The ‘Bitcoin club’ hoping to go from bottom of the pyramid to the Premier League

Peter McCormack was in Austin, Texas, meeting with the Winklevoss twins about renewing sponsorship of his Bitcoin podcast when he first floated the idea of buying his hometown football club.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, probably most well-known for their depiction in The Social Network, a film telling the story of their lawsuit against Mark Zuckerburg claiming he stole their idea for Facebook, are multibillionaires who founded cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.

McCormack, who built an audience hosting the most popular Bitcoin podcast in the world, had made enough money to become financially independent when he decided, in 2021, he wanted to buy a club in Bedford and, fuelled by Bitcoin, take them into the Football League.

He was turned down trying to buy Bedford Town, but a deal was struck for Bedford FC, at the bottom of the football pyramid.

The twins love sports but were confused by the English football system, and hadn’t heard of the Football League, so McCormack explained about promotion and relegation, about how you can buy a team at the bottom and take them to the top. He mentioned the professional leagues: League Two, League One, the Championship, the Premier League.

“I remember Tyler paused and went: ‘How do you get them in the Premier League’?” McCormack tells The i Paper.

McCormack was taken aback – this was way bigger than he had anticipated. He said, “OK… it’s not impossible”. They told him to go away and work it out.

Two years and plenty of discussions later, after McCormack had bought the club and taken them to two promotions in two seasons, he went back to the twins last summer and said the club was financially sound but it was getting harder, and he wanted an investment to accelerate what they were doing. On the spot they agreed, investing £3.6m-worth of Bitcoin, via Gemini, and becoming co-owners.

“Our Bitcoin position is £2.5m up already,” McCormack says. “Most clubs at our level don’t have any f***ing money. They struggle from week to week. We took £3.6m in Bitcoin when [a Bitcoin] was [worth] $70,000, and now it’s $103,000.”

Can it work? Can a tiny football club on the bottom rung be propelled up Everest by Bitcoin? Is this a madcap plan destined to fail, or a stroke of genius?

It’s worth hearing some of McCormack’s backstory to contextualise how several experiences in his life converged to form this idea. McCormack, now 46, was running a successful digital advertising agency with Covent Garden offices in the 2010s when he had a crisis of identity.

He and his wife divorced in 2014, he developed a robust cocaine and alcohol problem, became disillusioned by his own profession and, fearing for his health, quit in 2016.

He took a year off work, bought some trainers and took up running, waking each morning and jogging between 10k and a half marathon before heading to the gym for whatever class was going.

McCormack started listening to The Rich Roll Podcast which, Roll’s website states, “delves deep into all things wellness”. Soon, McCormack ended up in Italy at Rich Roll event – “40 people, doing yoga, eating vegan food and crying about their life. It was fun”.

Roll, a former entertainment lawyer turned vegan ultra-endurance athlete, said if anyone was in Los Angeles they should look him up. So McCormack got home, booked a flight and went round his house.

He told Roll he wanted to start a podcast and asked him how to do it. Roll offered advice and the next day McCormack was on one. Then he combined his faith and interest in Bitcoin with the medium and launched What Bitcoin Did.

The podcast took him all over the globe, interviewing people about the cryptocurrency, including the president of El Salvador and Robert F Kennedy Jr, recently nominated by US President Donald Trump to run the country’s health department.

He amassed a massive audience, recording more than 850 episodes, but all that travel made him yearn for home and, having grown up and lived in Bedford his whole life, turned to football. (He still hosts the podcast but football takes up around 80 per cent of his time.)

He looked at how other successful football clubs had grown and noticed Forest Green Rovers, run by green energy entrepreneur Dale Vince, who became the environmentally conscious club. They are top of the National League, on course for promotion to League Two, but for their relative size they have had an enormous amount of exposure.

‘The Bitcoin club’

With a population of 174,000, McCormack realised Bedford were one of the biggest towns never to have a club in the Football League. “Burnley has 90,000 people and has been in the Premier League,” he points out.

McCormack thought he could make Bedford FC “the Bitcoin team” and that would be their niche. He renamed the club Real Bedford, redesigned the club badge as a skull and crossbones, and started grinding away at the business, coming up with ideas, joining dots, persuading investors.

“I was looking at Bedford thinking, what can we do? I’ve got this gift, this podcast about Bitcoin, the biggest podcast in the world on the subject. I fundamentally believe Bitcoin is one of the most important ventures of our time. I put it up there with the railway lines, electricity, the Internet. There’s a book called Engines That Move Markets – for me Bitcoin is one of those. I see it, others don’t.

“What if we were to become the Bitcoin team? What if we were to become a football team that stands for something? Football teams don’t really stand for s*** anymore. Forest Green do. Most don’t. They stand for football and excellence, it’s all the same nonsense.

“They used to come from communities. Their name or nickname came from them. Bedford FC was called The Printers, because it was a group of people who worked at the print works.

“I say we’re going to stand for the separation of money and state. My belief is freedom comes from economic freedom and privacy – we need privacy as a society. These are things we don’t have anymore.

“We’re essentially going to be a freedom and liberty football club, with economic freedom at the basis. Essentially, we’re the Bitcoin club. If we’re the Bitcoin club, what does it mean for us as a business?

“It means all the people who listen to the podcast around the world have a team they can support. They might buy jerseys or hoodies, merchandise, they might come to games. It also means I can attract sponsors which aren’t a local business that may spend 10-grand to go on a shirt, it might be someone like Gemini who spend one hundred grand to go on a shirt. I thought it could work.”

McCormack has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and millions of podcast downloads – he had a readymade audience to leverage. And it is working. In two-and-a-half years they have sold more than £250,000 in merchandise around the world. Sponsorship this season totals £500,000.

