I have spent more than 10 years working alongside professional fighters, including Khabib Nurmagomedov, and one observation has stuck with me. Many of the people closest to Khabib today did not arrive through management, sponsorship or the sport itself. They entered his life as ordinary supporters after he turned professional. One started with a thoughtful gift; another with a dinner invitation that became a standing one. They showed up again and again, in ways that cost them, and over years became real friends. Those relationships formed despite the platforms every athlete uses, not because of them.

That is the part the sports-technology industry keeps getting wrong. We talk endlessly about growing an athlete’s audience, as if the constraint were reach. It is not. The best athletes already command more attention than they can process. Their real problem is not scarcity. It is noise, and no tool they have been handed was built to solve it.

The problem is filtering, not attention

Consider what an athlete’s inbox looks like. A message reading “hey bro” sits in the same undifferentiated feed as one from someone who has followed the athlete’s career for five years, bought every pay-per-view, flown to a fight in another country, and wants to be part of that person’s life. The platform treats both identically. There is no signal, no ranking, no way to see who has earned a reply and who is one of 10,000 typing the same thing.

Faced with that, the only rational decision is to ignore almost everyone. Not out of arrogance or dislike........

© Sports Business Journal