The Premier League champions had also previously put out
advertisements for jobs in their Strategy and Ventures Team for aspiring
applicants that could identify growth opportunities within the virtual reality
market.
Manchester City, the current English Premier League
champions, has started the construction of the world’s first football stadium
in the metaverse, with the assistance of virtual reality (VR) specialists from
Sony.
In a three-year agreement, City has partnered with Sony, and
while the project is still in its early stages, teams of the company’s
specialists have already visited the Etihad Stadium to map it digitally and
develop a virtual reality version of it as per an exclusive report by
inews.co.uk.
The club’s stadium, the Etihad, will be transformed into the
central hub of Man City in a VR world thanks to image analysis and
skeletal-tracking technology developed by Hawk-Eye, a subsidiary of the tech
and entertainment behemoth.
Officials from Manchester City who are working on the
project see a day when the virtual Eithad Stadium may be filled many times
over, enabling fans who may never travel to Manchester to watch live games from
the comfort of their own homes, wherever they are in the world.
Additional concepts being considered include the possibility
of fans meeting up with other players in the metaverse, communicating with one
another, and buying things that are not accessible in the real world.
City Football Group’s chief marketing and fan engagement
officer, Nuria Tarre, said:
“The whole point we could imagine of having a metaverse is
you can recreate a game, you could watch the game live, you’re part of the
action in a different way through different angles and you can fill the stadium
as much as you want because it’s unlimited, it’s completely virtual.”
She added:
“I think the traditional image of someone sitting on a sofa,
watching a screen, is something we cannot imagine is going still be the reality
not even in 10 years, maybe in five years’ time already. Things move much
faster than we think.”
If football is a hit in the metaverse, it has the potential
to revolutionize the way television rights are distributed.
At the moment, they are sold to broadcasters as part of a
Premier League-wide package, but teams are now looking at the prospect of
selling them directly to fans, maybe via their own metaverses, in the future.