{"id":476119,"date":"2026-05-09T08:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T08:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476119\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T08:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T08:56:11","slug":"irish-company-scores-own-goal-amid-pivot-from-soccer-to-crypto-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476119\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish company scores own goal amid pivot from soccer to crypto \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Florida-based stock picker and proud Gaeilgeoir Cathie Wood earned cult status during the pandemic with well-timed bets on disruptive innovators such as Tesla and Zoom \u2013 and now inhabits a world where even her smallest trades are parsed by investment blogs.<\/p>\n

The daughter of Irish immigrants, who lived for a period as a child in her mother\u2019s native village of Castlegregory in Co Kerry, Wood has taken followers of her ARK Invest on a volatile journey since the lockdown era, trying to make calls on the next big winners. <\/p>\n

Its flagship ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund (ETF) is changing hands almost 45 per cent below its peak in January 2021. The S&P 500, which tracks most of the largest US-listed companies, has, meanwhile, soared more than 90 per cent. <\/p>\n

An investment last September in a company based in the land of her forefathers hasn\u2019t helped the cause. <\/p>\n

ARK made a multimillion-dollar investment last September in Dublin-based Brera Holdings, securing an initial stake of more than 10 per cent as the company raised $300 million (\u20ac255 million) in total. <\/p>\n

Brera was incorporated in Dublin in 2022 as a corporate entity over Brera FC, the so-called \u201cthird team of Milan\u201d, after Inter Milan and AC Milan. Following its flotation on the Nasdaq in January 2023, it went on to invest in several other journeymen clubs in the likes of Mozambique, North Macedonia and Mongolia. It also took a small \u201cstrategic stake\u201d in Manchester United, making what it claimed was a 74 per cent gain at the end of 2023 as it tendered all its shares as UK billionaire Jim Ratcliffe made an offer for a minority stake in the club.<\/p>\n

The clubs have had mixed success under Brera. A slump in the stock in the 2\u00bd years after it floated at $5 a piece forced the group to consolidate shares in a one-for-10 conversion last summer to get the stock above the minimum $1 level required to avoid being booted out of the Nasdaq. <\/p>\n

Its most prized asset, Italian Serie B side SS Juve Stabia, near Naples, in which Brera took a controlling stake last June, succumbed to judicial administration within months amid claims of alleged pre-existing mafia-style influence over its financial activities. <\/p>\n

But by then, Brera had changed direction, dramatically. Joining a growing list of companies that were essentially ditching their original focus to dive into the cryptocurrency craze. <\/p>\n

Former US mobile software company MicroStrategy was one of the pioneers of such a pivot when it announced six years ago that it had bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin<\/a> as a primary treasury reserve asset.<\/p>\n

The $300 million Brera capital injection, also backed by the likes of Abu Dhabi blockchain advisory firm Pulsar Group and Cayman Islands-based investment vehicle RBCH, allowed it to become a so-called digital asset treasury and crypto infrastructure company \u2013 and stockpile crypto tokens built on a blockchain \u2013 or giant digital transactions notebook, called Solana. Brera also changed its trading name to Solmate. <\/p>\n

\"\"PrepayPower are hiking their prices – will other energy suppliers soon follow suit?<\/p>\n

The market euphoria didn\u2019t last long. <\/p>\n

The value of Solana peaked at $210 on September 19th, the day after Brera announced its metamorphosis. It has since plunged by almost 65 per cent. Bitcoin, the grandfather of cryptocurrencies, has lost a third of its value amid negative sentiment towards digital assets for several reasons, not least recent geopolitical uncertainty and concerns over a global slowdown. <\/p>\n

Brera\u2019s own share price has plunged almost 99 per cent from its September spike. <\/p>\n

Brera cancelled a tie-up with crypto infrastructure company RockawayX in February, moved to dump its soccer clubs in Mozambique and Mongolia a month later, and offloaded its stake in SS Juve Stabia for \u20ac1 in April. <\/p>\n

Last week, it announced that it had \u201cterminated\u201d chief executive Marco Santori, a crypto sector veteran who was hired only last September, and said that it would be a few weeks late filing its annual report \u201cbecause of unanticipated delays in the completion of its financial statements\u201d. <\/p>\n

The new chief executive, Ron Sade \u2013 Brera\u2019s fourth in under three years \u2013 wrote to investors on Monday to try to level with them. <\/p>\n

\u201cI want to treat you with the respect you deserve as the intelligent investors you are, and start instead with a realistic message \u2013 without trying to dress up the reality,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The tone follows the classic playbook of an incoming chief trying to steady a shaken company, even if he has been on the board since the outset of the new strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cRegrettably, I am taking on this role at a time when the company is far from where we want it to be,\u201d he added, noting that the stock is now trading well below the net asset value of its crypto holdings \u2013 and the price at which Wood and friends piled in. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy personal commitment is to do everything within my power to position Solmate, by 2030, as the world\u2019s leading Solana-focused technology infrastructure company and the largest Solana treasury in the world,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

But for now, the only company assets holding their own are its stakes in a third-tier club in Milan and two teams in North Macedonia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida-based stock picker and proud Gaeilgeoir Cathie Wood earned cult status during the pandemic with well-timed bets on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,10119,52,18,19,2003,17],"class_list":["post-476119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-cryptocurrencies","tag-dublin","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-investment","tag-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116543789353199033","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}