When a Club Paid a Transfer Fee in Bitcoin

Football has seen some daft transfers. Players signed for a batch of tracksuits, a Norwegian striker sold for his weight in shrimp (look it up), lower-league deals settled with a few bags of balls. But in January 2018, a small Turkish amateur club did something nobody had done before. They signed a player and paid for him, partly, in Bitcoin.
It was a tiny deal that made headlines around the world. Looking back, it was also an early sign of how tangled football and crypto would become.
Harunustaspor and the Bitcoin signing
The club was Harunustaspor, an amateur side from Malatya in eastern Turkey. The player was Ömer Faruk Kıroğlu, a 21-year-old forward. The fee? A modest amount of Turkish lira plus a fraction of a Bitcoin, worth a few hundred euros at the time.
It wasn’t exactly Neymar to PSG. But Bitcoin was at the peak of its first big mainstream hype cycle, having rocketed to nearly $20,000 just weeks earlier, and the story spread fast. Journalists from all over Europe picked it up. The club’s chairman said he wanted to show his club was forward-looking, and it worked: Harunustaspor got more international coverage from one signing than most amateur clubs get in a lifetime.
Funnily enough, if the player’s previous club had held onto that Bitcoin, it would be worth a lot more today than the deal suggested. It may be the only transfer in history where the fee appreciated more than the player.
The crypto gold rush hits football
The Harunustaspor deal looks quaint now. Within a few years, crypto money was everywhere in football.
Fan tokens arrived in a big way, with clubs like Barcelona, PSG, Juventus and Manchester City launching tokens that let supporters vote on minor club decisions. Exchanges and crypto brands signed sponsorship deals with clubs across Europe. Crypto.com became an official sponsor of the 2022 World Cup.
Not everyone was impressed. In 2021, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Arsenal had broken advertising rules with posts promoting its fan token, saying the club had failed to make the risks clear. It was one of the first signs that regulators were paying attention.
Crypto gambling brands on the shirt
The next wave came from crypto-focused gambling brands. Everton and Watford both signed front-of-shirt deals with Stake, a crypto casino and sportsbook, in 2022, and other clubs across Europe took similar money. For a period, crypto gambling logos were a common sight in English football.
A few hundred euros’ worth of Bitcoin for an amateur forward seems like small change now that crypto sports betting brands have become one of the biggest sources of sponsorship money across European football. Clubs needed revenue, and crypto betting companies wanted access to football’s global audiences.
The Premier League eventually decided enough was enough on the shirt front. In 2023, clubs agreed to stop front-of-shirt gambling sponsorships from the 2026/27 season, which is why you won’t see betting logos on the front of Premier League shirts this year. Sleeve deals, pitchside boards and partnerships are still allowed, so betting brands haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve just moved off the chest.
The crash and the fallout
When the crypto market crashed in 2022, football felt it. Some sponsors cut back or disappeared, fan token prices tumbled, and supporters who had bought in at the top lost money. The collapse of FTX later that year sent a chill through every sport that had taken crypto cash.
For fans, the main lesson was obvious: your club endorsing something doesn’t make it a good investment. A lot of supporters learned that the hard way.
Could Bitcoin transfers become normal?
Despite the headlines, Bitcoin transfer fees never caught on. Big transfers involve banks, agents, governing bodies and strict financial regulations, and nobody wants to agree a €50 million fee only to see its value swing by 10% before the paperwork clears. Stablecoins solve that problem in theory, but football’s financial rules haven’t moved in that direction.
Player wages are a different story. A few athletes in other sports have taken part of their pay in crypto, mostly in the US, and some footballers have dabbled in crypto endorsements. But for most of the game, transfers will stay boringly traditional for the foreseeable future.
What Harunustaspor tells us
The Harunustaspor deal was a gimmick, and everyone involved knew it. But it captured something real about where football was heading. Crypto money went from novelty to mainstream in a few years, then crashed, then settled into a more stable role around sponsorship, payments and betting.
Today, the crypto links in football are less about headlines and more about business. That’s probably healthier, even if it’s less fun to write about. And somewhere in eastern Turkey, there’s a footballer who can tell his grandkids he was the first player ever bought with Bitcoin. That’s a better pub story than most transfers ever give you.