Football (soccer) is the most popular sport on the planet.

If you've kicked a ball — or something that kicks like one — you belong to an active community measured in billions.

For the past decade, we've documented the world's love for the world's game on Where Is Football and collected thousands more snapshots and stories in an effort to explore football from all sides - at its most beautiful, its most complex, its most fearless, and its most representative.

We've wanted to explore how this game with so much history and heritage unites us collectively in moments like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Together, with the help of our community numbering in the hundreds of thousands, we've discovered how — whether on the internet or in the stadium, on the pitch or in the pub, with our mates or with strangers — football’s uniquely shared senses of awe, ecstasy, heartbreak, and belonging have the power to unite our world.

Whether you’re playing on concrete in New Jersey, a beach in Rio, a neighborhood field in Nepal, or a perfectly-manicured pitch under the floodlights in London, this game unites us all and cuts across borders, frontiers, and fears.

That is priceless.

But, so many of the game's institutions, with all their appetite for profit and glitz, have shown they do indeed have a price — and that has come at a great cost to the soul of the sport that the world loves.

Cautionary tales of football’s modern era filled with hyper-commercialization are abundant, with countless clubs entering administration (bankruptcy) or selling their souls to wealthy investors — whether an energy drink, an oligarch, a sovereign wealth fund, or a dictator.

We continue to see these stories play out — a sport falling away from sustainability, away from transparency, away from the moral foundations of its institutions, and away from those that keep it alive: its fans.

We’re here to change that.

Now is the time to level the playing field, fall back in love with football, and give every fan the chance to take ownership.

Literally.

Now is the time to be bold, to reclaim the soul of our sport, and to bring the transparency, security and accessibility of web3 to the world of football.

It’s time for us to work to get fans the power they deserve at their clubs and change the industry for the better.

It's time to speak plainly and simply about how short-termism, nepotism, dishonesty, and greed contribute to an industry completely devoid of meaningful supporter representation and focused on a race to the bottom for centralized financial benefit.

Where Is Football is changing to meet this moment.

We've always seen ourselves, first and foremost, not as an outlet but as a community that belongs to everyone - so now we're truly becoming that, with the aim of helping other entities do the same.

We are launching a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, that will be a self-governing cooperative dedicated to making football better.

We are launching football.xyz.

Our first goal is to build a large global community that pioneers new approaches to club ownership, governance, and finance in the sport, rooted in consensus building, web3 technology, and open-source use for fan communities around the world.

After assembling this network of advocates, experts, and innovators, we will aim to expand our membership and acquire a football club — in partnership with their existing fanbase — to demonstrate through a real-world example the industry-revolutionizing potential of DAOs.

Eventually, through the use of sub-DAOs, we aim to onboard more teams into the DAO ownership and collective model, reimagine football club and industry operations through open-source, transparent web3 technology and practices, and establish tokenized football-attached communities, causes and professions.

From blockchain to smart contracts to truly democratic governance, this emerging web3 era can usher in a new age for the sport — one developed in a spirit of supporter solidarity, alongside club and investor accountability — not just the rise of dubious fan tokens and rewards apps.

We are at a critical juncture. The soul, structure, and sustainability of football are under threat more and more each year. Our careers have been spent working with some of the biggest teams in the world but also volunteering with the clubs in our communities. We have seen firsthand how out of touch football has become at the top and how the issues of myopia, nepotism, and greed that plague the sport at its most elite levels have filtered down the pyramid to its base. We know that any realistic hope for the health of the game revolves around a global community coming together.

The web3 ecosystem enables us to develop a strong foundation and vision for the future of the football industry - one developed in a spirit of solidarity, transparency, and accountability that will allow us to answer the following questions, and so many more...

• What if a fanbase could govern their team via a DAO model in order to have a true say in its team’s future?
• What if grassroots clubs that presently rely on volunteer involvement from fans could remunerate their supporters for their contributions?
• What does it look like when blockchain technology’s philosophy of transparency reinvents how teams and industry organizations operate?
• How can the efficiencies of smart contracts be implemented into club processes to facilitate low-fee payments, streamline matchday ticketing and more?
• How does migrating traditional ownership models to web3 technology shift power away from the disengaged few, the overzealous greedy, and the selfishly powerful into the hands of passionate, conscientious and enthusiastic fans?

Football isn’t called “the beautiful game” because money has made the sport’s elite competitions a global spectacle worth trillions of dollars.

Football is called “the beautiful game” because it belongs to everyone.

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