The Pomp Podcast - #1367 Peter McCormack | This Football Team Is All-In On Bitcoin

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Peter McCormack is the Chairman of Real Bedford, and the host of “What Bitcoin Did” podcast. In this conversation, we talk Peter buying Real Bedford men’s team and plugging it into the bitcoin network, his plan to make the Premier League, raising capital, sponsors, merchandise, treasury management, bitcoin market cycles, women’s team, opening a bar, building a stadium, investing in the community of Bedford, and potential risks.  ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Bitcoin builders, apply for Supra’s Million Dollar Bitcoin DeFi Accelerator dedicated to Bitcoin L2 ecosystem dApps, and get their powerful price feeds and verifiable randomness services for free too. Not a builder? Earn $1,500 by referring Web3 projects to apply for the accelerator. The projects can get financial support while you get $1,500 for every referral. Learn more and apply for the accelerator: ⁠https://supra.com/pomp-btc/⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Peter McCormick is the chairman of Real Bedford and the host of What Bitcoin Did podcast. In this conversation, Palm talks with Peter about buying Real Bedford men's team and plugging it into the Bitcoin network. His plan

to make the Premier League, raising capital, sponsors, merchandise, treasury management, Bitcoin market cycles, women's team, opening a bar, building a stadium, investing in the community of Bedford and potential risks. And now, POM's conversation with Peter McCormick. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POMP Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POMP or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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BetOnline.ag. Go check them out today. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Peter, the chairman of, is it Real Bedford or Real? Real. Real. Real Madrid. Okay. You bought this soccer club football club um why why did you do this and the crazier part i think is like it's working you've now gotten four and a half million dollars invested from the winklevoss twins uh i think you've got a lot of other tricks up your sleeve so like explain what the rationale here for this is yeah i mean look i told you about this when i was first going to do it uh two and a half years ago uh the best way to say it look my dream has always been to own my local football club uh where i live in bedford uh our football our football team's never been in the football

league and so to explain the hierarchy to people are listening uh our football league is you have promotion and relegation if you're in the bottom three two or three or four you get relegated to the division below and it's brutal but if you win a division you go up so it means american sports should have this by the way yeah but you're a socialist yeah yeah it's weird isn't it you're you're a capitalist society with a socialist sports and we're a socialist society with capitalist sports but it's brilliant it means you can go and buy a club from the very bottom you know the very bottom of the english football pyramid and you can get to the premier league how much did you have to pay do you have you said i've never said that yeah do you want to you want

to break the news now no because like just out of respect to the you know the person i bought it from but like like it's nothing okay like a like a cool car what was it a uh uh situation where like they were happy to give the problem to somebody else yeah because a lot of these clubs are community clubs somebody runs it for the community they've got they're not thinking about going up through the leagues they're just thinking about uh local players having somewhere to play and occasionally you get somebody comes in and buys a team and wants to take them up but the coolest thing is you can do that look nobody's ever done what we're doing which is bottom to the top like rexham who they just bought uh ryan reynolds bought used to be a huge team

and uh but they brought them in the fifth tier which is essentially so the first four divisions premier league championship league one league two that's considered the professional division divisions below that's called non-league okay and it's called non-league because it's not in the league and historically all amateur that first layer now that tier five is professional now really and those teams are trying to get into the football league but you started you're starting in nine we started the 10th oh 10th yeah and our lady started in the fifth okay and so when i bought the club i thought you know my idea was like can you take a team from the bottom to the top and if you can how do you do it and it all comes down to money like my my kind of strict view on this is

every promotion is 70 your budget for your players 25 budget for your manager and five percent luck in that you can have no budget and have the best manager in the world you're probably not going to go up it's just too hard oh you could have the best budget in the world and a rubbish manager and he'll screw it up so you kind of need both you do get like um outliers you know when lester won the league that was a huge surprise in the uk no one expected it and just uh for the americans the manager is the coach or is it like a gm or both the coach okay so i think essentially i'm like the gm okay you're making decisions on players in terms of who's on the team who's not on the team no no that's the that's so the manager uh uh i set the budget but basically

these way i'm everything off the pitch he's everything on the pitch got it so you're like the business side and then he he's the team the players so it's almost like a coach and a gm is uh what the manager does yeah and he'll have coaches but the but essentially the manager will coach as well but he picks the team and and runs it from the sideline it's not like like i remember watching the film money ball where you know he doesn't need to be there at the game once it's selected right he just goes off for a walk the managers has to be there um but so i was like how do you do this like every division i know the budget you need in every division how do you get that budget and what what is the difference between league 10 sounds like

