There was a time when hearing directly from an athlete meant catching a postgame interview or waiting for a segment to air on ESPN. Reporters controlled the questions. Producers decided what made it to broadcast. The athlete was the subject of the story and rarely the one telling it.
Now, that dynamic has quietly flipped.
Over the past several years, athletes have moved into podcasting, YouTube, and full scale media ventures with a confidence that’s caught a lot of people off guard. This isn’t just moonlighting between seasons. Some of these platforms are drawing audiences that rival traditional sports networks like ESPN, CBS, and NBC.
The athletes utilizing owned-media seem to understand something those sports outlets are still catching up to.
Quick Highlights
- Athlete-owned podcasts have generated more than 7 billion YouTube views, 725 million TikTok likes, and 37 million Instagram followers combined.
- A 2025 USC Annenberg study found 33 athlete-owned production companies producing over 370 media properties worldwide.
- The global podcast industry was a heavy hitter in the entertainment industry, and was valued at nearly $40 billion by the end of 2025.
- Brands and sponsors are increasingly choosing athlete podcasts shows as advertising platforms due to the strong engagement from fans.
Traditional Sports Coverage
Within sports media, athlete frustration has been building for years over misquotes and selective editing stripped of context. A two hour conversation gets reduced to a single pulled quote. A nuanced opinion becomes a headline designed to generate outrage.
We live in a world where a clipped video or a screenshot taken out of context can reach millions of people before anyone bothers to fact check. Social media moves fast, and corrections almost never travel as far as the original story. For athletes who are already among the most visible and most misrepresented public figures in the country, this has created a major issue.
Traditional media was never set up to give athletes control over their own narratives. They have had to live with whatever version of themselves ended up in print or on television.
Marshawn Lynch is an infamous form of what that frustration can look like. He was fined over a million dollars across his career for refusing to comply with NFL media obligations. The coverage painted him as difficult and uncooperative, and that’s largely where the story stopped.
What rarely made it into the narrative was why he felt the way he did. He grew up in an environment that made being forced to perform for the press feel immoral. That context existed, it just had nowhere to go. Years after retiring, he laid it all out on various podcasts, in his own words, without anyone shaping it into something else.
Without that personal perspective, the public version of Marshawn Lynch was just a guy who wouldn’t speak to reporters. This didn’t come close to capturing it.
Athletes Taking Control
Podcasts have changed that dynamic across the board.
When an athlete is talking directly into a microphone for an hour, there is no editor cutting for time, no reporter filtering the message, no network sweating over advertising. The audience hears what was said, in full, in the actual context it was meant in.
That kind of direct access simply did not exist at scale before this format came along.
LeBron James recognized this early. Uninterrupted, the platform he helped build, was designed around a straightforward idea: let athletes talk without someone else shaping the message. No click bait reactions and no manufactured drama – just perspective.
The Kelce brothers landed on something similar, though it came together differently. New Heights isn’t built in the way a network show is. It wanders and it gets personal.
That looseness is the whole point. It gives fans something a standard broadcast would never make room for. It shows who they truly are.
Building While Still Playing and After Retirement
What’s changed most noticeably is the timing. Athletes used to wait until after retirement to transition into media. That’s no longer how it works.
Draymond Green launched his show while still active in the NBA, which created something genuinely unique. The audience was shown analysis from someone who had just been in the locker room the night before. The gap between player and commentator shrank in a way that felt hard to fake.
Pat McAfee is maybe the clearest example of what the high stage looks like. He built a digital show from scratch after his playing career ended and grew it into something ESPN eventually paid serious money to partner with. He also did so by refusing to sound like traditional sports radio. The fact that he was a retired NFL player helped – but it wasn’t the whole story. Plenty of former players have tried this. Most have not built what he has built.
For athletes watching all of this, the business logic is hard to ignore. Media presence drives sponsorship value. It builds an identity that outlasts any contract. In a profession where a single injury can end everything, that kind of security is surely worth chasing.
Why Personality Is Beating Production Value
The audience perspective of this is also worth paying attention to. Sport fans haven’t just accepted athlete led media. In a lot of cases, they actually prefer it.
Paul George’s podcast doesn’t try to be a debate show. JJ Redick built The Old Man and the Three around long conversations that assumed the listener actually cared about basketball, not just highlights. That show, more than anything else, explains why the Lakers looked at him differently when a coaching job opened up. He’d spent years demonstrating how he thought about the game.
There’s a version of sports media that’s still chasing outrage because outrage drives clicks. That model hasn’t disappeared, but it’s competing now with something that feels more like a real conversation. A growing share of the audience seems to prefer the latter.
Where It Goes From Here
The athletes coming up now have never known a sports landscape without this. For them, social media, content creation, and personal branding are not second careers to think about someday. They are already baked into how these athletes move through the world and how they build a following long before they reach the professional level.
The broader implications of this go well beyond podcasts. When athletes own their platforms, they also own their revenue streams. Sponsorship conversations shift. Brands no longer need to go through a network or a league to reach an audience; they can go directly to the athlete, whose audience is often more loyal and more targeted than traditional networks. That changes the financial scope of being a professional athlete in ways that are still playing out.
It also changes culture. Athletes have always shaped what people wear, listen to, and care about. That influence used to be filtered through endorsements and highlight reels. Now, it comes through in real conversation and the actual texture of who these people are. That kind of access builds something different than a commercial does. It builds genuine connection, and genuine connection turns casual fans into communities.
Athelo’s own Mark Henry is a good example of what this looks like. The Busted Open podcast, which Henry co-hosts, has become one of the most respected in professional wrestling media. He spent decades inside the industry as a competitor, and that background gives the show insider perspective delivered without a filter. Fans are not getting a produced segment. They are getting a real conversation with someone who actually lived it.
For Athelo Group, Henry represents exactly the kind of athlete-owned media that is reshaping how sports figures connect with their audiences long after their playing days are behind them.
The microphone used to sit in front of the athlete. Now they are the ones holding it, and they are not planning to hand it back.
FAQ:
- What is athlete owned media? It’s exactly what it sounds like. It consists of athletes running their own podcasts, social media, and/or production companies instead of waiting for a network to give them a segment. They own it, they run it, and they decide what gets said.
- Why are so many athletes doing this now? Telling your own story is important. Once athletes realized they could just talk directly to fans without a middleman, a lot of them didn’t look back. The financial gain is also a focus for many players.
- Are people actually watching and listening? More than most people realize. Athlete owned podcasts have combined for billions of views and likes across social media platforms. Some of these shows are pulling numbers that even rival traditional sports media.
- Are athletes really doing this while still in their prime? Draymond Green was still suiting up for the Warriors when he launched his show and Travis Kelce was still competing for Super Bowl runs. That’s actually what made it interesting. You’re getting takes from someone who has a first person perspective of the game.
- Does any of this actually pay off financially? Media presence drives sponsorship deals, attracts brands, and builds income that doesn’t disappear the moment a career ends. For athletes in sports where one bad injury changes everything, that kind of option matters a lot.
- Can a podcast really change how people see an athlete? Ask JJ Redick. He spent years having genuine basketball conversations on his show, and by the time the Lakers needed a coach, he had already proven how he thought about the game.
- Why do fans seem to prefer this over traditional coverage? Because it feels real. There’s no producer cutting to commercials at the good part. No anchor steering the conversation somewhere safe. It’s just people talking, and fans have noticed the difference.
- Is this just a trend or is it here to stay? It looks permanent. The podcast industry has boomed within the entertainment realm and sports topics are among the top genres.