Image Rights Step onto the Pitch: A War Without a Referee

"Someone out there is making money from my image."

Those words came from a young woman who had just opened an official account on an exclusive-content platform — what she calls the "blue app" — after discovering that strangers had been selling her image everywhere. She warned her followers to watch out for the fake pages sprouting up daily, then promised private photos and videos, behind-the-scenes moments, live streams, and things prepared especially for those who truly belong to her community.

I sat in a studio in Nagoya, late-season drizzle outside the window, and thought immediately of footballers. Her story has nothing to do with football, but the pitch has staged its script thousands of times. There, people give it a name that sounds very legal: image rights.

Since the day shirts began carrying players' names and cameras covered every corner of the stands, every rolling ball has dragged a parallel stream of money behind it. A player performs for the team and for the brand that bears his own name. A celebration can become an advertisement. A photo in the dressing room can become a contract. And in the middle of that stream there are always hangers-on: impersonating accounts, counterfeit shirts, edited clips tagged with famous names to farm views.

A few seasons ago, I sat with a communications officer at a Japanese club. He told me his team removes dozens of fake youth-player accounts every week, some of them even collecting donations from gullible fans. What exhausts him most, he said, is trust. When images are copied without control, the first thing lost is the thread connecting supporters to the real person.

The young woman on the "blue app" touched exactly that wound. She stated plainly that many people are profiting from her image, and that she wants to build an authentic space to connect with those who mean it. On its own it sounds like one person's story. Set beside football, it is the story of an entire generation of athletes.

Based on my experience watching matches, there is something the stat sheet never measures: the value of an authentic presence. Today's audience no longer watches football across ninety minutes. It watches through a phone, through short clips, through status lines, through live streams at midnight. A modern player runs two careers in parallel: the career on the pitch and the career on the screen. Both need protecting.

The model the young woman described is essentially paying to see exclusive content: fans subscribe, and in return they see what never appears on the public channel. For players the pull is uncanny, because it touches the very thing they always lack — control over their own story. On the pitch, the coach picks their position. On the screen, the algorithm picks their content. Only in a private space do they get to decide what they tell.

This is where I want to linger a little longer, because I have seen too many pretty metrics propped up to hide the emptiness inside. Follower counts, view counts, subscriber counts — those things are a mirror for the ego, and rarely reflect the weight of a career. Just like distance covered: a handsome figure can hide a player running in circles without cutting off a single pass. Images work the same way. An account with a big following is not necessarily a real person, genuinely loved.

I have followed Japanese football for a long time, and I notice clubs here handle image rights very differently from Europe. In Japan, a player's image is usually tightly bound inside a shared contract with sponsors; the collective comes before the individual. In Europe, players are freer, and that freedom breeds a parallel market. Each culture picks a different balance between the self and the collective. I have lived on both sides: carrying Vietnamese memory into Japan, where people taught me that silence can weigh more than a declaration.

Impersonators, in the end, only feed off someone else's light. But the fact they can feed off it means a real gap exists: the gap between a celebrity and the fans. In football that gap was once filled by the stands, by songs, by a shirt with a name on it. Now it is filled by a screen, and on a screen the line between real and fake blurs very fast. People buy players; I buy back the stories already sold. A blue tick is a passport, but it is also a target for impersonators to aim at.

There is a belief spreading fast through sport: that players should run their own media, open their own channels, sell their own content, hold their own image. It sounds sensible. I don't fully buy it.

When every player becomes its own brand, what gets pushed to the margins is the collective. Teammates become each other's prospective customers. The dressing room becomes a film set. And the "authentic space" built to fight impersonation becomes the very place where the last private moments are commercialised. The impersonator isn't defeated; he is merely replaced by a more legal version, with a subscription fee.

Then there is the verification game. Platforms hand celebrities a tick, then sell ticks to whoever pays, then sell tools to detect fake ticks. That war has no referee, and the winner is always the one selling tickets to the stands. The young woman is doing the right thing for herself — but she is playing a board game whose rules were written by someone else.

There is one thing on the pitch no account can copy: presence. You cannot fake a player standing at the penalty spot in the ninetieth minute. You cannot live-stream the feeling of ten thousand people holding their breath. I believe every passage of play has a heart beating inside it, and that heart is not for rent to any subscriber.

The pitch does not need a poet, but the poet needs the pitch. And perhaps football does not need another app. What it needs is clubs that learn to be a launchpad for players, rather than the owners of their image.

As for me, every time I touch that old microphone, Nagoya still echoes back. Nearly seven decades of watching football, and I am still learning how the ball rolls each day — and learning that some things, once sold, can never be bought back whole.