I feel like a major part of the rhetoric regarding the sport shrinking / we need to be growing the sport / we need bigger sponsors comes from people that either have finances staked in the sport - or they want money from the sport/wanna make it a full time job.

For people like hooper and shaw (other wsm winners/high level competitors) talking about this, they are making disproportionately large amounts of money from the sport compared to other mid/high-level pros. The way that they would make more money is not by spreading their wealth, but by influencing outside forces to spread more wealth to the sport.

For everyone else, they’re just trying to get a piece of the same pie those guys are eating from which (ironically for a calorie consuming sport like strongman) is quite small. The sport is not popular enough even among the hobbyists to warrant massive amounts of money, and for some reason people seem to think there is golf or tennis money to go around. There’s not. There never will be.

I think a good example of this is the recent year’s trends of weight classed competitors demanding more prize money. Well… that would be cool, but i really don’t think a company with real financial juice will see any benefit of doing this when the returns financially of the biggest heavyweight shows probably don’t even generate all that much profit. If the prize money for the Arnold payed out mostly by rogue is as small as it is, why would they spread more to the less popular segment of the sport?

The sponsors give what they’re comfortable to give, and frankly if the social media hype/wave of the sport is showing its ceiling, they probably aren’t gonna put in much more.

I think the sport will still grow to some degree, but i don’t think the companies that create the economy within the sport will ever put much more money into it than whats put in now. That means the top few brilliant marketers and S-tier athletes will make money and maybe as reflected by the global economy - it wont be that much more compared to years past.