When I first saw that Wimbledon would not be following the US Open in offering dedicated accreditation to influencers and content creators in 2027, part of me completely understood it.
There is something almost sacred about Wimbledon. The all-white clothing, the etiquette, the expectation of quiet during points – even the flowers around the grounds contribute to a very particular identity. It is traditional, unmistakably English and unlike almost any other sporting event.
So, when content creation starts to interfere with the sport itself – whether that is excessive noise, movement or bright lights during play – protecting that experience feels reasonable.
But I also wonder whether we are asking the wrong question.
Perhaps the problem isn’t influencers. Perhaps it is simply bad behaviour.
Tennis has another problem: who is it actually reaching?
The difficulty for tennis is that protecting tradition cannot be the only consideration.
For all its strengths, tennis still has a perception problem. It can feel like a sport for affluent families – and there are some fairly obvious reasons why.
During my PhD work with adolescent tennis players, the difference between tennis and many other sports was difficult to ignore. The combined financial costs of coaching, training, and competition, alongside the travel required for tournaments, create barriers far greater than those encountered in grassroots sports like football or rugby.
You also frequently see talented young players emerging from environments where families or schools can provide significant resources.
That matters because if we want tennis to grow, both in terms of participation and spectatorship, we have to think about who gets exposed to the sport in the first place.
And this is where content creators become interesting.
A teenager who will never pick up a tennis magazine or deliberately seek out traditional tennis coverage might watch a 30-second video because somebody they already follow is at Wimbledon.
Suddenly, the sport has reached someone new.
So if tennis wants a younger and potentially broader audience, can it really afford to dismiss that?
The real question is influence, not influencers
I think the word influencer itself causes problems.
It has acquired certain connotations: paid promotions, free products, somebody filming themselves at an event rather than actually watching it.
But strip that away and what are we really talking about?
Influence.
Someone with an audience of two million people can communicate an idea and potentially affect attitudes or behaviours within hours. An academic could spend years researching the same subject and struggle to reach a fraction of that audience.
You don't have to particularly like that reality to acknowledge it.
The more useful question is therefore not whether influencers are good or bad. It is: who currently has influence, what are they doing with it, and where does expertise fit into that environment?
That is a question I think academia needs to take very seriously.
Nutrition shows why ignoring this matters
I see the consequences of this every day in nutrition.
Social media is full of people offering advice about supplements, diets, weight loss and almost every other aspect of nutrition imaginable.
Some of that information is good. Some of it is questionable. Some is driven by a commercial relationship that may not always be obvious to the person watching it.
We've also seen extreme examples of personalities such as Liver King building enormous online audiences around particular health and diet messages.
The problem for academics and qualified practitioners is that simply pointing out that somebody doesn't have the same expertise isn't enough.
If they have millions of followers and we have published a paper that only a relatively small academic audience will ever read, who is actually having the greater impact on people's behaviour?
That is uncomfortable, but important.
So perhaps nutritionists need to ask: do we need to tap into influencers? Are we behind the curve?
Could we work with creators who genuinely want to communicate evidence-informed information? Could an academic provide the expertise while a creator provides the ability to communicate it to an audience we would otherwise never reach?
Of course, there is another challenge. Much of influencer marketing is ultimately driven by who can afford to pay for reach.
So how do we make evidence-informed influence competitive in an environment where money can determine which messages travel furthest?
I don't think we have solved that yet.
But ignoring the space certainly isn't going to solve it.
Academia has its own Wimbledon problem
This is where, for me, the Wimbledon debate becomes much bigger than tennis.
Wimbledon understandably worries that changing the way the sport is presented could dilute some of what makes it special.
Academia has a similar instinct.
We protect rigour, peer review, conferences, academic journals and established routes for disseminating knowledge. And we absolutely should protect standards.
But protecting standards doesn't require us to protect every traditional method of communicating them.
Who actually reads most academic papers?
If you produce genuinely useful research but it remains inside an academic journal – sometimes behind a paywall – has that knowledge reached the people who could benefit from it?
It is partly why I increasingly see value in doing podcasts, university social-media videos and speaking to journalists alongside conventional academic publishing.
I don't see those things as alternatives to academic research.
I see them as part of getting that research to the end user.
Academia talks a lot about impact. But if we genuinely care about impact, perhaps research projects and funding models should allocate more time and resources specifically to public-facing communication.
That might be video. It might be animation, podcasts, journalism or working with people who already have relevant online communities.
Otherwise, there is a danger that a lot of very good work simply stays within the academic sphere.
Reach isn't expertise – but expertise without reach has limitations
None of this means follower numbers should become a substitute for qualifications.
Someone having a million followers does not make their nutrition advice correct. And turning academics into influencers for the sake of visibility isn't the answer either.
Expertise matters.
Evidence matters.
Rigour matters.
But reach matters too.
The challenge is finding a way of bringing those things together rather than treating them as competing worlds.
Perhaps the lesson from the influencer debate in sport is not that institutions need to throw their doors open to every content creator.
It is that they need to understand where influence now sits, establish appropriate standards and work out how to engage with it constructively.
Don't confuse protecting tradition with refusing to evolve
Wimbledon may be completely right to protect the experience that makes Wimbledon distinctive.
Nobody wants a ring light switching on halfway through a crucial point simply because somebody needs content.
But content creators, social media and new forms of communication aren't disappearing.
The question therefore becomes where you draw the line between maintaining your standards and refusing to evolve with your audience.
Professional sport is having to confront that question now.
I think academia should be asking it too.
When does protecting an institution's traditions become resistance to its future?
Study nutrition at St Mary's
Social media isn't going anywhere, and neither is the flood of nutrition advice that comes with it. What's needed is more qualified nutritionists who can cut through the noise, backing up what they say with evidence and explaining it in a way people will listen to.
Our nutrition courses give you both. You'll build a solid scientific foundation and develop the communication skills to share it, whether you're working with athletes, advising the public or reaching an audience online.
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is Associate Head of School – Nutrition at St Mary's and leads our MSc Applied Sports Nutrition programme. A registered Performance Nutritionist (SENR), his PhD focused on fuelling adolescent athletes.