Historic Rise of Threads Creates Big Questions For Sports

The meteoric rise of Meta’s Threads has presented a pressing dilemma for sports properties allocating resources to a new social media platform with a perhaps murky legal future.

By Threads’ second day of operation, the service surpassed 70 million signups — the fastest-growing social media platform ever. Every major pro sports league has now created official feeds on the platform, as did many prominent current and former athletes such as Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Tom Brady. Some of those new Threads feeds immediately attracted millions of followers.

Leagues and teams, however, will have to commit staff time and intellectual property to Threads alongside Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and others.

“I’ve had a ton of calls, lots of texts from clients trying to figure out what they should do with Threads. And there are a lot of social media managers sweating out how to keep track of another channel,” Jeramie McPeek, veteran social and digital media consultant and former Phoenix Suns executive, said to Front Office Sports. “But the more I look at this, the more I’m confident this could really have staying power.”

Twitter owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $249 billion, threatened to sue Meta over the creation of the so-called “Twitter killer,” heightening the bitter rivalry between Musk and Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted.