Global Impact of a Bitcoin Football Club: Decentralize with Cointelegraph
This week’s episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph podcast takes a deep dive into Bitcoin (BTC) in Bedford. A Bitcoiner from the English town near London is turning heads and raising the town’s profile after buying his local football club, Real Bedford.
Peter McCormack, who took the No. 38 spot on Cointelegraph’s 2023 Top 100, hosts a Bitcoin podcast and is an avid soccer fan. At the start of the football season in August 2022, he told Cointelegraph that winning the league would put Bedford on the Bitcoin map.
Nine months later, Real Bedford have fulfilled that promise. It won Britain’s South Midlands League and was promoted. But has the move from Bitcoin football club galvanized the locals or just pissed them off? And how does driving it on the ground work?
Cointelegraph traveled to Real Bedford’s last home game of the season to interview fans, locals and Bitcoin advocates from around the world to understand why and how the Bitcoin football club had. From the club’s commentator to a Liberal Democrat councilor to well-known Bitcoin advocate Jeff Booth, this week’s podcast takes listeners on a whistlestop tour of Bedford.
An underdog story that explores themes of competition, community and Bitcoin awareness in the UK, it’s clear that Real Bedford has taken the Bitcoin community by storm.
Cointelegraph also caught up with McCormack pitchside during his What Bitcoin Did podcast live event to discuss whether he was pursuing a personal passion project or if the stakes were greater.
Moreover, with the price per Bitcoin still hovering below $30,000, the production seeks to highlight that there is more than a speculative streak to the world’s largest cryptocurrency. McCormack explained:
“I think the thing about Bitcoin now is that it’s not about Bitcoin. It’s Nostr, it’s Bitcoin, it’s mainstream media lies, it’s bad governance and regulation.”
It’s not about, “I’m going to get Bedford to buy Bitcoin,” he continued. He wants to be careful to curate the club’s image in the city, and the Real Bedford website even has a blog post titled “Why You Shouldn’t Buy Bitcoin.”
However, the headline is that this lower league football team looks set to develop into a bastion of Bitcoin adoption in the UK – listen Decentralize with Cointelegraph podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or your favorite platform to learn how.
