World Football Summit: Blockchain tech has a role in the evolving sports technology—here’s how

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Technological change is everywhere, and it seems to be speeding up by the day. Virtually every industry will be impacted, and football is no exception.

At the World Football Summit (WFS) in Sevilla, Spain, industry insiders, consultants, IT directors, and others at the bleeding edge of the game discussed how it will look at the end of the decade in a panel titled ‘Vision 2030: Sports Technologies of the Next Decade.’

Data-driven decisions and what they enable in football

During the discussion, I noticed a theme that kept occurring: data is crucial to everything that happens behind the scenes in football. This gigantic industry generates tens of billions per year in revenues, so that’s not surprising, but it does mean that data integrity is crucial.

The experts on the panel discussed how technology will allow coaches to track players’ physiological states and responses in granular detail, how apps will become interoperable and manual processes will be automated, how match analysis and data analytics will play a larger role, and much more.

All of this will depend on secure, verifiably true data. Blockchain technology was made for this purpose.

How blockchain can ensure data integrity and power innovation in football

While most of the attention in recent years has been focused on the prices of various digital coins like Ethereum, the blockchains these coins move on are essentially distributed databases.

Looking at the BSV blockchain, for example, copies of the ledger of transactions sit on multiple nodes (computers) and can’t be tampered with because changes require consensus between all nodes.

Distributed databases are more secure than centralized ones for several reasons: there’s no central point of attack for hackers, data on the blockchain is encrypted, and distributed systems are by their very nature more robust: if one part goes down, the others remain up.

Data stored on the blockchain or associated networks is guaranteed to be valid, something that’s essential for coaches and clubs who will make decisions based on it. Any changes made to the data via system error, hacks, or unauthorized entry would be detectable and time-stamped on the public blockchain. Clubs using blockchain to secure their data would experience unparalleled security, giving them a competitive edge.

Blockchain technology can ensure that the data coaches, financial decision-makers, marketers, and all of the other experts involved in a modern football club are based on verifiably accurate, secure data.

To learn more about how blockchain can be used to ensure data integrity, check out this video.

Watch: How Bitcoin and blockchain can change sports