According to online reports, Galatasaray S.K. and Netherlands national football team’s Ryan Babel has been shilling bitcoin to his teammates.
Babel has played for Ajax, Liverpool, Fulham and others. He has played in the Champions League, Euro 2012 and the World Cup building connections to some of the best-known and well-compensated soccer players in Europe. Babel has shared his eagerness to accumulate bitcoin on Twitter, so it is not a stretch to imagine that the reports are accurate.
If Babel and his teammates have been buying bitcoin for the past six months, for example, then they’ve made some hefty gains. This is as important to athletes as it is to anyone else, as they need a place to store their wealth in the best possible way. Securing their wealth behind a wall of cyber hornets and a 21 million supply cap ensures it will not deteriorate, but actually increase in value. The only meaningful difference between Bitcoin plebs and pro athletes is that the latter tend to have tens- to hundreds-of-millions of dollars more than the former with which to buy bitcoin.
Athletes have also been buying bitcoin here in the U.S., with NFL player Russell Okung using Strike to get a sizable portion of his $13 million contract paid to him in bitcoin. Why? Because Bitcoin is the perfect tool to protect one’s wealth. The average career length of athletes isn’t too long, and even though they make a lot of money, they need to protect it for the rest of their lives. Bitcoin excels at this.
Buying bitcoin, especially at around $60,000 prices, gives professional athletes a massive potential upside in gains. To put how big the gains can be in perspective: Babel reportedly earned a $2.37 million signing bonus in 2019, and the price of bitcoin rose by 87 percent across that year. Had he been able to allocate that bonus to BTC, he would have made more than $2 million in profit.
Rich athletes are figuring out that if they want to make a lot of money, all they’ve got to do is accumulate bitcoin, and sit on it.