New sports community - my "intro"
I’ve always been close to sports. Played football myself until injuries ended that part a bit earlier than planned, but I never really left it behind. These days I still follow a lot, mainly football, but also hockey and skiing. Anything that has real competition, speed, and a bit of unpredictability.
My sports and injury story
Covered that ages ago already here but just you the background:
Sports was always a huge part in my life
Since a young boy I am interested in Sports. At the age of 6 my parents got me to a gymnastics club aka Turnverein, with 7 I started to play football (for Americans: Soccer) at my home club Wormatia Worms. We won several regional titles – at the age of 17 I suffered from my first cruciate rupture along with a meniscal avulsion.
This was followed by two more of the same that really made me stop to do the sports I love! Team sports!
Even after the third rupture stupid was trying to play Beach Volley - result another rupture in the same knee (not the cruciate one though!). This then meant indeed to focus on boring fitness / gym stuff. Honestly mainly to pump iron and muscles to impress the girls. Did not work as planned – never achieved this six pack thing on my front.
Coming back to Football – I switched to a supporter of my local home club and especially the regional heroes of 1. FC Kaiserslautern. Was a mad supporter being there every week cheering – at least I was able to celebrate German Champion two times with them – now they play in the second division only – but a love for a football club will never die. I was lucky about the honour of meeting some players in that photo decades ago, even Stefan Kuntz (he now is attacked but some not very nice things I am not going into detail) when he was the boss of the Club some years ago.
Sports in businesss life
Also a bit here from my agency past - we did work a lot on marketing / communications for Sports brands such as Zumba, Shimano to name a few. When social media was near to become established I was running a full blown analysis of the social media / online activities of each German Bundesliga club. That story was picked by all major outlets across German and I could a lot more what the results initatiated (but topic for a later post maybe).
Sports on web2 and web3
On the network called tsu which was one the first that payed content creators based on ad revs I was leading a Football / Soccer community with over 10,000 people where we posted and discussed anything about our favorite sports. It was fun. Even the earnings were lower as here – every cent was great. My personal hightlight has been a Charity Contest I created during the Soccer Euro 2016 tournament. We managed to collect over $100 for charity. Glad to see more of the old Tsufamily are also here on Hive still e.g. 
On the blockchain side, I’ve also been around for a while. I was involved leading 
That’s probably why I still pay attention when something like SportsBlock pops up.
I came across it recently and my first reaction was honestly pretty standard: another sports plus token idea. We’ve seen a lot of those. Most of them had decent concepts, but they leaned too much into token mechanics and not enough into actual usage. The result was usually the same, some early excitement, then a slow fade because there simply weren’t enough people using it day to day.
SportsBlock seems to be trying a slightly different angle. At its core, it’s pretty straightforward: a sports-focused content layer on Hive where you can write, react to games in real time, join contests, and earn rewards in HIVE, HBD, and their own MEDALS token. On paper, nothing revolutionary. But a few details caught my attention.
The real-time integration is one of them. If you’re serious about sports, you can’t build something that isn’t happening live. Reactions, goals, moments — that’s what people care about. The short-form “Sportsbites” idea also makes sense, because most sports content isn’t long analysis. It’s quick reactions, opinions, emotions in the moment. That part feels aligned with how people actually behave.
Another thing that stood out is the onboarding. Allowing both normal email sign-up and Hive login sounds trivial, but it’s one of the biggest friction points in Web3. If you get that wrong, people never even enter the ecosystem.
That said, I’ve seen enough cycles to stay cautious. Features don’t decide anything. Tokens don’t decide anything. Users do. You can build a nice platform, design reward systems, create tiers and staking models — if people don’t come back every day, it simply doesn’t matter. The MEDALS token might work, or it might end up like many others where inflation slowly eats away any perceived value if real demand doesn’t follow.
And sports audiences are a bit unforgiving in that sense. They don’t care about APR, tokenomics, or whitepapers. They care about content, speed, emotion, and whether there’s an actual community worth engaging with. If that’s not there, no incentive model will fix it.
What gives this project at least a chance is Hive itself. No fees, a working ecosystem, and a social layer that already exists. That’s something most of the earlier projects didn’t have. They had to build everything from scratch and usually never got past the early adopter phase.
From my perspective, having seen Rabona, Scorum, and having run my own small sports experiment, SportsBlock sits somewhere in the middle. It’s not obviously doomed, but it’s also far from guaranteed to work. If they manage to get real, consistent activity, it could turn into something interesting. If not, it will follow the same path as many others before it.
In the end, it’s always the same story. The idea is rarely the problem. Execution and adoption are.