no budget basically and then like the top two or three leagues i mean teams in the 10th tier will have some teams where that no players being paid and they're just playing some are maybe getting 30 50 pound a week you know you know the team's budget may be like 500 you probably won't get teams spending more than like 1500 to 2000 that would be the top level okay and it you know and it can it can kind of go up about 50 to 100 each but but there's different ones like so you rolled in just so we're clear you rolled into league 10 you're like i'm a big baller like we're gonna we're gonna spend a little more than a thousand pounds a week yeah but you don't want to go too high you go too high you get the wrong players in and they don't care so it's a real it's

real delicate balance of having the right budget with the right players who care enough to turn in week in week out and want to win who in their head they want to get promoted okay versus getting people to just turn up and get paid and leave so what happened was i had the club for four months at the end of a season we tried that we got some really good players and didn't make any difference had the wrong manager wrong players wrong mindset wrong budget i bought in this guy called robert inclair and he kind of he was an ex-professional footballer and he reset everything for me but but the idea that i looked at said how do you do this how do you take from the top to the bottom 300 million you can do it 300 million 300 million like our pounds either or you could do it you

could definitely do it because you know in that you're you're planning 50 million for a new stadium all your infrastructure along the way but also like if you get in the championship you want to get into the premier league it's going to cost you 30 million every time you have a go and so you start doing up the sums and then maybe you can do it for 200 million but either way it's nine figures right and so i was like right i don't have 300 million um but cameron tyler might well so actually it's interesting the short-term goal wasn't the premier league the short-term was football league where i live in bedford we never had a team in the professional divisions and in my head i was like maybe that's 20 million uh i sat down with cameron tyler before i bought the

team i was like yeah i've got this idea i want to get my team in the football league and i think it was tyler i always attribute it to him but to be honest i still don't know which one's which um but I think I said to him I said yeah about the football league and he explained he said straight away off the bat he was like how'd you get in the premier league it's like let me go away and think about it so that's what I've been doing for the last two years like figuring it out but so I went away and thought right how does a local club make money like team next door bed for town well anyone who comes through the gate who buys a ticket a burger and a beer that maybe brings in 15 pound per person and maybe they get some local sponsors who maybe spend a thousand couple of

thousand maybe they put some events on it their place i was like cool that's really hard work you're gonna have to grind to build a crowd to get you know big borrow still from local sponsors uh to get their money i was like it's not gonna work it's just take forever uh what if i make us the bitcoin team that was in my head okay if i make us the bitcoin team i've got the platform got the megaphone got the podcast you know so any episodes can have tens of thousands hundreds of thousands listening i've got a following on twitter bitcoiners are crazy if i make us the bitcoin team and say this is our goal what difference does that does that make and it just changed everything instantly you know i got gemini as a shirt sponsor i got yeah i've

got luxor as a sponsor iron as a sponsor ledge i've got all these companies who are willing to to spend yeah not thousands but maybe tens of thousands of sponsorship and just so people understand um i think people understand if somebody's advertising on television or you know a podcast or whatever uh when they're buying a sponsorship with the team what are they anticipating is it just brand awareness of like hey gemini is uh on the shirt are they expecting people to go sign up for gemini like when you have these conversations what are they looking for i actually think it's one of those weird sponsorships like if they sponsor my pod they want people to sign up they want to get customers i think with this there's a little bit of yes a little bit of

that i think there's a little bit of the prestige there's only one team can be on the front of the bitcoin team shirt only one company so they want that um and i think part of it's i think there's a little bit of like almost philanthropy in it they're like they want to help me they're like this is cool we want to be part of this journey so it's it's an interesting one now our rates are high. They're like a team maybe in the fifth tier or fourth tier. But I would argue we get as much exposure because what I decided to do was stream the games and be very noisy to create a lot of awareness. But anyway, so we had that. We also, I knew the Bitcoiners would follow us internationally and that's worked. We've sold over £200,000 of merch in two years. I'd imagine that's more than

every team in our league put together, maybe the league above and below. And so making us the bitcoin team was the game changer i call it the cheat code i mean i did my conference i called cheat code it's a cheat code you get access to this network that supports you and wants you to win and wants to be part of it and so what that meant is we had the money but still long term you know good sponsors and uh like this crazy bitcoin international community who will fly to by the way some people just fly to bedford from america they come to bedford for a game but anyway and so americans are used to the opposite happening i know people in bedford are like what is going on here who's this guy from arkansas yeah

