The best athletes for brands to partner with based on their reputations: report

Some fans will go to bat over their favorite players no matter how many darkness retreats they go on. But for marketers looking to sign athletes, hype—or even high social engagement—doesn’t necessarily translate to the perfect brand partner.

To address client questions over brand safety tied to athlete partnerships, Kantar recently created the Sports Monitor Athlete Reputation Tracker, aka SMART, according to EVP Ryan McConnell. Kantar expects to run the survey twice a year.

“Awareness and likeability are really the key factors,” he told Marketing Brew. “The things that sponsors are often looking for these days is to break through the clutter and do it with somebody who’s likable who you can associate your brand with. Athletes have obviously been a good outlet for that for many, many years.”

Hot or not

To rank players based on reputation, Kantar used data from a July survey of more than 1,200 self-identified sports fans who were asked to share how much they liked and how familiar they were with a list of about 100 athletes. Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes came out on top.

Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Steph Curry, and Simone Biles rounded out the top five. Joe Burrow, No. 1 on the NFL Players Association’s recent list of most influential players in the league, landed at No. 14 on Kantar’s rankings.

Jake Paul, the YouTuber turned pro boxer who’s relatively famous among Gen Zers, ended up at the bottom of the list because he “embraces controversy,” leading to a high percentage of those who said they disliked him, McConnell explained.

Newbies versus retirees

Retired athletes tended to score highly, according to McConnell. In addition to Williams and Phelps, Tom Brady and Roger Federer also made the top 15.

On the other hand, none of the nine college athletes Kantar asked about made the top 50. USC QB Caleb Williams ranked the highest among the NCAA cohort at 59th overall. LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne followed at 60th, with USC basketball player Bronny James and Women’s March Madness phenoms Caitlyn Clark and Angel Reese close behind.

“If you’re only in the spotlight for a year, you just don’t have that much opportunity to develop that kind of awareness,” McConnell said. “They’re kind of behind the eight ball a little bit there.”

The gaps

Though 2023 has been a big year for women’s sports, only three women athletes (Biles and both Williams sisters) made the top 15. There were 24 women included in the survey, according to McConnell.

“Men have had a 50-year head start on women,” he said. “A lot of tastes are sort of solidified…You can still see where women have not gotten the same sort of support by sponsors, by broadcasters. They’re just not as known. They’re not as loved.”

Soccer players also have an “awareness problem,” McConnell said. Leo Messi, one of the most famous of them, ranked at No. 25, which is “pretty low down given all the attention he gets.” Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were the only two soccer players to make the top 50.