Athletic identity transfer and integration among Saudi athlete-entrepreneurs: a qualitative exploration

The intersection of sport and entrepreneurship has emerged as a dynamic economic driver globally, yet little has been understood about how individuals transition their athletic identities into business ventures outside Western markets. Recent empirical research focusing on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has shed light on this phenomenon, revealing how amateur and recreational athletes navigate the transition into business leadership. Set against the rapid socio-economic transformation of Saudi Vision 2030, the study examines the cognitive, personal, and professional resources individuals carry from athletic arenas into the commercial sector.

Background and Policy Context under Vision 2030

Launched in 2016, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has fundamentally reshaped the nation’s economic and social landscape. The framework explicitly incorporates the sport sector not merely as a tool for public health and cultural enrichment, but as a strategic economic pillar meant to generate employment, drive infrastructure investment, and foster private enterprise. Over the past decade, the country has witnessed a surge in international sporting events, the establishment of new professional leagues, and a historic expansion of female participation in both athletics and business.

Despite these sweeping structural changes, the ecosystem supporting dual careers remains nascent. Unlike mature Euro-American markets—where collegiate systems, professional sports leagues, and formal institutional pipelines systematically guide athletes into post-sport careers—Saudi athlete-entrepreneurs largely navigate their commercial journeys through informal networks, personal resilience, and self-directed initiatives. This unique environment created an empirical gap, prompting researchers to investigate how athletic identity functions when formal dual-career infrastructure is limited.

Methodology and Participant Demographics

To explore this transition, researchers adopted an exploratory qualitative design utilizing semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Conducted in Arabic between December 2025 and February 2026, the study engaged 24 Saudi nationals—comprising 10 men and 14 women—operating as athlete-entrepreneurs.

The cohort was predominantly composed of amateur and recreational athletes with sustained, long-term sport engagement rather than former professional athletes. Specifically, 16 participants engaged in sport at a recreational level, while 8 participated in organized amateur competitive events. Their entrepreneurial ventures spanned multiple modern sectors stimulated by Vision 2030, including sports technology, fitness enterprises, event management, e-sports, merchandise, and athletic training. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the research team analyzed transcripts to identify underlying patterns of resource transfer and identity integration.

Key Findings: Resource Transfer and Identity Layering

The study disaggregated sport-derived resource transfer into four overarching themes: personal traits, professional skills, athletic legacy, and social and community values.

1. Sport-Derived Personal Traits: Participants frequently credited years of rigorous training with instilling patience, endurance, positive stubbornness, and the capacity to absorb and learn from failure. Rather than applying these traits as learned business skills, individuals described them as embodied psychological frameworks.
2. Sport-Derived Professional Skills: Discipline, time management, commitment to routine, strategic thinking, and mental agility emerged as core competencies directly repurposed from athletic training into venture creation.
3. Athletic Legacy: Several participants established businesses—such as fitness clubs, specialty training spaces, and athletic product brands—that served as direct institutional extensions of their sporting backgrounds, transforming personal passion into commercial sustainability.
4. Social and Community Values: Participants emphasized the translation of fair competition, sportsmanship, and collective teamwork into their organizational models, fostering collaborative business environments rather than purely adversarial market dynamics.

The Identity Gap and Gendered Dynamics

A striking finding of the research was the presence of a pronounced identity tension among participants. While 37.5% self-identified primarily as athletes and 29.2% as both athletes and entrepreneurs, external perceptions skewed heavily toward the entrepreneurial role, with 50% of participants viewed solely as business owners by society. Overall, 62.5% of individuals reported a discrepancy between their internal self-perception and external societal imagery.

This identity gap was particularly pronounced among female participants. Navigating a landscape where women’s competitive sport and business leadership have scaled rapidly only in recent years, female athlete-entrepreneurs reported a dual layer of negotiation. Many women faced initial social and cultural resistance regarding their athletic pursuits, making their internal athletic identities hard-won and deeply protective. Consequently, they often relied on sport as an emotional and cognitive outlet to manage the pressures of entrepreneurial leadership, utilizing structured physical routines to balance the demands of commerce and daily life.

Theoretical Implications and Future Outlook

The findings challenge traditional career transition models that frame post-sport movement as "identity displacement" or "identity abrasion"—where a sporting self is discarded or mourned. Instead, the evidence strongly supports an "identity layering" model, wherein entrepreneurial identity is constructed over an enduring athletic self-schema without erasing it.

Furthermore, the study extends entrepreneurial identity theory beyond its traditional Euro-American boundaries by documenting how state-led policy transformations, Islamic values, familial structures, and gender dynamics shape commercial behavior in emerging markets.

As Saudi Arabia continues to build out its commercial and athletic infrastructure, the insights from this study offer critical implications for policymakers and sport managers. Rather than treating athlete-entrepreneurs as novices requiring remedial business education, future career development programs are encouraged to recognize and scaffold the sophisticated psychological and operational capital these individuals have already mastered through sport.