What Comes Next? Sports Celebrities as Influencers in the End-of-Career and Post-Career Phases: The Case of Gigi Datome

The end-of-career and post-career represent a delicate transition for sports celebrities. At this stage, the management of the celebrity capital accumulated over the course of a competitive career involves a renegotiation with the target audience and stakeholders, in an attempt to reinvest it in the same or other (political, business, etc.) sporting spheres. Social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, constitute media environments in which celebrities can set up forms of self-representationand self-narratives that influence and inspire the behaviour of followers and wider circles. Such communicative stages may also be aimed at practising forms of activism (cultural, civic, political, social, etc.). This paper intends to investigate the practices and processes through which sports celebrities, in the end-of-career and post-career phases, renegotiate their public role by being influencers and influ-activists. The specific case examined concerns the analysis of the forms of self-narration and self-representation set up by basketball player Gigi Datome on his official Instagram page, in the period between the end of his career and the first months of his post-career.