um so anyway so like we it meant we had the financial back like we had the financial backbone to do the first few promotions but you got the leagues you need the training center you need a ground but you know if we keep moving up quickly it's going to get more and more expensive and so the only other way to kind of accelerate that cheat code is have bitcoin so i went to tyler and camera and said look i know how to do this now the only thing's holding me back is capital i know you're not going to give me 300 million and i'm not asking for it what i am asking for is i think we started like negotiating around five million i was like about five million dollars we got to four and a half but and i'm going to put that in bitcoin and i'm going to

forget about it because i don't think i need that for the next four years maybe five years and you know what in four to five years if i can get away not using it that five million could be 20 million could be 15 million we know bitcoin does and in that year i might need to use a million of that and over that next four years maybe over that next four years i need to lose five million of that and i'm left with 15 that maybe becomes 50 but i measured i looked out the whole compound growth rate of bitcoin and then uh and then i reduced the rate i went with a kind of moderate conservative kind of uh reducing uh annual growth rate you know uh reflected the bull and bear markets i was like okay if i've got this right if this number's right then every single league we are in we will be the

most well capitalized team and if it's 20 years to the premier league there's a chance we get to the premier league as the most well capitalized football club in the world it's insane right but that's it's not that crazy i guess the only thing is uh one you got to make the decision now right so you get long-term thinking obviously which is a huge piece of bitcoin it sounds like you're doing that the second thing is uh when do you sell the bitcoin right and a lot of that is like do you need the money or do you not um and i bet that uh there's some nerd out there who's smarter than you and i both combined who could figure out uh you may actually want to sell sometimes when you don't need the Bitcoin, or I'm sorry, you don't need the cash because of the

market cycles. So if you're like, use hindsight as the example, at the end of 2021 would have been a pretty good idea to sell some Bitcoin if you knew that you were going to sell Bitcoin in the next two years. And so timing markets is nearly impossible, but I almost look at it as the same way that a corporation may hedge foreign currencies or something like that. You got to get really smart about the treasury management to be able to you know convert bitcoin into pounds in anticipation of when you're going to need it so that god forbid you don't sell bitcoin at 16 000 when you know eight months before you could have sold it at 70 000 hey listen if i can find a smart person to do that i will um and look a lot of this based on the idea that bitcoin continues to grow

but i just have a fundamental belief at will they're not going to stop printing money and uh yeah, there's still only 21 million. And so I still have that fundamental belief. And I would like to think, I never sell the Bitcoin. I would like to think the borrowing and lending markets mature to the point where you're actually using the asset with more well known institutions, your Fidelity's, your JP Morgan's, where it's people you would trust to to lend it to not lend it to to to put up as collateral to borrow against because we don't want to pay the cap gains and we don't want to sell the bitcoin what do you think about the people in the bitcoin community who say you know like all kind of credit is bad all lending is bad

um a huge part of traditional finance obviously is lending um and i have a hard time seeing a world where like lending is not part of finance um but there's definitely people who would say you know it's blasphemous to say i'm going to put the bitcoin to a bank and i'm going to borrow against it it's like how do you think about you know the pros and cons i mean i just i do think there's too much debt in the world and i think people take debt for the wrong reasons and i think credit cards are a you know vulture business but i wouldn't own my house without being able to get a mortgage and i wouldn't have bought you know cars before without that and i wouldn't have been been able to set up businesses without borrowing you know I think I think leveraging debt is a

good thing for building yeah for building wealth and building capital I think it's bad for lifestyle like do not get a credit card for your lifestyle and do not get a loan to go on holiday but if you've got a business idea and you can borrow money you can accelerate that growth yeah I absolutely and look there's always going to be more and whatever you say you could you could you could ban it but i could still come to you pom and say look look dude i've got a business idea i need to borrow five bitcoin you're like okay cool this is the return i want so it's always going to exist i would just i just think it's going to change under a bitcoin standard um certain types of leverage are going to go so you've got the uh men's team the men's team uh i think it's pretty

straightforward when you first told me about it i was like oh this is interesting i don't know really that much about uh football but let's see you know kind of what happens i think that you're smart and you'll figure that out but then what it looks like is you've actually used that as like the tip of the spear to do a whole bunch of other things so you have a women's team you have a bar i saw ai generated plans for a stadium i have seen now a fund to invest in kind of young promising people in bedford like there's a bunch of stuff that now is kind of almost coming off the back or drafting off of the team so describe maybe like the non-men's team activities and like where that's coming from think of it as a chessboard and so i'm thinking about what i'm trying to do

