It's tempting to write that off as "well, they've got the budget." They do. But budget doesn't explain what actually makes Wimbledon's social media work: they have no sign-off process. No approval chain. No "let me just check with legal." No content sitting in a Slack thread waiting for someone senior to say yes. A photographer catches a good moment, a creator has an idea, and it's live in minutes. That's how "Overheard at Wimbledon" became one of the most recognisable recurring content formats in this sport — it couldn't exist any other way. The joke is only funny if it's fast.
It's easy to assume this is chaos with good production values. It isn't. Cameron Prentice, Wimbledon's Content Manager, has spoken publicly about how the team actually operates, and three things stand out:
A small core team, tightly scaled up. Year-round, there are reportedly just two full-time staff on digital content, growing to around eight during the tournament itself, plus agency support for specific creative work. It's not an army — it's a small, trusted group with very clear jobs.
A tiered content strategy, decided in advance. Not every post is trying to go viral. The team has reportedly described their output in tiers — something like campfire, bonfire and firework content — where the bulk of what goes out is deliberately low-lift, reliable "always-on" material, freeing up capacity to swing bigger on the posts that matter most. That reliable base is what buys the team room to experiment elsewhere without the whole strategy living or dying on any single post.
Permission to publish imperfect work, fast. The team's philosophy, reportedly, comes down to a simple idea: posted beats perfect. In a live event, a slightly rough clip published in the moment beats a polished one published after the moment has passed. Emotion over production, essentially — if the hook's right, get it out and learn from how people respond rather than agonising over the edit.
Put together, that's the actual engine: a small trusted team, guardrails defined tightly in advance, then get out of the way and let speed do the rest.
You can see a version of this same trust-first logic play out off the official Wimbledon account too — in how brands used the tournament as a stage.
Odd Muse, the British fashion label founded by Aimee Smale, is a good example. Rather than parachuting in a roster of paid, one-off influencer placements for Wimbledon fortnight, the brand leaned on people it already works with — creators, friends of the brand, even Smale herself — dressing them in pieces from the new collection and letting the content happen organically around the tournament: courtside outfits, fittings, day-in-the-life clips. Odd Muse has built a reputation on exactly this kind of relationship-first marketing rather than transactional influencer deals, and Wimbledon gave it a natural, high-visibility moment to show the collection in the wild rather than on a studio model.
The closeness of that relationship was part of the content itself. Fashion creator Isobel Lorna, who wore Odd Muse courtside this year, was shown sharing a hotel room with Smale the night before the tournament, with the pair filming the getting-ready process together — trying on pieces, doing hair and makeup, talking through the outfit. It's a small production choice with a big effect: it reframes the content from "influencer wearing brand" to "two people who actually know each other getting ready for the same event," which is much harder to fake and much easier to trust.
It's the same underlying principle as Wimbledon's own content team, just applied to a brand's outer circle instead of its staff: you don't need a huge, unfamiliar network to move fast and look authentic. You need a smaller circle of people you trust enough to hand things over to.
It's not just Wimbledon's own team and the brands orbiting the tournament that are switched on. The players themselves are increasingly excellent content creators in their own right, and that opens up a layer of cross-collaboration that didn't exist online a decade ago.
Before the 2025 tournament, Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka posted a TikTok dance together — two of the best players in the world, filming lighthearted content days before they'd be competing, purely because that's what their audiences respond to - and because they’re human.
Moments like Carlos Alcaraz's ball-on-racket trick, clipped and posted by Wimbledon's own team, ranked among the tournament's best-performing posts of the year for the same reason: the player did something spontaneous and camera-ready, and the team were ready to capture and post it fast; they didn’t wait to manufacture it.
Brands have caught on too. Bose partnered with Coco Gauff and Ben Shelton on custom, designer headphones despite not being an official Wimbledon sponsor — proof that a smart player collaboration can outperform a formal sponsorship deal.
Governing bodies are now trying to formalise the trend, too: the ATP has partnered with TikTok to help more players build followings and to create a dedicated creator network for tour events, reportedly because only a fifth of the top 100 men's players were active on the platform.
None of it works without the same ingredient running through this whole piece: trust. A tournament, a brand or a governing body has to trust that letting a player be genuinely funny, spontaneous or unpolished on camera is worth more than a scripted appearance — and then get out of the way long enough for it to happen.
It would be a bit one-note to hold Wimbledon up as a pure success story without mentioning the pushback, because there's a real one.
Coverage of this year's tournament — including in the Guardian — has raised the question of whether Wimbledon's social-media-driven popularity is turning it into more of a tourist photo-op than a tennis tournament: influencers in white linen posing at the flower displays, content about queue-beating hacks outperforming content about actual matches, and some longtime attendees and even players voicing discomfort with the shift. Wimbledon's own marketing leadership has been fairly open that this is deliberate — a strategy to court influencers and skew younger, and it's reportedly working, with the average ballot attendee getting younger each year and international visitor numbers climbing.
There's a real lesson in that tension for any brand copying the "post everything, fast" model: volume and speed are a strategic advantage right up until the content stops representing the thing it's supposed to be promoting. Wimbledon can probably absorb some of that criticism because the tennis itself is still unimpeachable — the content sits on top of something real. Brands without that bedrock underneath the content machine don't have the same cushion.
We'd be lying if we said the "small trusted team, loose grip on control" part didn't resonate.
UP THERE, EVERYWHERE was built on a version of the same bet: no traditional office, no rigid hierarchy funnelling every decision through one desk — a distributed, cloud-based team of people we trust to do excellent work without someone hovering over their shoulder.
It's the same underlying idea Wimbledon's content team is running at tournament scale: speed and quality aren't in tension. The tension is between speed and control. Loosen your grip on control, tighten your standards for who's holding the pen, and you get both.
You don't need eight people glued to a live event or a black book of creators to borrow the model. You need:
Most brands won't dare operate this way. That's precisely why the ones that do stand out — and it's the gap we help our own clients close.
Want to talk through what a faster, trust-led content model could look like for your brand?