Marketability means many different things to many different people. It is, you could say, in the eye of the beholder.
Since 2010, when SportsPro first compiled its annual list of the world’s 50 Most Marketable Athletes, untold hours have been spent attempting to determine precisely what defines marketability and, specifically, what makes one athlete more marketable than another. It is, of course, an inexact science, one dependent upon an extensive and ever-evolving array of variables that shift alongside the rapid commercialization of modern sport.
No single ranking can possibly please every sports fan—as evidenced by the passionate social commentary that invariably follows each release—nor can it completely meet the diverse needs of every organization or corporate sponsor. The global head of sponsorship at an established multinational corporation will naturally hold a radically different view of an athlete’s commercial power than, say, the chief executive of a fledgling challenger brand prioritizing hyper-targeted growth within a specific geographic market or among a very particular demographic.
Some brand marketers are looking for broad geographic reach and mainstream, household-name visibility. Others actively seek out authentic ambassadors with localized or regional relevance who command smaller but vastly more engaged communities of followers. While certain brands prioritize real-time activity and direct engagement on specific digital platforms over raw athletic performances on the field of play, others simply want to sign the most famous athlete their marketing budget can possibly buy.
Put simply, an individual athlete’s marketability can be defined as the extent to which they influence consumer purchasing behavior and brand affinity. Yet that definition alone says little about what actually drives that marketability in practice. In reality, an athlete’s ability to convert casual fans into active, paying consumers depends on a multitude of interacting factors. These range from deeply personal attributes like innate personality, raw talent, public presentation, and personal reputation, to broader external forces such as the economic size of their home market or the global reach and cultural relevance of the sport in which they compete.
Because of this complex interplay, the variables that render an athlete marketable have transformed dramatically over the years, and the underlying analytical model powering SportsPro’s definitive list has evolved right alongside them. Marketability used to be predominantly a question of raw fame and traditional media exposure. Today, however, it is fundamentally about the depth and quality of the relationship between an athlete and their audience—how strong that connection is, which direction it is trending, and how much growth potential is still left to be unlocked.
Indeed, when evaluating the complex landscape of athlete marketability, timing is everything and context matters deeply.
Marketers must ask critical questions: How many commercial partners does an athlete already have locked into their portfolio, and in what product categories? How willing and realistically able are they to accept new sponsors given their demanding competitive schedules and prior commercial commitments? Where is their audience geographically distributed, and what does that demographic makeup actually look like? What major international tournaments or championships are they competing in this year? How much career runway do they realistically have ahead of them before retirement or athletic decline? How visible and culturally influential are the teams, leagues, or organizations they represent? What is the current public sentiment regarding their personal conduct and public image? And to what extent can they speak authentically and credibly about complex topics and societal issues that drive broader cultural conversations?
Many of these probing questions are far from easy to answer with absolute precision, yet they remain vital considerations for any brand marketer holding a substantial budget to invest in athlete sponsorships. Equally challenging is the immense task of compiling a comprehensive ranking that compares every conceivable type of athlete, across entirely disparate sports and widely varying geographies, in a truly definitive and standardized way.
Though SportsPro lays claim to the most comprehensive assessment of athlete marketability undertaken anywhere in the global sports industry, the annual list of the world’s 50 Most Marketable Athletes is precisely that—it is SportsPro’s definitive list. It is built using NorthStar’s sophisticated, data-driven marketability assessment model, but it ultimately represents just one possible ranking derived from a specific understanding and definition of athlete marketability, one that has been carefully developed and refined over the course of 16 years.
Equity Meets Momentum
The editorial view underpinning the project is that the most marketable athletes in any given year are not simply those who are winning championship titles or breaking through competitively on the field. Rather, they are the individuals who are rapidly emerging as highly desirable corporate spokespeople within an increasingly cluttered and competitive sports marketing landscape because they possess a genuinely unique story to tell and are actively cultivating deeply engaged digital followings, particularly through their strategic and effective use of modern social media channels.
More specifically, those individuals who are experiencing the most accelerated growth in overall reach, audience engagement, and cultural relevance are also consistently the most commercially appealing prospects for brand partners. Whether they are established veterans or newly minted breakout stars, their steep upward trajectory signals untapped marketing potential, pointing toward future commercial opportunities that likely exceed their current scale.
