Technology disruption, athlete empowerment, and new competition formats have fundamentally reshaped the sports industry since Ed Warner began covering it weekly in 2021. Warner's column — based on his weekly newsletter, Sport Inc. — has now reached its fifth anniversary, with the companion book predating it by three years.

In that relatively brief period, sporting empires have risen and fallen, power dynamics have shifted rapidly, and the industry's conventional financial foundations have been upended.

If Elon Musk's timeline proves accurate, humans could reach Mars within five years. In place of Alan Shepard's lunar golf shot in 1971, could we witness a Martian strike from Cristiano Ronaldo before Sport Inc. reaches its tenth year? Or perhaps Roger Federer facing Rafael Nadal in a game of padel?

Accelerating Change Across the Sporting Landscape

The pace of transformation in sport has outpaced all of Warner's original expectations when he first began writing Sport Inc. LIV Golf, launched in 2022 with backing from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, triggered a civil war in professional golf before a framework merger agreement with the PGA Tour was announced in 2023 — and then very nearly vanished from the conversation. Bazball — England's aggressive Test cricket philosophy adopted under coach Brendon McCullum in 2022 — lasted merely four years before McCullum's departure to coach the white-ball side. Russia was initially excluded from global competition following its invasion of Ukraine and is now being gradually reintegrated. The Commonwealth Games has gone from success story to near-collapse — with the 2026 edition struggling to find a host after Victoria, Australia withdrew — and is currently undergoing revival efforts.

Linear broadcasters have been largely displaced by streaming platforms. Athletes are wresting control from sports administrators. Football and cricket are approaching their global saturation thresholds. Major American sports leagues, while trailing in international penetration, are rapidly expanding their global reach. Women's sport continues to grow but remains dependent on financial pump-priming.

Technology as the Universal Enabler

Technology underpins nearly every major trend across the sporting world. Just a few years ago, sports industry conferences were fixated on the rise of streaming services. Today, YouTube has effectively conquered the field, making even the most niche events accessible on any screen.

Sporting content has proliferated to the point where consumer choice appears virtually limitless. However, this abundance has made audience cut-through increasingly difficult to achieve. While consumers may believe they can never have too many options, fragmentation poses a genuine threat to sports, teams, and athletes who risk being reduced to mere splinters.

Simultaneously, social media has empowered athletes to circumvent their employers and connect directly with fans, shaping narratives to align with their public personas and agent-crafted marketing strategies. The rapid dissemination of personal stories challenges a sporting establishment that craves control but lacks agility and struggles to match the celebrity appeal attached to its own human products.

Docuseries and the Celebrity Premium

Leading streaming services have amplified athlete celebrity through a proliferation of docuseries, though here too a battle for narrative control has played out. The inaugural seasons of Sunderland 'Til I Die, Netflix's 2018 behind-the-scenes portrayal of Sunderland AFC's relegation, and Drive to Survive, the 2019 Netflix series widely credited with expanding Formula 1's audience in the United States, already feel like relics of a bygone era, their raw authenticity having given way to highly polished PR messaging across the genre. Nevertheless, the stars remain front and centre in each supposed exposé.

The outcome has been a surge in the commercial value of athletes who can generate genuine fan engagement. This, in turn, has fuelled collective bargaining efforts in sports that depend on a broad pool of participants, even when a handful of stars capture the lion's share of commercial revenue.

Currently, the world's top tennis players are leading calls for a larger portion of broadcast revenues to be allocated as prize money, aware that their own success depends partly on the competitive depth beneath them.

Boxing and the Celebrity Economy

Boxing, by contrast, exhibits no such collectivism. The sport most starkly illustrates the broader industry's trajectory. Exhibition bouts between social media influencers? A long-awaited showdown between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua? Both reflect a reality where celebrity, notoriety, and mass recognition outweigh athletic prowess in an economy driven by monetised clicks.

Sports and organisations that attempt to ignore the economic power shift resulting from disintermediated fan engagement are destined to struggle. What does this mean for the Olympics when promising young athletes — and their parents — assess the disparity in potential earnings across different sports and make their formative career decisions?

The $10 million prize pool at September's inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships should be understood in this context — a direct competitive response to the drawing power of other entertainment properties and a signal of how governing bodies are being forced to adapt. Yet the International Olympic Committee continues to resist the rising tide, maintaining its amateur-spirited stance on direct athlete compensation despite growing pressure.

The Influx of New Money

A screen-dominated world has drawn a flood of capital into the sports industry, much of it likely to be lost unless investors can find buyers further down the chain. Celebrities from both within and outside sport appear keen to attach their names to its glamour. Private equity firms — firms like CVC Capital Partners, which has deployed billions across Formula 1, rugby, volleyball, and most recently a stake in the commercial operations of the Six Nations — have competed to feed at the trough, building spreadsheets laden with optimistic projections, captivated by the industry's relatively few but highly visible financial successes. Crypto wealth has also seeped into the margins.

This influx of new capital has further inflated athlete valuations — both salaries and, where applicable, asset values. When the Sport Inc. newsletter launched, the record transfer fee paid by an English football club was the £89 million Manchester United spent on Paul Pogba in 2016. Adjusted for inflation, that equates to approximately £125 million today, surpassing the £117 million Chelsea recently paid for Morgan Rogers — a nominal English record.

As any fan knows, however, average prices for average players have climbed relentlessly, and not solely at the highest level. Wages have followed suit as contractual leverage has shifted from clubs to players. The wave of new money flowing into football extends well beyond stadium redevelopment.

Signs of a Peak?

On less optimistic days, Warner looks for indications that sporting cycles may have peaked. A headline in The Times over the weekend, for instance, reported: "Hundred attendances 18 per cent down – despite bigger stars and fresh branding." The Hundred, the ECB's franchise 100-ball cricket format launched in 2021 to attract younger audiences, has been a lightning rod for debate about whether cricket needs another competition at all.

New investment, youthful products, considerable hype — all dependent on the greater fool theory, or perhaps justified by the prospect of future broadcast deals? Meanwhile, numerous sports administrators and investors are developing new event formats — monetisable content — unwilling to consider the possibility that less could ultimately prove more profitable.

What appears certain is that continued proliferation and fragmentation will widen the gulf between sport's haves and have-nots, and that the expectation of low-cost remote access to sport will drive many participants out of business. Whether fans will feel emotionally richer five years from now remains very much an open question.

For now, Warner says he remains buckled in for the ride, eager to discover where this rocket lands.

Down the Dustpipe

Monday marks the 90th anniversary of Jesse Owens' 100m gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — the first of his four golds at those Games.

By coincidence, Warner is currently reading Cool Machine, the final instalment of Colson Whitehead's acclaimed Harlem Shuffle trilogy. A central plotline involves the 1981 theft of one of Owens' medals from the Waldorf Astoria, where it was on display ahead of an auction. While fictional, one of the four gold medals was indeed sold at auction in 2013 for $1.47 million.

At that time, the whereabouts of the other three medals were reported as unknown, though a second was auctioned in 2019 for $615,000. Owens was said to have lost or given away his medals — a poignant reminder of the legendary athlete's difficult post-Berlin life.

Warner leaves the near-final words to Whitehead:

"Life'll lift you up one day and knock you down the next. Jesse Owens beats the goddamn Nazis on their home turf, thumbing his nose at Hitler himself, and a couple of years later he's selling his medals to pay his bills. You can be the fastest man in the world but you can't outrun the white man."

Spare a moment for Jesse Owens on Monday, and do read the Harlem Shuffle trilogy.

Ed Warner is chair of Sussex Cricket and GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com.