Abstract
Today's sportsmen and women are veritable public figures. They are known to everyone, including those who are not interested in sport. Their visibility and popularity can be seen, for example, in the fact that two footballers (Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi) currently have the most followers on Instagram. Such an observation calls for a series of reflections :
1. The first concerns what underlies this focus on sports stars. While the existence of sports stars is nothing new, their current level of visibility is unprecedented, hence the need to understand what explains the current situation.
2. Secondly, there are differences between sports (footballers are much more famous than fencers), between genders (sportsmen are more in the limelight than sportswomen) and between countries (cricketer Virat Kohli is a star in India, and more generally in Commonwealth countries, but unknown in France).
3. The third aims to explain why a small number of sportsmen and women are over-valued, to the detriment of others. This leads us to reflect on the conditions for personalizing performance, particularly in team sports.
4. The fourth : as well as being famous, the most prominent sportsmen and women also belong to the salary elites. They thus combine two properties that are not always associated, namely fame and great wealth.
We will also seek to put the celebrity acquired by contemporary sportsmen and women into historical perspective, based on a long history of celebrity dating back to the eighteenth century and enabling us to consider the links between performance, notoriety and advertising.