This year, working in close collaboration with the data experts at NorthStar, the assessment model has been thoroughly restructured around three clearly defined pillars: brand equity, momentum, and commercial trajectory. In previous iterations of the index, the model’s primary drivers were composites weighted heavily toward established equity, with momentum recognized only through a set of isolated scoring boosts and no dedicated, independent measure of an athlete’s future trajectory.
Now, however, each of these three critical elements possesses its own distinct pillar and its own tailored set of underlying drivers. Brand equity rightfully remains the single largest pillar, accounting for 45 percent of the total NorthStar Marketability Score. However, the two forward-looking pillars together carry the remaining 55 of the 100 available points. This structural change ensures that while built-up brand equity successfully gets an athlete into serious contention for the list, it is their momentum and commercial trajectory that ultimately differentiate the top contenders.
As a result, the annual ranking is specifically intended to highlight the current and future commercial trajectory of athletes competing on the global stage, rather than merely reflecting cumulative individual marketability over the entire fullness of a career. True marketability, at least within this analytical framework, comes down to balancing these crucial past, present, and future considerations.
An athlete’s accumulated brand equity is defined as the enduring trust, broad reach, and established commercial standing that define precisely where they stand today. Momentum signals the direction and rapid pace of change within that equity—gauging whether public attention and audience engagement are actively building, and whether commercial brands are naturally moving toward the athlete. Meanwhile, commercial trajectory is a forward-looking measure designed to assess the headroom left to grow across future years, new geographic markets, and untapped product categories.
Assessing athletes in this rigorous manner brings the evaluation back to the foundational roots of the 50 Most Marketable Athletes ranking, colloquially known as 50MM.
In its earliest years, the 50MM project was entirely focused on identifying rising, up-and-coming talent poised to break through into mainstream consciousness in a major way. Initially, athletes were ranked according to relatively rudimentary and somewhat debatable criteria, such as direct value for marketing money, personal willingness to be commercialized, chronological age, and projected marketing potential over a three-year horizon. The clear intention was to show global brands precisely where they could generate the most bang for their sports marketing buck.
That foundational logic still applies powerfully within this modern, highly data-driven era, but it now operates in multiple directions. Most corporate sponsors sign professional athletes for the multi-year length of a formal contract, not just for a single fleeting moment in time. Two different athletes can easily possess the exact same commercial profile today—and score remarkably similarly within the baseline 50MM model—while actually heading in completely opposite commercial directions.
If an athlete’s commercial trajectory is defined as their structural capacity for future growth rather than merely their current stature, then remaining career runway—or the distinct lack thereof—must be factored directly into the calculation. A long runway amplifies other growth factors, but that runway inevitably narrows as an athlete ages. Similarly, monetization headroom, which measures the extent to which an athlete’s inherent brand strength actually exceeds what is already being actively monetized, serves as a dynamic metric of marketability that shifts continuously as a professional career progresses.
Consider the case of Harry Kane. Few observers could reasonably deny that England’s record goalscorer and prominent star is exceptionally marketable. In fact, according to precise data tracked and analyzed by NorthStar, his current commercial returns—led primarily by estimated media value—are exceptionally strong relative to his overall brand profile. Yet, at age 33, he possesses significantly less career runway ahead of him than many of the younger athletes positioned nearby on the leaderboard. In operational terms, the 50MM model reads his commercial value as already well-realized, with limited untapped headroom remaining, resulting in a lower commercial trajectory score.
Crucially, a comparatively low commercial trajectory score does not indicate weak marketability; rather, it indicates that an athlete’s marketability has reached maturity and is already strongly and successfully commercialized. Kane secured his position in this year’s list largely on the strength of his towering brand equity and momentum scores, the two foundational pillars that carry the vast majority of the available points.
One Model, Many Configurations
One of the most fascinating intellectual aspects of compiling this year’s definitive list was observing how minor adaptations in the assessment model could produce radically different final outcomes.
