Do Athletes Have A Philanthropic Endorsement Problem ?

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There is a growing consensus in professional sports that athletes should use their platforms for social good.

The expectation has become so embedded in how we think about celebrity that it barely gets questioned anymore. An athlete signs a major contract and within months, there is a foundation launch, a cause partnership, a gala appearance. The machinery of philanthropic engagement starts turning almost automatically.

But there is a question underneath all of this activity that rarely gets asked, and when it does, the answers are uncomfortable.

What actually makes an athlete credible when they advocate for a social cause?

Not what makes them famous. Not what makes them marketable. What makes someone believe them? A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living set out to answer that question by going directly to the source.

Researchers Manuela Biz and Mathias Schubert conducted in-depth interviews with 12 current and recently retired professional athletes from seven countries across four continents, representing eight different sports, all serving as volunteer ambassadors for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation. The athletes included Olympic and Paralympic medalists, world champions, and continental champions. Six were women. Two had disabilities. Six were born in developing countries. The diversity was intentional. The findings were revealing.

What Biz and Schubert discovered challenges a foundational assumption that has shaped athlete endorsement strategy for decades: the idea that an athlete’s off-field persona, their lifestyle, their appearance, their curated public image, is what drives their influence. For product endorsement, that assumption holds. Prior research, particularly the work of Arai, Ko, and Ross in 2014, established that an athlete’s “marketable lifestyle” contributes more to product endorsement effectiveness than their actual athletic performance. The logic is straightforward. Selling shoes is about aspiration. Aspiration lives in lifestyle.

But when the context shifts from selling products to advocating for social causes, the entire hierarchy of influence reverses.

The athletes interviewed by Biz and Schubert were consistent on this point. They believed their credibility as cause advocates rested primarily on their on-field attributes.

Their competitive achievements, the behavior they demonstrated under pressure, the values they expressed through how they played their sport. One athlete described it this way, “I think that the achievements bring credibility. You have doors open, let’s say to the president of any company if you have an Olympic medal. It is a good business card because it shows your commitment.”

This is a meaningful departure from how the endorsement industry typically thinks about athlete influence. It suggests that the infrastructure built around celebrity philanthropy, the PR pipelines, the social media strategies, the lifestyle-forward branding, may be optimized for the wrong kind of credibility entirely.

To understand why this matters for athletes, musicians, entertainers, and the broader creative economy, it helps to look at the specific mechanisms the research identified.

The study was built on a conceptual framework developed by Hasaan, Kerem, Biscaia, and Agyemang in 2018, which divides an athlete’s brand into antecedents (the factors that create awareness), on-field attributes (achievements, behavior, skills), and off-field attributes (lifestyle, physical appearance, ethnicity).

Previous research using this framework had consistently shown that off-field attributes, particularly lifestyle, were the most influential factors in product endorsement. Athletes have more control over how they present themselves off the field than over whether they win or lose, so lifestyle becomes the primary tool for brand construction.

What the Biz and Schubert study found is that social cause endorsement operates by a different logic. The athletes in their sample deliberately minimized the very off-field attributes that product endorsement research says matter most. Several female athletes described consciously avoiding the use of their physical appearance to generate engagement.

One said she had chosen not to post images that foregrounded her body because she did not want to leverage attractiveness as influence. Another, who had been judged on her body throughout her competitive career, said she actively avoided promoting products related to dieting or body modification because she wanted to send the message that everybody is acceptable as they are.

This runs directly counter to the Ohanian credibility model, which since 1991 has identified perceived attractiveness as one of three primary sources of endorser credibility alongside trustworthiness and expertise.4 For social cause advocacy, the athletes in this study treated attractiveness not just as irrelevant but as something to be carefully managed and, in some cases, deliberately suppressed. They intuited what the research is only beginning to articulate: the kind of credibility that moves products and the kind that moves people toward social engagement are fundamentally different things.

The deeper finding in the study concerns something researchers call endorser-cause congruence. This concept has been explored before. Von Felbert and Breuer demonstrated in 2021 that the mere presence of a celebrity endorser does not automatically improve consumer attitudes; what matters is the perceived fit between the endorser and what they are endorsing. Cunningham and Regan made a similar argument regarding the alignment between an endorser’s identity and their commercial partnerships.

But the Biz and Schubert study shows that congruence operates with particular force in the social cause context, and that athletes do not stumble into it. They seek it deliberately. The patterns across their sample are striking.

