The New Playbook: Athletes Race to Own Their Digital Twins in AI Era

LOS ANGELES, CA – September 15, 2026

In a move that signals a seismic shift in the sports industry, rising Italian-Australian football talent Cristian Volpato has partnered with technology firm Callandor to secure and commercialize his digital identity. This isn't just another endorsement deal; it's a strategic maneuver in a high-stakes game for control. As generative AI makes it possible to create photorealistic deepfakes and synthetic endorsements with alarming ease, athletes are waking up to a new reality: their digital likeness may soon be as valuable, and as vulnerable, as their physical prowess.

Volpato, an attacking midfielder for Serie A club Sassuolo, is at the forefront of this new frontier. By joining Callandor's AI Rights Registry, he is creating a verified record of his “Digital DNA”—a comprehensive portfolio comprising his likeness, voice, biometric profiles, and performance data. The partnership, unveiled alongside an AI-generated video showcasing Volpato's official digital twin, aims to establish a framework where he can license authenticated, athlete-approved AI experiences to brands and fans globally, all while retaining absolute creative control.

The Athlete's New Frontier

The urgency for such a solution is palpable. In recent months, the sports world has seen a surge in unauthorized AI-generated content. High-profile players, including Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes, have been targeted by deepfake advertisements, creating false endorsements that threaten both reputation and lucrative sponsorship deals. For athletes, whose brands are meticulously crafted over years, the prospect of an AI-generated clone saying or selling something without consent is a nightmare scenario.

“Cristian represents the future of football, not just in his performance on the pitch, but in how modern athletes manage and scale their brands,” said Michael Fisk, Co-Founder & CEO of Callandor. He noted the need for this technology is urgent. This sentiment is spreading. Since the initial announcement, Callandor has onboarded other elite athletes, including global football champion Jorginho and the world's top-ranked match-racing skipper, Chris Poole, indicating a growing movement among athletes to proactively manage their AI rights.

This new paradigm moves far beyond traditional Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) contracts, which were rarely structured to account for synthetic media. By registering his Digital DNA, Volpato can deploy official digital twins for multilingual brand campaigns with strict authorization rules built into every deal. It represents a shift from a defensive posture—fighting against unauthorized use—to an offensive one, creating new, controlled revenue streams.

Building the Infrastructure for a New Economy

At the heart of this shift is Callandor, a company positioning itself as the essential infrastructure for the emerging AI-Sports economy. Its leadership team, which includes a former NASA engineer with experience at Stability AI and executives from Sony, Warner Bros., and Amazon Studios, describes its core product, the AI Rights Registry, as a “single source of truth” for sports intellectual property. The platform functions as a sophisticated ledger, mapping ownership, standardizing rights, tracking usage, and automating payments for the use of an athlete's digital assets.

Company executives have likened the platform to “YouTube Content ID meets Getty Images” for sports IP. For years, vast archives of sports footage and data have been used to train AI models without a clear system for attribution, permission, or compensation. The platform aims to solve this by creating a compliant marketplace. AI developers can license verified, high-quality data, while rights holders—from individual athletes to entire leagues—can finally monetize assets that were previously being used for free.

“Protection is foundational, but the real breakthrough is what control unlocks: official digital twins that can speak to every fan in their own language, and AI experiences created within rules set by the athlete,” said Guglielmo Cardente, Co-Founder and CMO of Callandor. “We want AI to scale an athlete's identity without taking control away from them.” This creates what Fisk calls a “new revenue engine,” where athletes are paid every time their identity works for them in the digital realm.

Navigating a Legal and Ethical Maze

The race to build this new market is unfolding against a complex and rapidly evolving legal backdrop. Existing right of publicity laws, which vary from state to state in the U.S., are ill-equipped to handle the nuances of generative AI. This legal ambiguity has created a vacuum that both bad actors and proactive legislators are rushing to fill.

Policymakers are beginning to respond. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, which took effect in July, specifically targets unauthorized AI voice cloning. In California, new laws require explicit consent for AI replicas of living performers and estate permission for deceased individuals. On a global scale, the EU AI Act, which became effective in August, mandates that synthetic content must be clearly labeled, providing a significant regulatory tailwind for platforms that offer transparency and verification.

“Traditional ‘all media and all technologies’ clauses in contracts are now a massive liability for athletes,” noted one legal expert specializing in sports IP. “They need to explicitly carve out and control their AI rights, or they risk giving them away for nothing.” This is precisely the gap that athlete-centric registry platforms aim to fill, providing a contractual and technological safeguard.

Beyond the legalities lie profound ethical questions. The creation of “human digital twins” (HDTs) from sensitive biometric and performance data raises significant privacy concerns. Ensuring informed consent and giving athletes agency over how their digital selves are portrayed is paramount. The line between an authentic endorsement and a synthetic one is blurring, posing a challenge to the very concept of identity in the commercial sphere.

The Billion-Dollar Race for Sports AI

This battle for digital ownership is happening within one of the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. The AI in sports market is projected to explode from approximately $8.9 billion in 2024 to over $27 billion by 2030. Venture capital is flowing into the space, with nearly $1 billion raised by sports startups this year alone.

In this crowded field, companies like Callandor are differentiating themselves not by building another performance analytics tool, but by creating the foundational “Bloomberg Terminal for Sports IP.” Their focus is on the missing plumbing—the registry, licensing, and payment infrastructure needed for the entire ecosystem to function in a compliant and profitable manner.

As Volpato's official AI-generated video circulates online, it serves as more than just a clever marketing launch. It is a demonstration of a future where an athlete’s digital twin is an official, controllable, and highly valuable asset. The game has changed, and the new playbook is being written in real-time, line by line, in code and in contract.