Spain National Fan Token Slides 20% After UEFA Euro 2024 Win

• The Spain National Fan token (SNFT) has dropped 20% in the past 24 hours.

• The losses likely represent “sell-the-fact” losses following Spain’s victory in UEFA championship.

Spain is reveling in the UEFA 2024 soccer championship victory, but the national team’s official cryptocurrency, the Spain National Fan token (SNFT), is unenthused.

On Sunday, Spain defeated England in the finals of the UEFA tournament, clinching a record fourth European Championship title as England’s decade-long wait for a major tournament win continued.

Still, the SNFT token has dropped by 20% to $0.024 in the past 24 hours and had a market capitalization of $565,000 at press time, according to Coingecko. Meanwhile, leading fan tokens like the Paris Saint-Germain Fan and FC Barcelona Fan tokens traded 2% to 4% higher alongside a renewed upswing in market leader bitcoin’s price.

The national team launched the SNFT token in 2021 in partnership with the Royal Spanish Football Federation and the Turkish blockchain platform Bitci. The token aims to enhance fan engagement and deliver a privileged experience for sports enthusiasts and investors.

SNFT’s price swoon likely represents a “sell the fact” loss. Prices surged just over 70% to $0.03845 in the three days leading up to the final. According to a research paper, fan tokens generally tend to experience anticipatory gains before the tournament and slide following the event. The so-called “buy the rumor, sell the fact” phenomenon was observed in the fan token market during the FIFA World Cup of 2022.

That said, researchers are divided on the impact of soccer tournaments on the market value of fan tokens.

A 2022 paper by Mieszko Mazur and Miguel Vega studied the correlation between fan tokens and field performance. The study showed that team performance does not affect fan token valuation irrespective of the tournament, and it added that these tokens tend to be volatile.

“Even though a high first-trading day return of 150% was found, in the long-term, fan tokens underperform major crypto benchmarks such as Bitcoin (BTC) and decentralized finance (DeFi) coins,” the study said.

Meanwhile, another study showed bigger tournaments like the Champions League affect fan tokens due to the broader audience and high tournament prestige compared to the regional leagues.