Athletes with disabilities advocate for inclusion and disability rights. Female athletes champion gender equity and equal pay. Athletes who grew up in poverty support youth development in economically marginalized communities. A disabled athlete in the study put it in plain terms: “If you have lived it, I think it just gives an extra argument that you can draw on these experiences and say, yeah, this thing happened to me. But look, I’ve come from the other side and this is what can be achieved.”

The athletes were equally clear about the inverse. They believed that audiences recognize immediately when a cause partnership exists purely for public relations or financial benefit, and that such recognition damages the credibility of everyone involved. This perception aligns with what we can observe happening across the creative economy more broadly. Fans and followers have become sophisticated readers of authenticity, particularly among younger demographics who have grown up surrounded by branded content and influencer culture.

This dynamic is visible in the most prominent examples of athlete philanthropy in recent years.

When Marcus Rashford forced the UK government to reverse its policy on free school meal vouchers during the pandemic, his effectiveness was not a function of his celebrity. It was rooted in the fact that he had personally relied on free school meals as a child, raised by a single mother working for minimum wage. His campaign with FareShare and the End Child Food Poverty Taskforce eventually secured more than £400 million in government support affecting 1.7 million children. The congruence between his story and his cause was total. There was no gap for skepticism to fill.

Maya Moore’s decision to step away from professional basketball at the height of her career tells a similar story, though through a different lens.

A four-time WNBA champion and league MVP, Moore left the sport in 2019 to focus on criminal justice reform, specifically the wrongful conviction of Jonathan Irons, who had been imprisoned since age 16. His convictions were overturned in 2020 after 23 years. Moore co-founded the nonprofit Win With Justice and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2024.

What makes Moore’s case instructive is not just the sacrifice involved but the timeline. She spent years working on Irons’ case before stepping away from basketball, which means her advocacy was not a pivot or a rebrand. It was a continuation of work that had been underway for a long time, out of public view.

Sadio Mané’s philanthropic work in Senegal follows a similar architecture of congruence. The hospital he built in his home village of Bambali, which serves 34 surrounding villages, was motivated by the death of his father when Mané was seven. There were no medical facilities in the community. His sister was born at home because there was no alternative. The school he funded, the internet infrastructure he installed, the monthly stipends he provides to every family in the village, all trace back to specific deprivations he experienced as a child in Sédhiou province, where the World Bank estimates nearly 70 percent of families live in poverty.

When Mané received the Socrates Prize at the 2022 Ballon d’Or ceremony for his humanitarian contributions, his remarks were characteristically understated: “Sometimes I’m a bit shy talking about it, but I’m really happy to do what I can for our people.”

What connects these cases is not fame or wealth. It is the depth of the connection between the person and the cause. The research from Biz and Schubert provides an empirical framework for understanding why this depth matters, but the implications extend well beyond sports.

For anyone operating in creative industries, whether as an athlete, musician, visual artist, content creator, or entertainment executive, the study raises a structural question about how philanthropic engagement is typically organized.

The dominant model treats celebrity endorsement of social causes as an extension of brand strategy. You identify a cause that is culturally resonant, attach a famous person, generate visibility. This model optimizes for attention. The research suggests it should be optimizing for credibility instead.

Credibility, as the athletes in the study describe it, comes from two sources that cannot be manufactured. The first is professional excellence. Athletes believe their achievements, especially those involving adversity and persistence, give them a platform that people take seriously. The second is lived experience with the issue itself. When those two things align, advocacy becomes something audiences can trust.

The researchers connect this to an ancient archetype. They note that athletes have been cast in the role of hero since antiquity, defined not by perfection but by the act of surpassing their own limitations. The heroic journey, as cultural scholar Kátia Rubio has argued, is central to how society understands the athlete’s place in public life.

What the Biz and Schubert study adds is that this archetype is not merely symbolic. It has a functional role in how people evaluate the sincerity of an athlete’s social engagement. An athlete who has overcome injury, discrimination, or poverty and then advocates on those same issues is perceived as having earned the right to speak.

There is a tension here worth acknowledging.

If credibility depends on having personally experienced the issues you advocate for, it creates a narrow pathway.

Not every athlete or creative professional has a story of hardship that maps cleanly onto a particular cause. The study addresses this partially by noting that proximity, not just personal suffering, can sustain credibility. An athlete from a wealthy family who grew up in a community marked by poverty has a legitimate connection even without having experienced deprivation directly. But the study does not fully resolve this tension, and future research would benefit from examining how credibility is perceived when the connection is more ambient than biographical.

