Pro athletes will one day be thought of as entertainers, not sportstars – if they aren’t already.  

Sport has assimilated the values of the entertainment industry. Sport has assimilated the values of the entertainment industry.
Image: Getty Images

In figuring out how global capital flows from Russell Crowe to Sam Burgess – multinational media conglomerate that’s not News Ltd pays Kiwi-cum-Aussie star to play English folk hero to pay English star to play as Rabbitoh folk hero – it’s striking how different their working conditions are. But even more striking is how their professional circumstances are growing ever more similar.

We’ve heard it for the last three decades now, how sport has assimilated the values of the entertainment industry. Pro sport has grown fairly indistinguishable in its conduct from the movies or music, except in one critical regard. Where the talent is free in most of entertainment to be the boss of themselves, athletes are still locked into a rather strict hierarchy.Consider: Crowe can go from Robin Hood to playing any other ancient warrior he hasn’t turned his hand to yet, or generally do nothing for a while. His fan base will even tolerate him occasionally taking on a role that keeps his Serious Actor cred intact. He’s not told what to do (discounting his predilection for making whatever movie Ridley Scott or Ron Howard are working on).Burgess, meanwhile, once he decided to play for Souths, has no such freedom.

But sport has taken an important thoroughfare on its way to a Rollerball-looking future. Today’s superstar athletes don’t think of themselves as employees. They don’t punch the clock and go to work – instead, they’re negotiating where their names appear above the bill. The most stark example of this was the resolution of the long-running LeBron James saga. James announced on a one-hour television special that he was leaving his long-suffering hometown team of Cleveland for glitzy Miami, linking up with fellow Olympic gold-medallists Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

James’ blaze of self-promotion couldn’t have been crafted better – to turn the public against him. Critics invoked old pieties about loyalty to the club and the leadership responsibilities of the star player. Much of the indignation came

from the feeling that James had violated the code of the sports alpha dog – instead of taking it upon himself to bring his team to the title, he abandoned it for the easier path.James is nothing if not an entertainer, and must’ve strategised with other superstar players in choosing where he was going to play. Observers of the film or music industries would’ve seen a familiar pattern at work here. Actors band together in all-star casts, rock musicians form supergroups. It seems a natural progression that athletes do the same.

All of this is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a beneath-the-surface development in the last few years that’s now beginning to show up on the sporting landscape. Four years ago the top Hollywood talent agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), weighed into sports, challenging the traditional territory of category giant International Management Group – now known as IMG. Creative Artists’ appeal was obvious. It pitched its ability to forge links between the two worlds of celebrity. As movie studios and recording labels tightened up the money they used to lavish on big names, CAA found that sports stars still contained potential for growth. To its stable of Hanks, Cruise, Roberts, Winfrey, Springsteen and Timberlake, it added names such as Beckham, Ronaldo, the IOC, and not incidentally, James and Wade.

The culture of showbiz talent management is becoming firmly rooted in sport, and it’s not just all those athlete cameos on Entourage. Israel Folau’s jump to AFL, for example, resembles nothing so much as an actor trying to record a pop album, or a rapper making an action movie. Expect more top athletes to conduct their careers much the same way that stars do. When a future Burgess meets with a future Crowe, he’ll probably be asking for a percentage of the profits, and his own trailer separate to the dressing room.

– Jeff Centenera