There are people saying that the sports stars are the modern gladiators competing in a world wide arena, now the the mass-media transmision (at televion, radio and online) of the sport competitions and trainings. There is a good reason for this: everybody that practice a sport have something more that an “ordinary” man, someone that sits in front of the television set or the computer and just hits the keys. Sports stars have not only the fast reaction and the stamina: they have the fame and the money, some even may say they have the aura of demigods.
The statistics say that every major company (UFC, WWE and TNA) that has embarked on usage of social media (like Twitter and Facebook) has ended up having their key business metrics (ratings, PPVs) decline. There is a reason why that happened: the stars are slowly killing their aura as stars. The sportmen get people to talk about them, but they also make people less want to pay to see them because they understand they are realise that, after all, all athletes are still very human. The status of star was carefully developed in decades of mass-media education and entertainment and some people may lose their respect toward a sport star if they find he is just a man or a woman making the same mistake they are doing.
