Real Bedford is not your typical English non-league soccer club.
Bought by Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack in 2022, the club has put Bitcoin at the heart of its identity and business strategy — attracting sponsors, supporters and millions of dollars in investment from crypto entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Fans can spend Bitcoin at the ground, some players are paid partly or entirely in the cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin enthusiasts travel from around the world to attend the club's matchday meetups.
But Bitcoin isn't actually funding the club on its own. McCormack describes Real Bedford more like a startup: using investment alongside sponsorship, ticketing and commercial revenue to accelerate its push up the English football pyramid.
CNBC's Tom Chitty travels to Bedford to examine whether the model is sustainable, what happens when a volatile asset becomes part of a football club's financial strategy and whether Real Bedford's experiment could offer a glimpse of a different future for football finance.
This is the final installment in The Score's three-part "Crypto FC" series. Catch up on part one, which explores how crypto's sponsorship gold rush took over soccer, and part two, which examines what happened when the boom collapsed.
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