Every configuration of the model answers a fundamentally different strategic question. If you tip the analytical scales heavily toward brand equity, established household names will naturally rise directly to the top of the rankings. Conversely, if you shift the structural balance toward momentum, an entirely different cohort of rising stars suddenly comes to the fore, with only a few notable exceptions. SportsPro’s published list ultimately reflects an editorial view of marketability, expressed explicitly through the specific weights chosen by the publication. However, NorthStar’s underlying model can be configured just as purposefully for entirely different organizational goals, utilizing different weightings, alternative inclusion criteria, or a completely different selection of drivers tailored to suit a specific corporate brief.
Interestingly, across the 247 professional athletes fully assessed by NorthStar’s comprehensive model this year, the statistical correlation between brand equity and momentum sits close to zero. Furthermore, no single athlete appearing in the top ten on one measure ranks within the top ten on the other. This sharp statistical reality highlights several unavoidable tensions inherent within the list, such as the persistent challenge of how to appropriately weigh an athlete’s marketability today against their future potential, or their established profile against emerging opportunities.
"What we’re seeing is that, from the overall marketability standpoint, you have athletes that have built brand equity through long and successful careers," explains Chris Collins, the founder, chief executive, and president of NorthStar Solutions Group. "But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have current day momentum. Likewise, you may find athletes that have a lot of current day momentum, but they may be earlier in their career and maybe haven’t converted that momentum into stable brand equity."
"We’re not seeing a ton of overlap there—although when we look at number one Aryna Sabalenka, one of the really cool things is she tends to do well across all three pillars of equity, momentum, and commercial trajectory. She earned more than 70 per cent of the available points on every pillar, and she’s the only athlete of the 247 who did."
Other significant operational challenges remain inherent within the complex process of compiling the 50MM rankings. Every single year, the baseline availability and underlying quality of data serve as critical considerations. Frequently, publicly available data sources are incomplete or fragmented, making it difficult to assess all athletes on a completely level playing field. Consequently, any data utilized to inform the analysis must be rigorously validated and verified for accuracy before being processed.
NorthStar utilizes robust data streams from various leading industry providers, but how that raw data feeds into the distinct drivers within the 50MM model remains crucial. This year, utilizing an expanded slate of 27 individual drivers per athlete, NorthStar has brought substantially greater depth and granularity to the analytical process while ensuring that the exact same underlying data is not accidentally fed into a set of drivers that effectively measure the very same thing.
"We’ve obviously refined the model, gotten better, gotten more efficient," adds Collins. "There’s more data that’s out there. The tools that are available to measure it and process it have gotten better and we’re continually integrating them into our overall platform and what we do. So, we continue to evolve with it."
That ongoing evolution opens up exciting new commercial possibilities for SportsPro’s list in future years. It also speaks directly to the underlying power of NorthStar’s analytical model, which remains comprehensive in its broad scope yet sufficiently malleable to evaluate complex commercial opportunities against almost any organization’s specific strategic priorities and business objectives.
Once those core priorities and operational objectives have been clearly established, the model can be dynamically configured to reflect them, allowing marketability drivers to be weighted differently to produce the desired commercial outcome. Indeed, SportsPro’s published list is merely one specific configuration of NorthStar’s overarching platform: the exact same robust data engine can be set up to answer a private corporate sponsor’s specific brief, audit an established brand’s existing roster of ambassadors, or comprehensively assess an entire team, league, or sports governing body’s stable of athletes.
"There’s an engine underneath all of this," Collins explains. "The cool part about what we built is anybody can come to us, right? It could be a different list. Somebody may want to know the most marketable women athletes in a specific country or a specific sport. And we would collect the requirements and then configure and tune the model to drive that."
"We can work with athletes directly or with agencies to help them understand, with these drivers of marketability, where they are today, where they are excelling, or where there are gaps where they may want to put some strategy behind."
"We can look at the interplay between sponsors and which athletes to sponsor. From a sponsorship investment standpoint, what are their goals? What should their sponsorship portfolio look like? Who’s currently in it? Where are the gaps? Who then can they approach to fill those gaps? And what part of that portfolio is an athlete playing? Is it a growth play? Is it a value play? Are we looking at creating a balanced and diversified portfolio?"
"There are lots of different use cases that span lots of different stakeholders and we can configure this a lot of different ways."
