According to recent reports, the Spanish football community is suffering from a “crypto hangover” as many La Liga clubs are left with “defaults, complaints, and an experience to forget” after partnerships with crypto sponsors soured.
La Liga (Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera División) is the name of the renowned Spanish football league which has existed since 1929. Certain football clubs that are playing in the league have incurred problems with crypto entities in recent times.
The latest club to suffer problems with a sponsor from the crypto sector is Celta Vigo. The club partnered with the Turkish crypto exchange Bitci in 2021. However, according to a press release posted on Twitter earlier this week, Celta claimed that the exchange has “not made any payments” since the deal was struck.
Celta wrote that it “has been forced to demand Bitci to fulfill its payment obligations on several occasions.”The club added that the exchange had limited itself to offering various promises of payment, which it has never fulfilled. The club stated it had “decided to initiate legal action” to “request the full compliance of what the parties agreed.”
The club concluded that it was making “the greatest efforts” to solve an “unpleasant situation” that had been “caused exclusively by Bitci.” However, Celta’s case is not an isolated incident.
Earlier, a local sports media agency reported that Bitci had requested payment delays to a number of its other Spanish partners including Celta rivals Valencia, as well as the Barcelona-based Espanyol. Espanyol said they were attempting to take Bitci to court over unpaid fees last year.
Bitci responded that it has the “solvency” to pay its bills to Spanish clubs but its hands have been tied due to some legislations around crypto firms implemented in Turkey.
Reportedly, Bitci also has sponsorship deals with Cádiz, Alavés, and Real Betis. It also penned a deal with the Royal Spanish Football Federation with its logo printed on Spanish national team training attire. However, it is not the only crypto platform to embark on a rocky ride with La Liga teams. Last year, Real Sociedad’s main shirt sponsor, a fan token issuer named Iqoniq, folded. Iqoniq owed Sociedad $875,000 in unpaid sponsorship fees at the time of its liquidation.
A growing friendliness was observed between the crypto sector and the football domain in recent times. A few days back, AS Roma, a top Italian soccer club, started accepting payments in DigitalBits (XDB). Reportedly, the payments will be taken across five of the club’s flagship retail stores, including Via del Corso, Piazza Colonna, Ottaviano, Porta di Roma, and Fan zone at Stadio Olimpico.