The Value of the Elite Athlete as Influencer in the Era of Social Media

The paper is centred on an “emerging intangible”: the value of elite athletes as influencer for companies which “invest” on him/her to increase their image in what we could call “sponsorship 2.0”. Specifically, we look at how we can evaluate, in the era of social media, the intangible of what has been defined athlete brand, that is an athlete who becomes a “company” engaged in promoting, as influencer, several products. Differently from the study that proposed the Scale of Athlete Brand Image (SABI), and in some sense enlarging and thus confirming its validity, we interviewed 60 college students upon some aspects of the SABI but not “going back”, having a list of the most famous athletes, rather than “going forward”, that is showing images of successful athletes trying to evaluate which were the main tools that were developing their visibility. Although we are in a preliminary stage of a larger study, findings show that the greatest value is given by the number of followers produced by the storytelling rather than important results in athlete’s sport discipline.