The old athlete-brand relationship playbook is changing quickly as athletes become creators.

Instead of waiting for networks or press offices to shape their narrative, athletes are building the studio themselves, streaming from on their smartphones, with no scripts in sight on platforms like Amazon’s live-streaming service Twitch.

When WNBA stars Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman turned the 2026 All-Star Weekend into a 72-hour Twitch livestream with a peak audience of 36,000 concurrent viewers, or when former Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown processed a trade to the 76ers with nearly 30,000 viewers, they were doing more than traditional press hits. They were talking directly to their fandom and sponsors followed.

Each athlete on Twitch, or running their own podcasts, now functions less like a spokesperson and more like a media property, with its own built-in audience, its own brand voice, and its own distribution channel that marketers and advertisers can't fully script or own.

“The format matters less than the behavior it creates. The audience stops simply following the athlete, and starts participating in their world,” said Amar Braithwaite, Global SVP of Creative Strategy for creator marketing agency Influencer. 

From borrowing an audience to joining a community

The old influencer model treated an athlete's following as inventory: A brand paid for access, wrote the pitches, rented the reach for a campaign cycle. That model still exists, but it could appear faded compared to newer deals built around genuine cultural relevance, where the athlete's community sets the value.

Athletes are leading that migration.

• Jason and Travis Kelce signed a $100 million podcasting deal with Wondery.
• WNBA star Angel Reese launched her own interview podcast after her breakout WNBA season.
• And sports podcast network Blue Wire has been actively recruiting pro athletes like D'Angelo Russell and Cam Newton to host shows rather than relying on influencer hosts.

"Brands are approaching it with a few different models," said Ashley Rector, founder of Quimby Digital.

In the traditional legacy-influencer model, brands essentially script content alongside the creator and borrow the audience, but she says "authenticity and brand control are always at odds in the influencer relationship." The alternative, she says, is a model where "the brand approves the creator and lets them do what they do best."

That model allows social platforms like Twitch to thrive. A live chat scrolling in real time, an athlete reacting on camera to news, or a stream that runs three days instead of three minutes is part behind-the-scenes content and part reality TV, and none of it can be possibly storyboarded in advance.

Nicole van Zanten, co-president and chief growth officer at ICUC Social (a Dentsu agency), argues that what looks like entertainment is actually a discipline brands have underrated: "Athletes on Twitch aren't doing PR. They're doing community management.”

She said fans are there to watch someone "react in real time, mess up, laugh it off."

The takeaway for marketers, van Zanten says, is uncomfortable but simple.

"Brands can't buy their way into authenticity after the fact," she said. They have to show up on the platform's own terms, in the moment, "listen first, engage live, and not worry about overproducing the content."

Why fan engagement is beating reach

Drawing on data from 14.9 million social posts, Ishveen Jolly, founder and CEO of OpenSponsorship, a sports marketing platform connecting brands with over 25,000 professional athletes and wellness influencers, said athletes on her platform average 10.97% engagement, more than twice the 4.92% engagement typical of influencers broadly.

On Twitch specifically, she says, "brands are finally realizing that when you live stream you are giving athletes the opportunity to be authentic in a way that a produced post will never be able to replicate."

“The strongest (athlete-brand) partnerships behave more like an ongoing story. They build anticipation before the moment, give fans something to participate in while it is happening, and keep the conversation alive afterward,” Braithwaite noted.

Marketers used to chase reach or how many people saw an ad. Now they're chasing something harder: real attention, freely given, in a place the audience already trusts and is willfully engaged.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.