Media training kills commercial value

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I spoke to Matt Dunn (seasoned pro in MotoGP) about this after reading Andrea Dovizio’s interview on motorsport.com. The observation stuck with me because it’s not just MotoGP. It’s every athlete navigating the tension between being commercially valuable and being real.

Dovizioso said: “Even if you’re just standing at the side of the track watching a race, there could be a camera pointed at you when you react.”

He’s referencing the amateur footage of Valentino Rossi caught during Marc Marquez’s crashes at Jerez and Misano in 2025. Fan cameras captured Rossi’s reaction. The clips circulated everywhere. Now every rider knows: you’re never off-camera.

So you get more footage of everything. But almost none of it is actually true.

Look at the early career of Lewis Hamilton. He was polarising, controversial, and he made statements that got him in trouble. If you go check his early Instagram posts and social presence, they’re candid and unfiltered-the kind of content that made people feel like they actually knew him.

Same thing with Ronaldo in Instagram’s early days before the PR teams came in and locked everything down.

That authenticity is what builds massive followings. The race wins, and goals helped - but those are table stakes. People showed up because they felt like they knew these athletes. A POV.

Take this video from Adam Mosseri (IG ceo) with a grain of salt, but he referenced this problem with footballers.

Hamilton’s got 38 million followers, and they didn’t show up JUST because he wins races. They showed up because at some point, they connected with who he actually was. That connection is what makes merchandise sell, makes people watch the content, and makes sponsors want to be associated with him.

You see the same thing with Haaland’s YouTube channel. The mediation, the salmon obsession, the deadpan humour - it’s weird, and fans love it because it feels real. His team understand that the quirks ARE the value.

Brands see the following: engagement and connection, and they write the checks. The athlete becomes a commercial asset.

And look, the toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube on that one. That’s just the reality now.

Now there’s something to lose. Everything is caught on camera and people keep a close on these parasocial relationships, a controversial statement or perceived wrong posts trigger a social media pile on. All of the wrong reasons.

Cancel culture took away the liberty of football players posting behind-the-scenes content. Now they have a PR person managing their accounts because they’re all too scared to offend someone.

One wrong move and they think they’re going to lose all their deal and sponsorships.

It’s corporate accountability applied to athletes.

It’s the same issue I see when I advise people trying to build their careers or make new connections.

I tell them to start writing on LinkedIn to start building connections. But, the fear of their employer judging what they’re writing or being upset stops them from saying even the mildest take.

So we end up getting “just joined the company” posts, year-end reflection posts, “congratulations on the move” posts, and “I’m looking for work” posts or “AI-slop.”

The PR team filters everything through a strict approval process. I see this first-hand through the interviews we did through the Track Limits podcast.

Those Hot Ones clips of Lewis Hamilton, or any athlete for that matter, still circulate in fan edits years later. You get rare glimpses of the PR media training, turn off, and their unscripted personality. That’s what people actually want.

Most feeds are very calculated, managed, and curated. A whole team of people and PR people are managing that.

The irony is that the safety that was supposed to protect commercial value is what actually erodes it. When an athlete becomes so media-trained that they could be anyone, they become commercially invisible.

Brands love the safety of it because it creates no problems. But sport is one of the last pieces of culture that’s still unscripted. The tension, the rivalries, the moments where things boil over, you can’t add a safety net to that and expect it to stay compelling.

What they’re actually getting is an interchangeable athlete who generates no heart, no storylines, no real reason for fans to care beyond performance.

Drive to Survive performed so well because we saw the drivers' personalities and the drama. Okay, it was almost "unscripted." Netflix and the studio definitely took liberties with what they created. But through that series, we got a glimpse of the personalities actually driving the cars.

We saw Günther Steiner losing his mind, and we saw Daniel Ricciardo being genuinely funny. We saw team principals actually stressed and under pressure.

The DTS model: controlled environments for authenticity

DTS was still a controlled environment. Netflix and their studio had the edit. The drivers knew they were being filmed. It wasn’t truly unscripted in the sense that they were just being themselves with no awareness. They just weren’t filtering every single word through a PR before it came out of their mouths.

*I don’t want this to feel like I am against PR teams, their roles in the whole process is just as important.

That’s the model that works: controlled formats that create “safe spaces” for authenticity.

The Haaland model: owned platforms with smart gatekeepers

Haaland’s YouTube channel does this. It still feels authentic because he’s genuinely unique and he leans into it. His gatekeepers understand that some edge is actually necessary for commercial value.

Compare that to a rider whose PR team has turned them into nothing but generic sponsor thank-yous and training montages. That's "safe" in the sense that you'll never have a PR crisis. But it's also commercially invisible.

Right now, athletes are stuck in this trap where they feel like they need to be on social media because it’s a career necessity. But they also fear that one wrong post is going to tank all of their deals.

Right-holders benefit from athlete personalities driving engagement, but they don’t actually protect those athletes from the downside.

So everyone self-censors, fans lose interest, and commercial value decreases for everyone involved.

This should be a joint venture.

Because ultimately it’s the right holder- the property - that benefits from this. The athletes need to create this infrastructure with their own teams as well.

Look, no one is actually getting fired for posting something authentic on Instagram. That’s not the real risk here.

But there is a fear that the audience perceives things differently. There IS a fear that sponsors start seeing you as too risk,y and they cancel the deal. Those fears are completely rational when you watch viral pile-ons destroy people in real-time.

What right-holders should create:

What athletes need:

The key is that gatekeepers can’t be corporate risk-minimisers. They need to understand that preserving some edge IS preserving commercial value.