with this football team as a game of chess right and so uh and i'm not yeah i could start attributing bits to pieces like maybe the team is the king which i want to protect but the truth is i'm just thinking of like a chessboard i'm moving pieces around so uh the next thing we did was a lady side uh for a couple of reasons commercially it's a good idea it's not something like a woke agenda we need to have a ladies team commercially it's a good idea we make money off our ladies team and it means uh you know half the population of bedford is female and they see that we're supporting females football secondly we should do it because girls want to play football and there was a time when they were banned from playing football so we should do it um but the

men's team they won a league and cup double uh consecutive years the league is promotion cup is fun but it's still prestigious so they've gone from 10th to 9th 9th to 8th we're now in the 8th tier the ladies um we took over properly last year in the fifth tier they won the league the county cup and the league cup it's called the trebles it never happens so they're now up into the fourth tier and so the fact that we've gone for three promotions won three promotions i think i know what i'm doing in terms of the algorithm i think the algorithm's right the rest is all chess pieces so we first started a hardship fund well we started investing in youth football so there's 30 boys teams 30 girls teams and we just give them money and support but then we set

up the the hardship fund and we set up hardship funds for any kid in bedford who wants to play football whose parents can't afford it they can go to the fund they'll pay the fees and buy them football boots and how much is the fee for a kid to play like like a hundred pounds okay you know it's it's not an expensive thing you know our fund's like 12 000 pounds it's not a lot but that we know that every kid in bedford who wants to play football can and that for us is doing our community work and it's nice to do it it's good to do it um and it's a chess piece to show the town that like we care for the town you know we need you to care for us because part of the sustainability is growing your crowd when i took over we used to get 40 people at game and then

season one we averaged 180 with a i think our biggest crowd was three two one last year we averaged 260 and our biggest crowd was a thousand so it's going up you know we need i want a crowd a 2000 next year an average of 500 i you know i gotta keep trying doubling it every year how many people are in bedford uh the town's a hundred thousand the kind of metropolitan area is 174 000 it's a good i mean burnley were in the premier league with 90 000 so it's a good base and there's not many teams around us but but we need the town to get behind this we want the town to support it love it and come to games buy burgers buy a shirt and support us and so my it's almost like my my uh trade with the town it's like i'm gonna do loads for this town as much as i can i'll help

this town as much as i can you help me and come to games so we invest in youth football boys and girls we have the hardship fund then i bought the bar and the bar is the coolest bar in bedford and i didn't buy it as a money-making exercise because the amount of work for the return compared to everything else isn't worth it but i knew it'd be a a lot of people but a lot of people come to the bar right and they want to know who owns the bar and they're like oh that's the real bedford owner oh that's pete mccormack and without it's really hard to explain it without sounding like a dick but i knew if i wanted the town to be successful i kind of needed to be known in the town and people like oh who's that guy that's pete mccormack oh he's got the football team

and so i started like placing chess pieces around so people would know who i am and then because you've seen glenn garrigan ross right you'll always be selling and so when people come to and they ask me about the bar or they ask about the football club my first thing i say is have you been to a game no come to a game we're playing saturday and it works they come so the bar was a chess piece you know we use it as well for our conference we use it for our um end awards season you know we use it for a lot of things so it's a useful tool but it's a chess piece the conference again i don't need to be doing a conference there's a pain in the ass you've done them but for that weekend every hotel in the room is in the town is sold out the bars are full the

restaurants are full and then we have a record crowd at the football and the football team rather than taking three thousand pound on saturday takes twenty thousand pound and all these people become loyal royal bedford fans another another nod to the town the local paper writes about it uh we're opening a cafe again another chess piece the chess piece for that is it's right in the middle of the town centre the shopping district and it means right in the centre it's going to have a big logo that says Rail Bedford so people are like oh there's Rail Bedford but it's never going to make money as a club shop that's why we did a cafe so you come in you buy a cup of coffee it's got the Rail Bedford logo on while you're in there you find out about the club it'll be the

best coffee we're sourcing the best coffee from London I think it's El Salvador coffee actually as well and we're going to make the best cup of coffee you can get and it's going to be really well priced and you're going to find out about the football we just partnered with a netball team do you know what netball is i have no clue i saw you announce this and i was like all right i'm out of my league right now so that's huge in uh england australia new zealand it's a huge spot it's a bit like it's like handball well it's like basketball but like lacrosse is big here and no one in the uk knows what it is yeah netball's big in these territories it's like basketball but it's main it's really only played by girls my daughter plays it but there's no backboard okay so they've

