Athletes Are Influencers. Sports Media Is Still Catching Up.

For a long time, sports had a fairly predictable way of creating fans. You grew up in a city, your family were fans of all the local teams (or, in the case of New York and Chicago, one of the local teams) and you inherited your allegiance the way you inherited curly hair or green eyes. The players mattered, sometimes a lot, but the team and the idea of the team, was the thing you stayed attached to.

That still happens, of course but to a much lesser degree than in years past.  Today, it’s just as likely that social media will open the door to fandom, especially for a younger generation that is accustomed to using those platforms to discover just about everything else.

The process might start with a basketball player whose videos they find funny, a soccer player whose fashion sense they admire or a college athlete who lets them see what life on campus is actually like. Watching their new connections actually play may come later. (So, for that matter, may learning the rules.) The initial connection is to the athlete as a person, and the sport benefits from whatever interest that person can generate.

This in turn makes athletes a most valuable variety of influencer. Their social presence can help sell tickets, drive people to a televised game, move merchandise or introduce a team to people who had never given it much thought. The complication is that much of the sports business is built around selling access to teams and leagues, while these new social media fans are attracted to a particular player

It’s a massive switch from the old days of ESPN where the premise was that their core viewers were fans of a particular sport or sports, and thus willing to watch most any game, so long as it was a good matchup. The player-driven fanbase offers no such option.

Following The Player

Someone who starts watching a team because they follow one of its players is likely to follow that player to their next team and the team after that. While this is not exactly a new development in sports. What social media changes is the athlete’s ability to maintain that relationship independently of any team, league, streaming service or network.

For a broadcaster signing a multiyear rights deal, that creates a problem. You can buy the games, but you cannot guarantee that the players who attracted part of the audience will still be there. Because while old school fans stuck with their team through thick and thin, viewers who arrive through a player’s Instagram account are fans of the player and when he or she is gone, they’re gone too.

Sponsors have more flexibility. A brand can build its relationship around the athlete and follow them across teams and platforms. Depending on what it is selling, the athlete’s audience outside of sports may be just as large and/or just as valuable as the people watching the games. A fashion brand, for instance, does not need a stylish athlete’s followers to develop an appreciation for defensive strategy—it just needs them to like his shoes.

Leagues have a different calculation. A player who brings in new fans is good for the league overall no matter what team they’re rooting for. But if those fans mostly see the games as a sideline to the player’s other interests and thus never bother to take a real interest in the league, that’s not helping.

Which is why it’s so important for the leagues to try and steer the players to promote the actual games and turn hardcore parasocial followers into, at the very least, casual fans.

Giving Fans A Reason To Watch

That is why I find Genius Sports’ newly announced venture with Chris Paul, his Ohh Dip!!! Entertainment company and Connor Schell’s Words + Pictures, so interesting. The plan is to give athlete-led programming the ability to incorporate Genius’ official sports data and technology. The program will start off with Paul and, once the kinks are ironed out, expand to other athlete/creators.

While there is no shortage of athletes who are adept at creating charming TikToks, the opportunity here is to complement the appeal they already have by helping them demonstrate to fans their winning methods for understanding the game.

That means explaining the strategy behind the play in a way that is accessible to someone who pretty much only knows that a basketball is orange and round (if that.)

It’s a way to make the game come to life while at the same time reinforcing the player’s parasocial relationship as a “friend” while also giving the new fans the sense that they can finally get a handle on a game that until then seemed chaotic and impenetrable.

Data and visualization are great ways to make that explanation come to life. Many people are visual learners and even those who are not, can appreciate some well done graphics. What’s more, the player then gets the halo effect of being the one who taught them all about basketball.

This then makes the new venture useful to rights holders as well as advertisers. Meaning that an athlete’s social audience can now become a potential source of potential fans, many of whom can be converted into a promotional regiment with strong social media skills

It will be up to all of the parties involved to make sure that this is the likely outcome. None of which is rocket science.

To begin with, it needs to be engaging, not dull. To cater to new fans who only have a vague idea what the “foul line” refers to. Without, of course, turning off the old ones.

Genius’ technology gives producers material to work with. But Words + Pictures had the most challenging job of all: turnint the athletes’ expertise into something entertaining and engaging. Fans will show up once for an athlete they like. Two or three times with no rewards—that’s a problem.

For sponsors, the question is what they want the programming to accomplish. Awareness, merchandise sales and tune-in are all reasonable goals. But they all require different definitions of success., which in turn require bespoke measurement. 

Not impossible, but not as easy as trotting out the Nielsen ratings.

But that is not the big story here. 

That belongs to the skills of the athletes who have figured out that in this age of Feudal Media they must turn to social media to succeed.

So that rather rely on leagues and teams to pay them, they can now build and maintain their own media businesses and reap the fruits.

The question though, is whether teams, leagues and brands can reap those same benefits too.

Time will tell.