Meta and SportsPro hand out first athlete social media honours

SportsPro says the awards, announced in London on 3 November, cover ten categories. These include Content of the Year, Best Use of Threads and Breakthrough Voice. A panel from SportsPro's editorial staff and Meta's sports partnerships team judged entries on creativity and craft. Audience size and engagement metrics did not count.

Haaland, 26, took the Global Athlete Award. He went viral at this summer's Fifa World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico. SportsPro says the Norwegian striker has gained more than 36 million Instagram followers since the tournament. Most came from self-shot video that showed a playful side and pulled him into online conversations.

Maher won Best Use of Instagram. SportsPro describes her as the most-followed rugby player on social media. Hamilton won Content of the Year for films shot by his long-term photographer Sulay Kelly. The films covered the unveiling of his Ferrari F40.

Twenty honourees, eleven sports, nine countries

The list covers 11 men and nine women across 11 sports and nine countries on five continents. Six competed at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, and four of those won gold. They include US figure skater Alysa Liu, named Breakthrough Voice.

Cris Bowyer works on athlete partnerships at Meta. In the announcement he said: "Athletes are taking control of their narrative more than ever. They are telling their own stories, in their own words, to their own audiences." James Dickens, SportsPro's director of content, said the aim was "to recognise the craft behind athlete storytelling rather than simply the size of an audience."

Both quotes come from the companies, so read them as marketing as much as description. The harder claim is the structural one. Athletes now produce content that platforms and publishers want to be seen to reward. Meta gets a slate of names whose work happens to sit on its apps. SportsPro gets a franchise event.

The money side of sport is moving too

That framing fits a wider shift in sports media economics. SportsPro covered the Sportel conference in Monaco on 26 October. Speakers there said streaming has made broadcasters more data-driven. That pushes them toward big properties such as the NFL, NBA and Premier League and squeezes everyone else.

Hillary Mandel is executive vice president and head of Americas rights at IMG. She told the event: "You cannot depend entirely on your [media] deal to drive your property. The dollars are incredibly important, but the ecosystem that sits around that... you've got to own it yourself." Jeff Roth, founding partner at Bruin Capital, agreed there is a "middle squeeze". Properties can no longer count on rights fees doubling every seven years.

Creators, meanwhile, were described at Sportel as partners rather than rivals. Scott Melvin, chief executive of The Overlap, said: "Live is the most important thing. Live drives everything." But he added that rights are "becoming prohibitively expensive" and that the alternative is to "own the conversation." Pedro Pina, vice president for YouTube in EMEA, said 80 per cent of World Cup content viewership on YouTube happened between matches.

That between-matches audience is exactly what an athlete with 36 million new followers can reach without buying a rights package. The Meta awards are a small event next to a Premier League tender. But they point at where attention sits when the match is over.

Stadiums, unions and the rest of the week

Elsewhere, Inter and AC Milan unveiled a naming rights deal with Generali for their planned 71,500-seat stadium. Outlets including The Athletic reported the deal at €650 million (US$725 million) over 20 years, and The Athletic first reported the fee. SportsPro notes that would beat the US$700 million Crypto.com Arena deal of 2021. The clubs put the build cost at €1.2 billion. Work is due to start in 2028 and the venue is expected to open in the 2031/32 season. SportsPro flags the figure as reported rather than confirmed by the parties.

On the labour side, The Guardian reported on 2 November that Prospect signed an access agreement with Google UK. It covers about 7,000 workers, including YouTube but excluding DeepMind, after new UK employment rights came into force. Prospect already has a similar deal with Meta, which employs about 5,000 people in the UK. From January, employers must tell workers they have a right to join a union.

Two other items sit further from the story. CleanTechnica argued on 2 November that Elon Musk's spending in US races amounts to a referendum on transgender rights. IEEE Spectrum profiled Beta Technologies and its electric aircraft on 28 October.