got to get their shot right it's a it's like a it's a net on a pole but you can't you don't bounce the ball and you can't run with it so you get the ball and you move and you pass it got it so it's kind of like your ultimate frisbee yeah right like that yeah but you got to throw the ball and got it okay every young girl plays it okay and there's a local team called team beds they're brilliant they're the best in the county but like anyone at the moment money is an issue so i said well look we'll give you some money in return you become rail bedford netball and so everybody knows emma's team bears everyone will see the rail bedford it's just branding yeah yeah and we'll help them grow what they're doing there's a local rugby league side we want to do

it with you know if you go to europe barcelona they have a basketball team handball team you know they have everything we want to be the same again another chess piece um i've bought i'm about to buy a building which i'm going to turn into kind of like a solo house in bedford but like not membership just a nice place another chess piece yeah and and i set up the fund yeah it's this girl came to us well her dad came to us and said his daughter's a really good swimmer she's trying to raise money to go to the junior world uh swimming championships in brazil it's a thousand pounds just like go she went she won three medals i was like oh this is cool right we'll set up a fund so we took the profits from the conference we put into the fund it's like 51 grand i've had

like endless letters from people kids who want to do so it's all been sport really but again another chess piece you know i i i think with philanthropy it can be a trade right you can say listen i'm helping you you help me let's make bedford better and so all these things are chess pieces to get it in into place and it's all kind of working but in the background i'm having a i'm in a public war with the mayor who's like fighting again what happened what happened with this i saw you sending some letters and uh it sounds like there's uh corruption no i wouldn't say that okay um i say stupidity uh i mean look i just don't know what his game is um i my suspicion is he wanted the role of mayor out of prestige his family's got

loads of money his dad's called tesco ted he sold loads of land to tesco they're farmers you know he went to one of the private schools and i think he's just he's like bedford aristocracy he's just a pompous old idiot and he's just come in he hasn't realized the man his mandate is to do the best thing for the town i think he just does what he wants it's it's really funny it should we should have filmed it he's friends with the chairman of the rival club who was shit scared of us and they had a meeting and afterwards he cancelled our lease which means we'd have no ground and i was like what are you doing meaning like the field yeah know where to play finish the club i said what are you doing we're clear look at all the things we're doing we're good for bedford

oh we'll move you somewhere else i was like it takes four years to build a stadium we need at least extension he finally did it then he tried to ban women playing at the ground i saw that called him out on that he offered to remove it and i said no i'm ceasing negotiations with you you've got to get somebody else to do it then he went out to the press and lied and said it was a drafting error like he's a moron um i've told him he should resign i might run for mayor in three years and just take him out just because he's he's clearly and obviously bad for the town he's He's unqualified, he's incompetent, he's out of touch, and he's compromised. So he's got to go.

He's bad for the town. But there's other things happening. It's like, do you ever feel like you're in the simulation? No. I do, because I don't believe I deserve to live this life. But anyway, so we're doing all this. No one had heard of Bedford before in our communities. So all this happens, then we get this announcement.

universal studios are building their first theme park in the uk in bedford what i swear to god it's five minutes from my house they've bought 500 acres five minutes from my house and they're building a theme park there why do you think that they're doing that well i so i think they tried to buy land near london and when they found out it was universal the price went up but bedford has this unique thing in that you have these two motorway spines that come up from london and they go either side of Bedford. Bedford's in the middle. For America, that's highways.

Yeah, two highways. But there's a highway that connects them, and Bedford's in the middle. Got it. So we got lots of things like Amazon Logistics set up there. It's strategically located from a geographic standpoint. Yeah, and then there's a train that goes right past us from London, which is 40 minutes.

So it's a good location. It's got another airport near it, and it's got easy access than they got in the land tube. And so, yes, it's so funny. the daily mail do you know the daily mail yeah they wrote an article i think it was titled something like what the hell is going on in bedford and it basically half of it was universal half of it was winklevoss billionaires co-owners and so we've just everything is just pointing in the right direction for this to work and so yeah i don't know i'm rambling now um what could go wrong

like how does this not work yeah that's a great god that's a really good question and i don't think about it enough but i do think about it football's a weird business you know business right you know business if you understand a pnl understand the cash flow you understand your inputs your output price you treat your staff well and you manage all those effectively and you've got a business that's viable you're going to be fine so if you open a coffee shop up in new york and you've got the right rent the right product um and you've got your costs right you'll be successful the reason most businesses fails they get one of those wrong like either they've got a business that's unviable or they've got in an area that's unviable or they're bad at

