REVIEW article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Management, Marketing, and Economics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1642180
This article is part of the Research TopicSports marketing evolution: Emerging trends, challenges, and future directionsView all 3 articles
Platform power, athlete branding, generative AI, and the future of sport governance – a systematic review
Provisionally accepted
Hans Westerbeek1,2*
Thomas Van Schaik3- 1Victoria University, Australia, Melbourne, Australia
- 2Victoria University Business School, Melbourne, Australia
- 3https://theathletebrand.com/, Eindhoven, Netherlands
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This systematic review examines how elite athletes are leveraging digital platforms, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to build autonomous brands, bypass traditional sport gatekeepers, and develop athlete-owned business models. Drawing on 47 peer-reviewed studies (2016–2025), we synthesise evidence across five domains: athlete branding and self-production, disintermediation, platform-enabled empowerment, AI-driven content innovation, and emerging commercial structures. The findings reveal a decisive shift in sport's power balance, with athletes acting as media producers, cultural influencers, and entrepreneurial actors. Digital platforms enable direct-to-fan engagement, while AI tools lower content production costs whilst personalising interactions and extend global reach. Blockchain facilitates decentralised monetisation and data sovereignty, supporting ventures such as athlete-owned leagues and non-fungible tokens. However, these developments embed new dependencies on platform algorithms and volatile digital markets. From a platform capitalism perspective, athlete autonomy is constrained by corporate-controlled infrastructures; from a value co-creation lens, fan relationships become participatory spaces for shared cultural and commercial value creation. The review highlights governance challenges, including ethical implications of synthetic media, data ownership, and the regulation of AI-enabled branding ecosystems. We argue that sport governance must evolve from a control-oriented model to one that positions athletes as co-creators of value and strategic partners in decision-making. Future research should address equity in digital visibility and sustainable athlete-led business ecosystems. Governance mechanisms that reconcile technological opportunity with autonomy protection should be explored as well. Athletes are no longer peripheral actors in sport's commercial order, they are emerging as its architects, with significant implications for the future of sport governance.
Keywords: Athlete branding, Self-production, Disintermediation, Digital platforms, Generative AI, emerging business models
Received: 06 Jun 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Westerbeek and Van Schaik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hans Westerbeek, Victoria University, Australia, Melbourne, Australia
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