Luka Modrić leads trend of athletes competing at 40 in 2026 World Cup, and crypto is paying attention

When Luka Modrić lined up for Croatia against England on Wednesday, the 40-year-old midfielder wasn’t just playing football. He was making a statistical argument that would have seemed absurd a decade ago.

The 2026 World Cup features a record eight players aged 40 or older. That’s more than every previous World Cup combined.

The longevity boom meets the token economy

Modrić became CoinW’s global brand ambassador in April 2026, joining a growing roster of elite athletes who’ve attached their names to crypto platforms. The Croatian Football Federation has also entered the digital space with its VATRENI fan token, designed for national team fan engagement and utility.

Several Solana-based $MODRIC tokens have launched, trading with market caps around $100K or lower. These are not affiliated with the player himself. They’re speculative bets by traders hoping to ride the wave of attention surrounding Modrić’s World Cup appearance.

Ronaldo, Binance, and the blueprint

Cristiano Ronaldo, another member of the 40-plus World Cup club, has been the most prominent athlete in the crypto-collectible space for years. Ronaldo has released multiple CR7 NFT collections through Binance since 2022. Like Modrić, Ronaldo has also spawned a cottage industry of unaffiliated meme tokens on Ethereum and Solana.

The tournament effect

Kraken was named the Official Crypto Exchange Supporter for the FIFA World Cup 2026. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar saw similar patterns, with tokens tied to participating national teams surging in the weeks before kickoff and fading afterward.

Micro-cap meme tokens tied to athletes like Modrić or Ronaldo can produce outsized short-term returns during tournament windows. The $MODRIC tokens trading at sub-$100K market caps are essentially lottery tickets denominated in SOL. Official fan tokens like VATRENI carry marginally more legitimacy because they’re issued by the football federation itself.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.