There was a time when being a sports fan required surprisingly little infrastructure. You watched the game. Maybe you read the box score the next morning. Maybe you argued about it with somebody at work.
That version of fandom still exists, but it now lives inside something much larger.
St. John’s University is putting that larger system under a microscope Sept. 21 and 22 with a screening and discussion of More in Common: The “Sportsploitation” of Modern Society, a four-part documentary about the intersection of sports, media, technology and contemporary culture. The university says the project examines 17 topics, including the evolution of sports media, WorldStarHipHop, youth influence, Name, Image and Likeness, traditional and nontraditional media, algorithms, influencer culture, artificial intelligence, mental health, cancel culture, politics, gambling, capitalism and responsibility.
That is a lot to place around a ball. And that may be the point.
The most interesting thing about the list is not that sports now touches all of those subjects. Sports has always touched money, identity, media, politics and celebrity. The change is that the surrounding systems have become so large, so continuous and so personalized that the game itself can begin to feel like raw material for the much bigger product built around it.
A three-hour game can now generate days of secondary output. There are clips, reaction clips to the clips, gambling lines, fantasy implications, trade speculation, creator breakdowns, player livestreams, hot takes, apology videos, memes, podcast segments, algorithmic recommendations and arguments about the arguments. A single play can become a betting event, a meme template, an officiating controversy, a personal-brand moment and a week of content before anybody plays again.
The game ends. The sports product does not.
That distinction is useful because we still tend to talk about these developments as separate industries. Sports betting is one story. NIL is another. Influencer culture is another. AI is another. Social media, athlete mental health and media fragmentation each get their own panels, trade publications and policy fights.
For the fan, however, they arrive through the same door.
Open one sports app and the score sits next to odds. Open a social feed and a highlight sits next to a creator explaining it, a sportsbook promoting a prop bet, a player posting directly to fans and a stranger with a microphone insisting the coach should be fired. Search for an injury and you may get a reporter, a fantasy analyst, a team account, a betting account and an AI summary in the same session.
Those are different kinds of information with different incentives. The feed is very good at making them look adjacent.
That adjacency changes what it means to follow a team.
Traditional sports media once operated with a fairly recognizable chain. The game happened. Reporters covered it. Editors packaged it. Fans consumed it. Talk radio and television commentary expanded the argument, but the roles remained visible enough that most people could tell when they had moved from reporting to opinion.
Now the athlete may break the news directly. A creator may have a larger audience than a beat reporter. A bettor may know more about one narrow statistical market than a general sports desk. A fan account can become a news source by accumulation. An algorithm decides which of them arrives first. The distinction between journalism, entertainment, marketing, analysis and personality has not disappeared, but it is no longer built into the shape of the medium.
Everything is a tile.
That creates opportunity. Fans can hear from athletes without waiting for a press conference. Niche sports can find audiences that traditional broadcasters might never have served. Women’s sports, minor leagues, international competitions and emerging formats can build communities directly. A smart independent analyst can earn trust without first being handed a desk by a network.
It also creates pressure for every participant to become media.
NIL makes that especially visible at the college level. An athlete is not only performing in competition; the athlete may also be building a commercial identity, maintaining social channels, working with sponsors and learning what kind of content converts attention into opportunity. The personal brand is no longer an optional layer added after athletic success. For some athletes, it is part of the economic structure surrounding the sport.
Gambling creates another layer because it gives the spectator a second scoreboard.
The old fan question was whether the team won. The betting fan may simultaneously care whether the quarterback cleared a yardage line, whether the third quarter produced enough points, whether a player recorded one more rebound or whether a late meaningless basket just changed somebody’s night financially. The same event contains multiple outcomes depending on which market a person entered.
That does not make gambling the explanation for modern fandom. It makes it one more system that can sit on top of the game and alter what the viewer notices.
Algorithms do something similar without requiring a wager. They turn fandom into a personalized stream. Two people can follow the same team and encounter completely different versions of it: one sees tactical analysis, another trade rumors, another outrage clips, another player lifestyle content, another nonstop arguments about officiating.
The team is shared. The surrounding sports world increasingly is not.
That fragmentation helps explain why the documentary’s inclusion of mental health, politics and responsibility belongs beside media and technology rather than outside them. The modern sports environment is not merely delivering information about athletes. It can continuously evaluate them in public. Performance, identity, mistakes, relationships, contracts, opinions and private moments become material for an audience that never fully clocks out.
The athlete can leave the arena and remain inside the event.
So can the fan.
That may be the larger cultural change hiding inside the word “sportsploitation.” The issue is not simply whether somebody is exploiting sports. It is that sport has become an extraordinarily productive base layer from which entire secondary economies can be manufactured.
The game creates the uncertainty. Everything around it converts that uncertainty into something else.
A platform turns it into engagement. A sportsbook turns it into markets. A creator turns it into content. An athlete turns it into brand equity. A network turns it into programming. A fan turns it into identity. AI can now summarize, rank, predict and repackage pieces of the whole system before the next game starts.
None of that requires believing that modern sports fandom was somehow purer when there were three television channels and everybody waited for the morning newspaper. Sports has always been mediated. Fans have always loved gossip, arguments, statistics, heroes, villains and money. The new part is scale, speed and accumulation.
We kept adding things to the experience without removing very many of the old ones.
The box score did not disappear when television arrived. Television did not disappear when sports radio grew. Radio did not disappear when blogs arrived. Blogs did not disappear when social media arrived. Traditional reporting did not disappear when athletes got direct channels. Search did not disappear when feeds took over. Now AI is being inserted into the same stack.
Sports did what technology usually does to human behavior: it accumulated methods.
That is why the St. John’s event is more interesting as an aggregation than as a checklist. Put gambling, NIL, algorithms, influencer culture, AI, media fragmentation and mental health next to one another and a different picture appears. They are not merely issues affecting sports. Together, they describe the environment in which sports is now experienced.
The four-part documentary was co-executive produced by Scotty Pippen Jr., Arize Ifejika and Daniel Bezman. St. John’s says Ifejika, the documentary’s director and executive producer, will also participate in a Q&A. The screening and discussion run from 6 to 9 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 21, and Tuesday, Sept. 22, in the D’Angelo Center Ballroom on the university’s Queens campus.
The title More in Common suggests connection. The topic list suggests saturation.
Either way, it is increasingly difficult to describe sports as the thing that happens only after the whistle.
Watching the game is still the reason most of this exists.
It just may no longer be the largest part of being a fan.
EVENT DETAILS
WHAT: More in Common: The “Sportsploitation” of Modern Society — documentary screening and panel discussion
WHEN: Monday, Sept. 21, and Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, 6–9 p.m.
WHERE: D’Angelo Center Ballroom, St. John’s University, Queens, New York
INCLUDES: Four-part documentary screening and Q&A with director/executive producer Arize Ifejika
SOURCE NOTES
• St. John’s University, Sept. 16, 2026: CCPS Hosts Screening and Panel Discussion
• Reporting note: The article uses St. John’s announced topic list as the factual basis for the event. The broader discussion of modern fandom is cultural analysis and should not be read as a summary of conclusions reached by the documentary.
Event details attributed to St. John's University materials cited in SOURCE NOTES. Cultural framing is RMN's.