Sport research pivots from social media to algorithmic trust

A bibliometric and thematic review of 1,206 Scopus-indexed publications finds that research on algorithmic sport business expanded rapidly between 2010 and 2025, with annual output rising from eight papers in 2010 to 234 in 2025. The literature has evolved from an early focus on online communities, sports scheduling and social media toward artificial intelligence, platformized fan engagement, athlete branding, synthetic media, misinformation and digital integrity. Rather than treating algorithms simply as new tools for promotion, the review argues that they create trust-sensitive environments in which authenticity, data responsibility, platform power and organizational legitimacy become central management concerns.

The study combined bibliometric mapping with interpretive thematic synthesis to examine how sport organizations, athletes, fans, sponsors and media actors operate through digital platforms. Records were retrieved from Scopus in May 2026 using a two-part search covering sport management and business on one side, and artificial intelligence, synthetic media, trust, authenticity, social media and related digital concepts on the other. Of 2,520 initial records, 1,206 articles, conference papers and reviews across 542 sources were retained after manual relevance screening and metadata cleaning. The corpus comprised 1,002 articles, 175 conference papers and 29 reviews, with an annual growth rate of 25.24% and an average of 15.97 citations per document.

Social media remained the field’s strongest intellectual bridge. It was the most frequent author keyword, appearing in 385 records with a total link strength of 601, ahead of artificial intelligence with 77 occurrences, sport marketing with 76, Twitter/X with 67 and fan engagement with 61. The keyword network separated into six clusters covering computational and data-driven sport, consumer relationships, branding and sponsorship, social media and identity, risk and integrity, and digital organization. Earlier work emphasized Web 2.0, new media, Facebook, Twitter and sports marketing, while later periods added artificial intelligence, machine learning, sentiment analysis, digital platforms, athlete branding and fan engagement as more prominent and sustained themes.

Publication networks nevertheless remained divided. The most productive journal was the International Journal of Sport Communication with 72 documents, followed by Communication and Sport with 61 and the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship with 56. The source structure also included European Sport Management Quarterly, Sport Management Review, Sport, Business and Management and the Journal of Sport Management, showing that the topic had entered core sport management alongside communication, marketing, psychology, information systems and media studies. The co-citation analysis likewise showed six intellectual clusters spanning sport communication, digital business, management, psychology, tourism and sport management, indicating both interdisciplinary reach and conceptual fragmentation rather than a unified field.

Collaboration was broad but uneven. The corpus included 2,657 contributing authors, 226 single-authored papers and an average of 2.94 co-authors per document, while 25.95% of papers involved international co-authorship. The United States formed the strongest country link, with 34 joint papers involving Canada, 23 with Australia, 12 each with China and the United Kingdom, and 10 with South Korea. Australia was also prominent, especially in links with Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Germany. However, the author co-authorship map displayed distinct clusters with relatively few bridges between them. La Trobe University was the most productive affiliation with 25 documents, followed by Brock and Griffith universities with 22 each, but the institutional pattern was spread across universities in Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The review’s central interpretation is that platformization has made trust a managerial resource rather than a peripheral communications condition. Platforms do more than distribute sport content: they determine visibility, organize interaction, measure audiences, extract behavioral data and convert attention into commercial value. Fans therefore operate simultaneously as emotionally attached supporters, content producers, data points, brand amplifiers and algorithmically classified consumers. The authors caution that engagement volume cannot automatically be treated as evidence of a strong or durable relationship, because greater interaction may coexist with negative outcomes or perceptions of manipulation, surveillance and excessive personalization.

Synthetic media sharpens the problem of authenticity. Athletes increasingly function as performers, brands, influencers and commercial partners whose identities circulate through images, captions, follower communities and platform metrics. Generative tools can reproduce or manipulate an athlete’s likeness, voice and messages, making it harder for audiences to distinguish personal expression from strategic branding or fabricated representation. The review connects this uncertainty to potential consequences for athlete rights, sponsorship credibility, brand integrity and organizational reputation. These are theoretically informed relationships rather than causal effects demonstrated by bibliometric analysis, and the proposed framework has not yet been empirically validated.

Based on organizational trust, trust in automation, artificial-intelligence trust, relationship marketing and platformization research, the authors propose an integrative framework with six propositions for future testing. It links algorithmic sport conditions with stakeholder appraisals of authenticity, transparency, fairness, accountability and responsible data use, then connects those appraisals to trust and potential relational, commercial and institutional outcomes. Governance practices—including disclosure, verification, human oversight, data governance and likeness protection—may weaken the association between perceived algorithmic risk and low trust. Platform dependence and information asymmetry may also strengthen the relationship between algorithmic conditions and trust, although the direction, size and boundary conditions of these relationships require empirical evaluation.

The review has important limits. It draws exclusively on English-language work indexed in Scopus, with no searches of Web of Science, SPORTDiscus, regional databases, books, technical reports or practitioner literature. Records were retrieved in May 2026 to cover publications through 2025, and the authors described the procedure as criterion-based corpus delimitation rather than a PRISMA-based systematic review; exclusion counts for individual screening reasons were not reconstructed. The 2016 publications had the highest mean citation totals, but recent papers had shorter citation windows, and country or institutional prominence may reflect indexing and publication visibility as well as underlying research activity. The study therefore maps a structured portion of global scholarship rather than the complete field. Its proposed research agenda calls for experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, organizational cases, platform analysis, digital ethnography and culturally grounded comparisons involving Global South, multilingual and underrepresented sport settings.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric and thematic review of trust in algorithmic sport business research from 2010 to 2025

Article Title: A bibliometric and thematic review of trust in algorithmic sport business research on artificial intelligence, synthetic media and platformized sport from 2010 to 2025

Article References: Lobo, J. (2026). A bibliometric and thematic review of trust in algorithmic sport business research on artificial intelligence, synthetic media and platformized sport from 2010 to 2025. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 6(1), Article 1079. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-026-02183-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44163-026-02183-2

Keywords: sport business, algorithmic sport, digital trust, artificial intelligence, synthetic media, platformization, fan engagement, athlete branding, sport integrity, bibliometric analysis, bibliometric, thematic