The Athletic.

Hello, I'm Dan Bardell.

And I'm Floeloid Hughes.

And welcome to the Athletic Football podcast.

It's Wednesday, which means we'll be picking out some of the best work available on the Athletic right now and putting the author under the spotlight.

Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are exploding in popularity.

They're being used to buy things like art, baseball cards and even Jack Dorsey's

first tweet. The biggest companies in the world, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, all

companies that don't have a product that you can hold for a digital product and they are worth

billions of dollars. So they've got more money than they want to do with. And this is kind of

almost the latest kind of Rolex watch or Lamborghini thing. It's like, because I can,

I've spent 50,000 pounds on an NFT. This week we're going to highlight an article by the Athletics Investigations writer Joey Dursso all about NFTs and why footballers are spending

thousands on cartoon monkeys. Yeah, so if you like me and you've been been trying to wrap your head around what on earth, a non-fungible token actually is and why they're worth so much money, as well as the more serious concerns surrounding football and its growing connection with the crypto bros, we've got you covered this week. We're going to say hello to Joey in just a moment, but Flo, do you get to a game this weekend,

or did you have a game that was controversially postponed at the last minute,

as is so on Vogue at the moment?

I got to one game, but one game was postponed, I think semi-controversially.

I was at Millwall on Saturday, which went ahead, but on Friday, the game that was meant to be on Sunday,

which was Arsenal Women versus Redding,

was postponed by request from Reading.

And it was interesting because they've got a quite small squad,

and they don't have a massive budget.

But they could obviously probably sign more players if they wanted to

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