managing the numbers football's a weird business you can get all those numbers right on saturday afternoon even the team can play brilliant the ref made a bad decision the goalkeeper makes a mistake you don't win the game you don't get the three points you don't get promoted like this season we we had a it was we had like a macro borg battle between us and another team called mk irish okay we became rivals yeah so first game of the season we played them they um we beat them one nil but they were the better side they were much better side uh we then played them in the fa cup and i think we slightly edged it but they won we then played them in the fa bars we won five nil and then we had a nil-nil draw but all season it was us two racing away there was a one period where

we both were winning every week like 15 16 in a row or something and we could never get away from them they were always like three six points behind us and then we had a little wobble and they were still behind us but they had played less games which if they'd won they would have gone in the league then they had a wobble and we closed it out but the gap between us and them was six points between them and the next team team was like 15 16 got it they don't get promoted because they're second they go into the playoffs which is like a semi-final and a final knockout they lose they lose they're out they did all that hard work and yet a team who got less points over the season went up so you can do everything right and just not get promoted and if you keep not

getting promoted you're not hitting your goal we can bring crowds in we can bring sponsors in but how many you know like it's fun now we're winning leagues what happens if we don't get up next year yeah people might be all right cool you know they'll do it the year after what if we get stuck there for four years people get a bit bored stop coming the sponsors are less interested so that's that's there's a real pressure to get promoted which is why i and you know and to do that consecutively is hard so that's i've got to be very good at growing the business of the club so that's something that can go wrong um infrastructure could hold us back you know if go too quickly and we don't have the right ground at the right time you can get promoted and the

league say you're not allowed to come up you're you haven't got enough seats that's a tricky thing and so are you gonna try to like in america um and probably elsewhere as well but in america specifically uh building the stadium has become a very big business so a lot of uh for those that don't know uh there's a lot of people who go by these uh teams um there's actually a a gentleman uh philip and shu um a buddy of mine has a podcast and what he does he goes look for investors that most people don't know so he's not trying to talk about the elon musk as an entrepreneur or you know warren buffett as an investor he's trying to find people who've been very very successful but are kind of fly under the radar and so philip and shu is one of these

guys who he owns aeg which the anchu entertainment group and what he realized early on he had learned from somebody was if you go by the second and third market teams and then you go to the local city and you say to them, Hey, we have a basketball team. We want to build a basketball arena. We're going to put businesses, we're going to bring people in, we're going to do all this stuff, but I need tax breaks. I need concessions. I need, you know, all this stuff. And so essentially the cities will do that because they look at it from an economic development standpoint. And it's been a very, very successful thing, including there's many people who argue that some of these NBA owners actually have made more money on the real estate than they're making on

the teams right now again is that true is that not my brother probably would know better than me but um for you all somebody's screwing with the lease like you have all these issues yeah do you think that eventually along this path you've got to go build the actual infrastructure i mean we've got to build a stadium we're starting now but we're in this position where we can't build the premier league stadium now but you've got to plan for your long-term you know uh goals so you have to build a stadium in a modular way whereby the stands can be replaced and make made bigger as you go but the problem is we can't get tax breaks because councils don't really have the ability to give tax breaks they can do a small amount on business rates uh they're also they're all broke

so they can't invest in it you can do things like if you build a stadium uh you know mcdonald's might want to be there and they'll give you some money towards it but really it is it's usually a private project and that's fine we just need bitcoin to go to a million and then cameron and Tyler, we want to have the Winklevoss Stadium and then we'll figure that one out. Gemini grounds. Yeah, the Gemini arena. But, like, we're on that now. My brother works on this.

A bit like you, I work with my brother. He's just, like, on it hardcore. But, you know, it is a real challenge. Other things that can go wrong, I think they're the main ones. I mean, the only thing I worry about is not winning leagues, you know. and so my job every time for both my managers is to start the season with them having everything they need so i do this thing i work a year ahead you know so start this season both teams both managers have a budget to get the squad they want which they say will get them a squad that can

compete for the league i've got them the training facilities they need i've got them uh the kit and equipment they need for their physios etc as soon as this season starts i'm done i'm working on next season and i'm working so hard because like my budget's gonna go up i want my teams to go hybrid professional which means the young players train every day because they don't have a job and the senior players train midweek most teams don't do that for two divisions above i want to do it next year so we've got an advantage on them when we go in but that means i need to you know if our budget this year is let's say 880 000 pound next year is probably going to be like 1.2 million well where's the extra 380 380 300 000 coming from so i'm on that now so you know what usually happens

