When Netflix releases a documentary series about an elite athlete, or when a brand closes a content deal with a football club, what’s really being negotiated isn’t just money — it’s control over an identity. An athlete’s name, likeness and personal story have become some of the most valuable assets in the sports media ecosystem, and some of the most contested. In Spain, the legal framework governing that territory hasn’t kept pace with the industry, and the distance from the American model continues to grow.
A legal framework built for another era
The primary reference for image rights disputes in Spain is still Organic Law 1/1982 on the civil protection of the right to honor, personal privacy and one’s own image — a statute drafted long before OTT platforms, modern branded content or all-access documentary series were part of anyone’s vocabulary. The law recognizes the right of individuals to consent to or refuse the commercial use of their image, but in professional sport that right is frequently absorbed by collective bargaining agreements or implicit clauses within standard player contracts, leaving athletes with considerably less room to negotiate.
In practice, LaLiga clubs negotiate image rights collectively for global sponsorship and production deals, while each player retains a percentage — typically between 15 and 50 percent depending on their profile — to exploit independently. The disputes tend to cluster in that gap: can a club include a player’s image in a documentary produced by its kit sponsor without a specific individual agreement? Does the athlete have the right to veto certain appearances? The answer almost always comes down to the fine print, and the fine print is almost always written by the club.
NIL and what Spanish sport hasn’t caught up with yet
The contrast with the American model is instructive. Since July 2021, the NCAA has allowed college athletes to monetize their name, image and likeness (NIL) independently, opening a market that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in direct deals between athletes and brands, talent agencies and content producers in just three years. Players who haven’t yet signed a professional contract are building their own YouTube channels, fronting global ad campaigns and appearing as lead subjects in documentary projects for ESPN+ or Amazon Prime Video.
Spain has no legislative or cultural equivalent. University sport lacks the media weight it carries in the U.S., and the path to professional competition runs through academies, youth clubs and agencies that have historically concentrated control over a young athlete’s image from a very early age. It’s not unusual for a footballer to have signed image rights over to their agent, their academy and their regional federation before they ever reach the top flight — in contracts they signed at sixteen or seventeen.
Documentaries and branded content as the new contested ground
The rise of the sports documentary on platforms like Netflix — through series such as Break Point and Full Swing — and the proliferation of brand-funded content projects built around authentic athlete narratives have made image rights management a first-order strategic issue. An all-access production following a team through an entire season requires every athlete who appears on camera to have signed an explicit release. In theory. In practice, many of these projects are structured through the club or federation, which assumes collective representation and leaves individual athletes with little say over how they’ll be portrayed.
Spanish production companies working in the sports space — Mediapro and Diagonal TV among them, alongside international outfits producing content with Spanish athletes — have had to navigate this legal complexity on recent projects. The result is often image release contracts that athletes don’t read carefully, or whose long-term implications they don’t fully understand: which platforms can distribute the content, for how many years, across which territories, and whether the footage can be recut for future campaigns.
A new generation of athletes taking ownership of their story
Change is coming, if slowly. Elite athletes with strong international profiles — particularly in tennis, padel and athletics — are increasingly working with specialized legal teams that treat image rights as a distinct asset, separate from athletic performance. Figures like Carolina Marín and Jon Rahm have shown that it’s possible to build an independent content ecosystem — social media, documentaries, direct brand partnerships — that doesn’t run entirely through a club or federation’s infrastructure.
For audiovisual producers working at the intersection of sport and narrative, understanding this legal landscape isn’t a bureaucratic detail. It’s the condition that makes the project possible at all. A well-told story about an athlete starts, before the camera is ever switched on, with knowing exactly who that story belongs to.