relatively lower price sensitivity—which can be attributed to their need for the product outweighing their need to economize, or to a greater understanding of the product's value.

Sales forecast

A few academic institutions will be targeted on the second half of the first year, both locally and internationally, and we expect to see these numbers go up as years go by. Our financial plan (expected P&L, attached as image) for a 5-year period takes account of these potential sales and the needed maintenance service, which will be our sole sources of revenue.

Industry and market research

According to a recent PwC report for Spain, the sports industry there boasts a 3.3% of the Spanish GDP in revenue, and a 2.1% in occupation out of total employment—both figures account for so-called direct, indirect, and induced impacts. In numbers, and only considering the direct impacts, the sports industry in Spain generates roughly 15B EUR in revenue and employs around 200K employees.

Moreover, according to the Ministry of Universities (2022), there have been 1.3M undergraduate, 248K master, and 90K students enrolled in Spanish universities during 2020-21. The shares of degrees being offered were as: 39% undergraduate, 46%, graduate, and 15% PhDs. Our own university, UIC Barcelona, has around 8.000 students enrolled, and we expect to see these numbers go up by the use the blockchain in the near future.

We believe the numbers shown above represent an enticing prospect for adding value in the intersection of these two thriving sectors, sports and education, while employing the blockchain technology as the disruptive and value-adding catalyst.

References:

• Termómetro del ecosistema del deporte en España (Spanish only), PwC and Fundación España Activa (2020).
• Datos y cifras del Sistema Universitario Español (Spanish only), Ministry of Universities, Spain (2022).

Threats and opportunities

In a nutshell, we can identify a few items in the context of a SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: university know-how, we know the sector, both academic and sports
• Weaknesses: first time we do this from the university (but who says it’s a weakness!). Partners Myoo and HashingDNA have been working with the blockchain for some time now.
• Opportunities: there is a latent market niche and the timing seems auspicious
• Threats: a changing legal and tax environment, in addition to world uncertainty and a pervasive inflation.

Competition

We are aware of a newly created start-up, Petronus, with a similar vision, but we a focus on the sports sector. Another recent endeavor in the Barcelona area is Token Champions, led by Josep Maria Miguella, a well-known and established players agent. His project allows customers to invest in the careers of soccer players early on via security tokens, which eventually might report benfits as the market value of the players go up with their performance.

On the other hand, we believe our comparative advantage lies primarily within the university sector, as the idea of fully funded student-athletes has not yet been addressed. One of the main deficits student-athletes typically run into has to do with their own marketability.