is the season ends we win the trophy we have a beer the next day i say to the manager what do you need for the start of the season they say i need this um nobody's nobody's ever done this at the pace we're trying to do as well and look we will stumble my plan was the football league in a decade that was six promotions in uh 10 years we've done two in twos we're going to do four and eight you know next eight years i think it's fair to to try and try try and do each one in two years my goal is to make sure every year we have a budget for the players that can win that league it's hard pomp it's hard you know sometimes you find the players are you like putting an all calling like anyone in the world who's good at this like come show up and we'll try out and see

it's the manager he has a certain style of football he plays he plays a really good football for this level and he knows the player he wants you get to the end of the season he's got people he's identified he gets in touch you know some people and how much are you paying the players i do you know what i wouldn't share that because the one the only thing you you'll see the presentation put out i redacted the budgets um i don't want people to know our budget because it's competitive knowledge um and you know people always react to it in terms of what you're playing the players but these are part-time players who will be on some multiple of hundreds of pounds from 100 to maybe a few hundred per week per week yeah so just let's just use round numbers

somebody could make i don't know 10 to 30 000 pounds a year playing if it was all year long yeah so they tend to get paid during the season so about 40 weeks so they tend to get yeah they tend to get paid about 40 weeks and but it starts to change right so maybe next year we might have some people who are on 52 week contracts and they get paid if they get injured we don't pay people if they get injured at the moment but some of the players are like look if i'm not going to come and play for you and get injured and not be paid so i have to prepare for that but the really interesting thing is when you get to like uh levels five and six and you start to go full time you've got all these players are brilliant players who won't go full time and the reason being they might have an

eighty thousand pound a year job they're not going to go quit their eighty thousand pound a year job to earn £30,000, £40,000 a year playing football, it's just, why wouldn't they? That makes sense, yeah. So what they tend to do is they keep their full-time job and they join the teams that are maybe hybrid full-time and they'll pick up, you know, £400, £500, £600 a week playing football. So add to their £80,000 a year, they're doing that on football as well.

Yeah, now they're making £100,000. Yeah, and so there's so many players who could be playing hard, they just don't do it. And these transitions, they're hard. and growing you know we're trying to do it sustainably without losing money i don't want to spend any wink of us money on player wages that's for infrastructure so to grow your revenue yeah i've essentially this year i've got to bring in another 300 000 that's incremental that's more than some teams will spend in a whole season and so i'm out there this is why i'm in the u.s

i'm going to new york i'm visiting sponsors i'm telling the story i'm talking to you i'm and making the bitcoin community like this and be a thing because you know the sponsorship game people will sponsor you but they want awareness so i've got to drive the awareness and so so yeah i mean it's a lot pop what um what can people do to help you that maybe don't live near bedford uh maybe they can't they have a job and they can't leave to go to a game or something like that what can they do yeah um buy merch uh and just follow the team just you know get behind the team because it's certainly if you're a bitcoiner you want this team to be a success because if it is

it is powered by bitcoin it is because we had a bitcoin treasury and we had bitcoin companies behind us it's because we as a bitcoin community when this is our club i can do all the work but if you know cameron tyler or nick from luxor or the guys at iron don't go yes our club as well and give me sponsorship money i can't get the players if all the if edgar in minneapolis doesn't run a he doesn't meet up every saturday at seven o'clock they get to a brewery and they watch our game together like 10 of them and then 7 a.m 7 a.m that's something that happens in minneapolis is uh 7 a.m at the brewery yeah they probably were already good yeah but you know shout out to edgar edgar comes his annual holidays to bedford now he comes we made him a commentator

at the game he runs up and down the pitch with his scarf um but but buy buy a hoodie you know it's 50 pound for a hoodie buy a jersey buy a scarf follow the results get behind it that's what people can do because every like i'm not doing this for money there's no world like i don't care if i end up with if i could if i ended up with zero if i ended up with one percent of the club with 100 100 to one voting rights and they're in the premier league i'm the happiest man i don't need to make any money from this right this is purely a dream for my team to try and be in the football league you know originally and then just to create history by getting into the premier league like if this happens someone will make a film about it i know and are you guys filming it

now i got cut a little bit yeah we're taking cut on full time to do that because the amount of stuff we've missed um by not recording it we've had like just absolute gold moments but the incremental benefit from the town we have a premier league team everybody in the world will know of bedford okay and then so what does that mean well that means when people in korea or australia or america are following football they're like oh there's a team from bedford and when they come on holiday to the uk some of those are going to come to bedford maybe go to universal and they're going to come to the ground and they're going to spend money in the town and so what this does this creates jobs opportunity and prosperity in bedford

