Perhaps one of the biggest unforeseen consequences of the rise of digital media has been the fact that sport and culture have come together in such a big way.

This isn’t a totally new phenomenon, of course. Sport has always had a big role in the cultural makeup of many countries. Olympic Games, World Cups and other major events have always been red letter days for whole nations. But there’s just something about social media that amplifies it even further.

It has allowed publishers, brands and even athletes themselves to merge the two in a much more obvious way. For example, the below video is part of Copa90 a documentary series on world footballing rivalries. But it has gone even further than that, too.

It has also allowed brands to get involved. Especially those who can claim to be at the intersection of sport and culture anyway – Adidas and Nike have managed to turn their products into fitness gear, ensuring they can market their trainers and hoodies as lifestyle pieces rather than sportswear. Fitness as a way of life has a much broader appeal than simply sport.

But then this goes beyond brands and the idea of sport as culture, too. It’s also allowed sports stars to become bigger celebrities than ever before.

Again, it’s nothing new that the biggest athletes are well-known or that they are icons, but digital media has been able to amplify that phenomenon even further. Whereas Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar would undoubtedly have been famous if they were playing 20 years ago, they could never have reached tens of millions of people with the click of a button in Instagram, sending their style into the minds of masses of people whose style choices may well have been altered by the Nike trainers taking pride of place.

Bleacher Report are tapping into that with their basketball House of Highlights coverage, and a report in Digiday last week suggests that the publisher is about to do something similar with football, tapping into the celebrity and the cultural significance of the game’s world stars and presenting that alongside the highlights rights that Turner – the owners of Bleacher Report – have acquired to the UEFA Champions League.

Sport is a cultural thing, but its links to other parts of cultural life like music and fashion are only made stronger by social media, and it seems that’s only going to increase.