The 2026 FIFA World Cup is doing double duty. On one level, it’s the biggest sporting event on the planet. On another, it’s an extended job interview for at least 14 players who will walk off the pitch at the end of the tournament with no club to return to.

Fourteen players still competing in the knockout stages have contracts that have either expired or will expire with the tournament’s conclusion. Zoom out slightly and the number gets larger: over 25 World Cup participants entered the summer with deals set to run out around June 2026, making this one of the more unusual transfer situations in recent memory.

The names involved are not small ones

Mohamed Salah, John Stones, Luka Modrić, and Bernardo Silva are among the high-profile players navigating the tournament while their futures remain unsigned.

Where crypto enters the picture

Fan tokens, the blockchain-based digital assets tied to national teams and clubs, have historically been sensitive to exactly this kind of tournament drama. The Argentina Fan Token surged over 1,000% during the 2022 World Cup, a figure that illustrated just how reactive these markets can be to on-field performance and fan sentiment.

The mechanism is straightforward. Fan tokens, many of which are issued and traded on the Chiliz platform, derive much of their short-term price behavior from collective enthusiasm. A country goes deep into a tournament, its fan token sees elevated trading volume.

What investors should watch

National team tokens are the more immediate play during the tournament itself. The 2022 Argentina example remains the clearest historical reference point for how large those moves can get.

The risk side of this trade is worth naming directly. Fan tokens are highly speculative assets with liquidity that can dry up quickly outside of peak sentiment moments. A player who underperforms, picks up an injury, or signs with a club outside the fan token ecosystem can reverse any accumulated gains in short order. The 1,000% spike in 2022 was real, but so were the corrections that followed as tournament excitement faded.