Athletes on YouTube

it feels like every single athlete is now a youtuber

Cristiano Ronaldo → 83.3M subs Neymar Jr → 9.2M subs Aakash Chopra → 5.2M subs Shannon Sharpe → 4.3M subs Eddie Hall → 3.5M subs Jason & Travis Kelce → 3.2M subs Pat McAfee → 3.0M subs Bryson DeChambeau → 2.9M subs Stephen Curry → 2.2M subs Demetrious Johnson → 1.8M subs Gary Neville → 1.8M subs Rio Ferdinand → 1.7M subs Nico Rosberg → 1.5M subs Trevor Bauer → 1.2M subs LeBron James → 910K subs Paul George → 801K subs Taylor Lewan → 728K subs AB de Villiers → 710K subs Shaquille O’Neal → 665K subs Carmelo Anthony → 627K subs Cam Newton → 568K subs Julian Edelman → 564K subs Draymond Green → 269K subs Andy Murray → 51K subs

The leagues own the highlights. All an athlete really owns is the mindshare, the fact that people actually watched them and remember their face.

A channel is one of the first tangible things on the internet that’s actually theirs. Somewhere they own the content, own the distribution, can monetize it, build a real career, and promote all their other investments and products off of it.

You can already see who’s taking it seriously. The Kelce brothers, Draymond Green.

And what they build usually outlasts the playing days. Look at Shaq, Pat McAfee, Shannon Sharpe.

Ask a lot of the younger generation who they are and they’ll say the people they see on YouTube. They know them for the talking instead of the highlights because they’ve spent way more time listening to them than they ever spent watching them play.

So of course they all have a YouTube channel now.