and so so there's this symbiotic relationship between my dream and opportunity where i live for the people locally and what is the people's reaction uh i'm assuming most of them like this it's a mixture of okay well look there's a lot of people that still don't know this is going on you can go in the town center and say to people yeah what do you think of royal bedford they'll be like what yeah even though everything we've done how noisy we've been people still haven't heard of us but generally speaking it's almost universally universally positive with a bunch of what the fuck is going on here what do you mean the guys in the social network are co-owners and there's billionaires who own our club and and then there's this very small contingent of people who

support bed for town our rivals who hate us everything we do they hate they just why is it just because they want the opposite team uh you guys play in the same league and play each other no they're one above us so i tried to buy them first they said no and so i was just very public i was like well your plan isn't going to work and we'll be a bigger club and we will be like objectively it's very obvious we'll be i never even heard of them before hey they we are the two closest clubs in the country there's a fence that separates us and so they just hate us and because and it's the thing in football you always hate you if you're a man you fan you hate city if you're a liverpool fan you hate everton if you're arsenal you hate tottenham we're better uh we're

rail bed for their bed for town we've never played each other oh interesting and with three chances this year fa cup fa vars and county cup they're the three chances would you guys win it'd be tough i mean they're going up to a higher league they've got good players we'll give them a good game but i'd love us to win but most of all i want the game to happen for the town because it'll be a sellout it'll be chaos there'll be fights people throw a beer at each other it'd be like absolute carnage so um only an englishman could say it'll be great for the town there'll be fights i mean it'll just be fun but you know it will sell out um uh but yeah they're the only people to dislike it the mayor doesn't like us the council a little bit don't like us um is it

because it's change yeah like who moved my cheese yeah my cheese back um yeah it's changed um i think also for the mayor he's just he's probably not he just went into this role of prestige and he's probably didn't expect or not used to somebody who just doesn't care who he is and is willing to tell him to fuck off publicly yeah and i am he can fuck off i don't care about him and so he's not used to that so he certainly doesn't like us there's some rugby fans locally probably don't like the fan like the fact that football's taken the shine of it i don't give a shit yeah um and so so yeah i mainly almost universally positive people like if you live in a town that nobody has heard of and then suddenly people from all over the world are

traveling to it and they're spending money in your business and you've got a team going up through the leagues it's exciting it's exciting and people like it where can we send people to check out either merch watch the live stream rail bedford.com r-e-a-l-b-e-d-f-o-r-d.com when do we get you up to a game i'll definitely come 100 yes um this is i've saved my dumb american question for the end okay uh why do so many of the soccer slash football clubs use real in the front of the name actually it's only spanish teams but you're not spanish i know i'll come to that so rail is spanish for royal so it's royal madrid or royal sociedad or royal bettas so when i bought the team we were called bedford fc and the next door was bedford town and people

used to get them confused so i was like i've got to change the name and i was in america and i went to watch miami play into miami which is beckham's team into miami comes from the into milan so we took the inter from into milan and mixed it with miami and went into miami i was like that's cool i'm gonna go rail bedford but it's kind of like ours is more of a joke because like bedford is just like Miami is like, it's just a beautiful city. And, and, um, uh, Milan is a beautiful city. So they kind of, they kind of go together. Madrid and Bedford are opposite. And so, yeah, I just did it. Um, and it's, it's the kind of name, it's a funny story to this as well. It's the kind of name you, so if you're, if you play five-a-side football, which is like in the evening

with your friends, five-a-side, it's the kind of name you give your five-a-side team or your fantasy team and i just thought it would always be funny if we went up through the leagues that you know one day we'll get drawn out the hat for the fa cup and like a famous footballer i'll have to say rail bedford but it's a really funny story so when i came up with the name i was like this is cool i ordered all the merch like tens of thousands of merch uh got everything ready went to the football association where you have to register your team there was already a rail bedford no way yeah a sunday league side the bottom tier of sunday league football so i had by the name of them wow but now you got it now i got it now i got it all right thanks real bedford

dot com real bedford.com i'll come to a game hopefully you don't ask me to play you know jason williams keeps asking to play you should he's good he's an old man now no no he's good he's an old man come on what is he no i've seen him play he's good it's like 49 50 nah he's like 22 you should you should definitely let him play if for nothing else if you want eyeballs if he plays for sure people will watch and if he scores a goal you'll never hear the end of it dude i'm i'm everything off the pitch all right we'll do it again soon thank you pomp appreciate this