“For a club at our level that is insane. It’s almost certainly more in total than all the other clubs in the division put together. I don’t say that arrogantly, it’s a fact.”

Where they currently struggle is matchday revenue. They have had 1,000 at a game, but usually get around 300. This could improve soon. Talks of a merger with Bedford Town are gathering pace.

“I think we’re a problem for the other team,” McCormack says. “As a brand we’re exciting, kids around Bedford are starting to support us. Our financial position puts us in a better position. If we get promoted this year and they don’t, we’re at the same level. At that point, we’re the bigger club, on several measures.

“They have a bigger history, bigger crowds still, but generally speaking we’re the bigger club. That puts immense pressure on them. I’m a Bedford person, I don’t want to see them go to the wall. Together we’re stronger. One group of fans, one history, one goal. Bedford comes first.

“I don’t need a rivalry with a local team in a town I love. I don’t want to fight people from my own town. I want to win with people from my own town, all together.

“We will do this anyway. Having them on board makes it easier. But more so I just want the town of Bedford to win. I want an FA Cup run, I want one day for the club to play at Wembley, I want someone from Bedford to play for England.”

Real Bedford have also set up a women’s team that is on course for back-to-back promotions.

“Short-term we wanted Football League for the men in 10 years, which is six promotions. If we do three in three, we’ll have seven years to do three.

“Step three, two and one are significantly more difficult than what we’ve been in. Step three has big clubs – Kettering [Town], Telford [United], massive budgets. Step two even higher. Step one, I don’t know what Wrexham’s budget was – I’d assume £2.5m.

“Notts County were getting crowds of 11,000 some games there. You’re up against big clubs. But our goal, still, will be Football League in seven years.”

Can Bitcoin take Real Bedford to the Premier League?

We meet at The Embankment, a restaurant overlooking the River Great Ouse, with its criss-crossing bridges and small parks on either side, a few miles away from where the team plays. And you can see why there might be potential.

As a gauge of the challenge: Salford City were in the same tier as Real Bedford are now when Gary Neville and his Class of ’92 teammates bought the club in 2014, and rose to League Two with four promotions in five years.

McCormack believes the problem Salford, who are now in a sixth season in League Two, face is playing on the doorstep of Manchester United and Manchester City, competing for fans. An issue Bedford don’t have.

But does he not worry about the volatility of Bitcoin, the primary cryptocurrency yet still prone to great crashes and leaps?

McCormack felt the harsh edge of its unpredictability when he saw a £23,000 investment in Bitcoin turn into almost £1m in 2017, only to watch it crash to almost nothing a year later.

He is adamant Bitcoin is a “mathematical inevitability”, reasoning that while governments keep increasing debt and printing money, it will be an asset, similar to gold, that keeps increasing in value. And that he can harness that to Real Bedford’s advantage.

“Do I worry about the price of Bitcoin? No, because I know what’s going to happen. Governments are going to print more money and there will be increasing demand for an escape hatch, which Bitcoin is. If I needed all the money in the next year it’s a different story, but I don’t.

“I’ve sold less than one per cent of my personal Bitcoin in my life. A sell a little bit here or there to fund things – family, kids, whatever – but generally I don’t sell it. I have this long-term confidence in it.”

McCormack declines to reveal how much he is worth, saying he has enough to retire. But if he retained his initial investment in Bitcoin after it crashed, it will be worth considerably more than £1m.

“We have a model: one business, backed by Bitcoin, with a couple of billionaires, and support from the local community,” he says. “That’s our jigsaw puzzle for getting in the Premier League.”

Cameron Winklevoss said that he believes “Real Bedford – powered by Bitcoin and Peter’s leadership – has the ability to defy the odds, upset the establishment and dethrone incumbents. We love underdog stories that have the ability to literally change the game”.

McCormack adds: “I know the costs of football are going to get more and more expensive. I know if we continue at this pace, the cost of promotion is going to accelerate quicker than our revenues. How do I bridge that gap?

“Well, if I have Bitcoin it fills that gap. Its’ compound annual growth rate is about 38 per cent. This is the first season we’re going to make a loss – about two hundred grand. Two hundred grand out of £7m in Bitcoin? That’s easy.

“What if I have to lose £250,000 for the next four years? My £7m in current day value goes down to £6m, but Bitcoin doubles in that period it goes up to £12m.”

When McCormack ran the numbers he discovered the cold, hard reality that by-and-large where a club finishes in the table comes down to money. “If you get a league table at the end of a season and rank everyone by budget, you’d get outliers, like Leicester [City] and Nottingham Forest, but most are within five or six spaces of their budget.”

I suggest that’s quite sad. “It is and it isn’t. The only other option is some form of socialism. Football is a business and a brand. If you’re complaining about the money in football, what’s the alternative? If you want to socialise sports it will be like America. There’s no real jeopardy there. Every club survives. The jeopardy of football is what makes it unique.

“The jeopardy of football is better than any American sport – if we get relegated, what will that mean? It makes it exciting.

“If you look at our club and you’re angry about our club – you say look at them, they’ve got all the money – you’re saying you’re angry about our business model, which is creating jobs, bringing people to Bedford, selling merch around the world. Why are you angry about that?

“We need wealth creators to create jobs and opportunity. I think it’s a nonsense argument.

“I ran a model, based on a promotion every two years, we can afford the top three wage bill in every division and we will be the club with the best balance sheet all the way up to the Premier League.

“People say, you’re an idiot, you’re not going to get in the Premier League, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

“I show them this model and they’re like, ‘Oh s*** you’re onto something’.”