The study also surfaces an underexplored dynamic around social media and cause advocacy. Despite the widespread assumption that digital platforms are essential for philanthropic engagement, several athletes in the study reported deliberately limiting their social media use.

Some restricted their posts to career highlights and cause-related content, explicitly excluding personal life details. The reasons were varied. Some wanted to avoid negative attention. Others simply did not see the relevance of sharing personal content. But the effect was consistent: by being selective about what they shared, the content they did produce around social causes carried more weight. Interestingly, the athletes also perceived traditional media appearances as more credible than social media posts, a finding that runs counter to the prevailing logic in influencer marketing but aligns with broader research on media trust.

For athletes, creatives, and entertainers who are serious about philanthropy rather than simply performing it, these findings point toward a specific kind of infrastructure.

Not the infrastructure of visibility, which is abundant, but the infrastructure of strategic, sustained giving. The kind that allows someone to contribute during peak earning years and distribute resources thoughtfully over time. The kind that accepts the complex asset structures common in creative careers, from cryptocurrency to royalties to equity holdings. The kind that protects privacy, so that giving can be driven by conviction rather than by the pressures of public expectation.

Active Cause exists to provide exactly this infrastructure.

As a private philanthropy membership platform built exclusively for athletes, creatives, and entertainers, Active Cause offers donor-advised fund management, charity discovery across more than 1.4 million U.S. nonprofits, fundraising campaign tools, philanthropic advisory, and community through private gatherings designed around members’ schedules.

The premise is straight forward. Cultural leaders deserve philanthropic tools built for how they actually earn, live, and give, not tools adapted from systems designed for a different demographic entirely.

The Biz and Schubert study is limited in ways the researchers themselves acknowledge. The sample of 12 athletes, while diverse, is small. All participants were affiliated with a single organization, Laureus, which may shape how they think about cause endorsement. None were professional football players, despite football producing some of the most visible examples of athlete philanthropy globally. And the study captures only the athletes’ own perceptions, not the perspectives of the communities they serve or the organizations they partner with.

But the core insight holds, and it matters. The credibility that makes social cause advocacy effective is not the same credibility that sells products. It is not lifestyle. It is not reach. It is not aesthetic. It is the demonstrated alignment between who a person is, what they have experienced, and what they are willing to stand for. Everything else is decoration.

The trajectory of athlete philanthropy is moving toward this understanding, even if the industry structures around it have not caught up.

As new wealth creation demographics emerge, from NIL student-athletes to independent content creators to musicians building careers outside traditional label structures, the need for philanthropy infrastructure that matches modern creative careers will only intensify.

The question for the next generation of cultural leaders is not whether they will engage with social causes. It is whether they will do so with the kind of depth and congruence that actually earns trust.

The research is clear on what that requires. And it starts with something no PR strategy can fabricate: a genuine reason to care.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the research suggest athletes should only advocate for causes they have personally experienced?

Not exactly. The study found that personal experience creates the strongest form of credibility, but it also acknowledged that proximity and sincere interest can serve as legitimate foundations.

An athlete who grew up in a community affected by poverty, even if their own family was not directly impoverished, still has a credible connection. What the research warns against is the purely transactional partnership, where a famous person is attached to a cause with no authentic link. Audiences detect that quickly, and it erodes trust for both the athlete and the organization.

Why did on-field achievements matter more than lifestyle for social cause credibility?

Because the nature of trust differs between commercial and social contexts.

Product endorsement trades on aspiration and aesthetic association. Social cause advocacy trades on perceived sincerity and competence. Athletic achievements, particularly those involving persistence through adversity, signal the kind of discipline and integrity that people associate with authentic commitment.

In competition, as the researchers note, performance cannot be staged. That transparency transfers to how people evaluate an athlete’s philanthropic sincerity.

How does this research apply to musicians, entertainers, and creators outside of sports?

The underlying principles translate directly. For musicians, a body of work and artistic integrity function as the equivalent of athletic achievement. For content creators, consistency and genuine audience trust serve a parallel role.

The core finding is that professional excellence provides the platform, and authentic connection to a cause provides the credibility. These dynamics are not unique to sports; they apply wherever public figures engage with social issues.

What role should social media play in cause advocacy?

The athletes in the study used social media selectively and with clear purpose, focusing on career and cause-related content rather than personal lifestyle material.

Several reported that traditional media appearances were perceived as more credible by audiences. The implication is not that social media is irrelevant but that it should serve the advocacy rather than substitute for it. An Instagram post about a cause carries less weight than years of consistent engagement, but it can amplify work that is already grounded in real commitment.

