At the recent Forbes Under 30 Summit, Cherry Beagles — founder and CEO of The 400 Club and a rising voice in sports marketing — laid out a vision many in the establishment are already cheering: artificial intelligence isn’t just editing highlight reels anymore, it’s being pitched as the way to make athletes stronger, healthier, and more connected to fans. Forbes included Beagles among its roster of young innovators at the summit, a sign that the mainstream business press is fully onboard with selling AI as sport’s next big thing.
There’s no question AI tools can deliver real benefits on the field and off — from biomechanics and injury prediction to personalized recovery programs and hyper-targeted content for fans — and Forbes has catalogued multiple use cases where teams and leagues lean on data to gain an edge. Those promises sound great in a conference hall, and they make for slick marketing copy about smarter stadiums and “fan-first” experiences. But sexy demos and venture-backed pilots are not the same thing as proven, lasting improvements for players and working-class fans.
Here’s the red flag conservatives should pay attention to: the AI-in-sports market is booming because companies see money, not because coaches suddenly trust black-box algorithms more than hard-earned experience. Industry reports project the sector growing into a multi-billion-dollar market within years, which funnels powerful incentives for data harvesting, surveillance-style monitoring, and commercial exploitation of athletes’ bodies and personal health information. When Wall Street and Silicon Valley smell recurring revenue, ordinary athletes and their families rarely get to set the terms.
The NFL, major franchises, and billionaire owners are already wiring stadiums and locker rooms with sensors and analytics platforms, turning training rooms into data centers that feed corporate dashboards in real time. That infrastructure can yield tactical wins, but it also concentrates decision-making in the hands of technicians and vendors who answer to profit margins, not to the long-term welfare of players or the cultural value of sport. Conservatives should worry about outsourcing human judgment — the intuition of a coach, the mentorship of a trainer, the human call to protect a kid — to algorithms that can be bought, sold, and quietly updated.
Beagles’ own venture, The 400 Club, rightly spotlights women’s sport and the commercial opportunity in connecting brands with female fans and athletes, which deserves applause in principle for opening markets and sponsorships typically denied to female competitors. Still, turning every athlete into a curated content vertical risks reducing human beings to demographic segments and monetizable micro-moments. Supporting female athletes means protecting their agency and privacy, not packaging them into yet another influencer product for corporate advertisers.
The right approach is not to slam the door on technology but to demand commonsense guardrails: strict limits on biometric data collection without informed consent, protections for minors, transparency about who owns and monetizes athlete data, and rules that keep final health and roster decisions with qualified humans, not opaque AI vendors. Market growth and flashy partnerships do not absolve us from protecting individual liberty and bodily autonomy, especially when commercial interests are driving the narrative.
If conservatives want to defend the soul of American sport — its grit, its mentorship, its role in building character — we must embrace innovation on our terms: productive, private-sector-driven, and accountable to families and communities rather than to technocrats and media conglomerates. Celebrate the wins Cherry Beagles and others promise, but insist on rules that keep athletes safe, fans respected, and Big Tech from turning our pastime into another surveillance-backed revenue stream. The future of sports can be bright, but only if it stays human first.
