The athlete-hosted podcast is all out of ideas

This article was published in conjunction with the 2025 Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List. To read more about the sports podcast and digital video space and the people guiding it right now, click here.

Every social media and online content vertical has the same cycle. Whether it’s MySpace, blogging, Vine, Twitter, TikTok, or podcasts, we’ve seen the same pattern play out over and over again.

The platform gets popular. Everyone jumps on board, convinced they’ll succeed. A handful of people find success, with 0.00001% finding mega-success. Everyone else kinda just subsists, if that. Eventually, the zone is flooded with so much mediocrity and boring content that it loses what made it enjoyable in the first place. A shiny new platform comes along, and the whole process begins anew.

The athlete-hosted podcast appears to be in the final part of that cycle.

That’s not to say there aren’t popular or well-done athlete podcasts. There’s no denying that there are and that they seem primed to continue succeeding in the years ahead. The Kelce brothers’ New Heights keep reaching higher and higher. The Pat McAfee Show stretches the boundaries of what still qualifies as a podcast, but it has roots in that space and therefore must be considered one of its success stories. A quick perusal of the Apple Podcasts charts for sports podcasts reveals that Jeff Teague’s Club 520, Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay, Will Compton and Taylor Lewan’s Bussin’ With The Boys, Ryan Clark’s The Pivot, Matt Leinart’s Throwbacks, and Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke are among the most listened to at the moment.

It’s also worth noting our own Sports Podcast Power List is dotted with athlete-driven shows. Credit is due to those who do it well and understand how to speak to an audience and captivate them.

For every successful podcast hosted by former athletes, there’s a truckload of others that flounder or fade into the background because the person at the center of it doesn’t have as much to say as they thought. Or worse, they’re just not as interesting as they thought they were when they were captivating audiences with their physical prowess.

Like so many companies, websites, and podcasts in the sports media space, it often feels like these things exist for the people at the center to feel important, not for an actual audience. Even now, many of the new athlete-hosted podcasts that launch make you wonder, “Who wants this?”

As Front Office Sports recently noted, just in the last few months, we’ve gotten new podcasts from Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, Billie Jean King, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, former Patriots Brian Hoyer and David Andrews, tennis icons Venus and Serena Williams, and Fox Sports’ Mark Sanchez (though we think that one might be on hiatus for a bit). Embattled former NFL quarterback Brett Favre debuted his podcast this week, avoiding any of the topics that might have made it an interesting listen.

The road to podcasting success is paved with announcements about new athlete-hosted podcasts that no one even remembers a month later.

Back in 2022, I wrote about how basketball’s “new media” — led by Draymond Green, Patrick Beverley, CJ McCollum, Kevin Durant, and others —wasn’t reading the room. So convinced that the world needed to go directly to them for information rather than to media members, they attempted to hijack the medium for themselves. In some cases, it works. Green continues to find success across several media platforms, including his podcast. JJ Redick parlayed his one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach into becoming a bona fide NBA head coach. But in most cases, they came off as whiny, complaining, and bitter, with many of them burning media bridges along the way. And for all these players’ complaints about what audiences really want, Stephen A. Smith, Chris Russo, Nick Wright, and Dave Portnoy are all still yelling their way to the bank.

It’s not unlike the prevailing notion that independent creators no longer need traditional networks or broadcasters. That those days of the “suits” are over. It makes for a great story or pull-clip, and it’s something a lot of content creators have to tell themselves, but it’s not actually true.

The idea that sports media ‘suits’ are in trouble is a bit naive

There are other factors involved with how successful athlete-hosted podcasts can be. The money for gambling marketing and sponsorships is drying up. There are serious concerns about how real all the listener data and subscriber numbers actually are. Some of the media companies that went all-in on athlete-driven content are dying off, pulling back, or simply moving on. And as noted above, the market is saturated.

Most of all, however, is the reality that, in the media space, you have to be interesting. You have to have something worthwhile to say, and there has to be an audience to hear it. And what many former athletes find when they move into podcasting or media is that, unfortunately, they’re not that interesting. In many cases, that is because they are not actually willing to go to places the audience might find interesting (whereas Teague, for example, thrives precisely because he goes there). The Players’ Tribune never became what so many puff pieces tried to convince us it would because most of what they offer is pretty dull.

Going back to that Apple Podcasts sports chart, it still mostly shows hosts who are non-athletes and media members who have crafted interesting personalities and understand how to command an audience. Because at the end of the day, you can’t brute force your way into success in this medium. Just like in sports, you have to have the inherent skills. Eventually, those who don’t get exposed.

All of this isn’t to say that athlete-hosted podcasts are going away tomorrow. In fact, in the time you read this, seven more probably popped up. And there are plenty of people out there saying this is the wave of the future and what audiences want. We’re still told that audiences want to hear directly from players.

Maybe that’s true in a vacuum, but how many of those former players have something interesting to say?