What is a donor-advised fund and why does it matter in this context?

A donor-advised fund is a charitable giving vehicle that allows individuals to make tax-deductible contributions, invest those funds for potential growth, and recommend grants to qualified nonprofits over time.

For athletes and creatives with compressed earning windows and irregular income patterns, a DAF provides structure for giving that aligns with how they actually earn. It also offers privacy protections that allow individuals to support causes without public disclosure, which the research suggests may actually enhance rather than diminish philanthropic credibility by removing the suspicion of performative giving.

Why does the study emphasize the importance of preparing athletes before they advocate publicly?

Because several athletes expressed anxiety about speaking on topics they did not feel fully informed about. The researchers found that an uninformed statement can damage both the athlete’s reputation and the credibility of the cause itself.

Organizations seeking athlete ambassadors should invest in substantive preparation, providing not just talking points but genuine education about the issue, the organization’s work, and the landscape in which it operates. This benefits everyone involved and reflects a maturity in how partnerships are structured.

What does the Laureus model reveal about effective cause endorsement programs?

Laureus, founded in 2000 by Mercedes-Benz and IWC Schaffhausen, operates a network of approximately 235 athlete ambassadors supporting more than 160 organizations in 40 countries.

Rather than developing projects internally, the foundation supports existing charitable structures with deeper understanding of local needs. The model succeeds in part because it recruits ambassadors based on both athletic achievement and community relevance, not just global fame. The study’s finding that locally known athletes with strong community ties can be as effective as global superstars reinforces this approach.

This content is provided for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or financial advice.

Active Cause is a private philanthropy membership app exclusively for athletes, creatives, and entertainers. We provide donor-advised fund infrastructure, charity discovery tools, fundraising campaign management, philanthropic insights, and community through Active Gatherings.

Private membership. Impact over optics. Built for compressed careers and cultural power that drives social change.

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References

1. Biz, M. & Schubert, M. (2024). Perceptions of celebrity athletes involved in social cause endorsement. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 6, 1415382. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2024.1415382
2. Arai, A., Ko, Y.J. & Ross, S. (2014). Branding athletes: exploration and conceptualization of athlete brand image. Sport Management Review, 17, 97–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smr.2013.04.003
3. Hasaan, A., Kerem, K., Biscaia, R. & Agyemang, K.J. (2018). A conceptual framework to understand the creation of athlete brand and its implications. International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 18, 169–198. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJSMM.2018.091753
4. Ohanian, R. (1991). The impact of celebrity spokespersons’ perceived image on consumers’ intention to purchase. Journal of Advertising Research, 31, 46–54.
5. Von Felbert, A. & Breuer, C. (2021). Do endorsements by sports celebrities positively influence consumers’ purchase intentions? International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 21, 190–208. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJSMM.2021.118811
6. Cunningham, G.B. & Regan, M.R. (2011). Political activism, racial identity and the commercial endorsement of athletes. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 47, 657–669. https://doi.org/10.1177/101269021141635
7. FareShare (2024). Marcus Rashford’s work with FareShare. https://fareshare.org.uk/marcus-rashford/
8. SOFII (2021). Fundraising and activism: Marcus Rashford’s campaign to save free school meals. https://sofii.org/article/marcus-rashfords-campaign-to-save-free-school-meals
9. Equal Justice Initiative (2020). Jonathan Irons Released with WNBA Star Maya Moore’s Support. https://eji.org/news/jonathan-irons-released-with-support-of-wnba-star-maya-moore/
10. Oglethorpe University (2024). Maya Moore and Jonathan Irons kick off 2024 LASS with stirring challenge to students. https://oglethorpe.edu/news/maya-moore-and-jonathan-irons-kick-off-2024-lass-with-stirring-challenge-to-students/
11. Olympics.com (2023). Sadio Mané: Why I wanted to build a hospital. https://www.olympics.com/en/news/sadio-mane-why-i-wanted-to-build-a-hospital. See also: BORGEN Magazine (2022). Senegalese Superstar Mane’s Philanthropic Work. https://www.borgenmagazine.com/manes-philanthropic-work/
12. Rubio, K. (2019). The mythic relation between the athlete and the hero: the contemporary sport imaginary. In Georgiadis, K. (Ed.), Olympic Medallists and Olympians as Role Models: Their Educational Role. International Olympic Academy, pp. 61–67.
13. Salaudeen, M.A. & Onyechi, N. (2020). Digital media vs mainstream media: exploring the influences of media exposure and information preference as correlates of media credibility. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 7, 1837461. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2020.1837461