The sports and entertainment sectors are being rearranged by advanced artificial intelligence, and a new company wants to ensure athletes are not left out of the value chain. Callandor Group has launched what it calls a dedicated registry to catalog and license sports-related intellectual property in the AI era. The platform is presented as a way for athletes and clubs to gain transparency and financial participation when their performances, voice and biometric patterns are used to train or power AI systems.
At its heart the proposal treats players’ on-field presence as a commercial asset that can be tracked and licensed. Callandor frames the challenge as both technical and legal: many modern models consume video and sensor data without clear permission structures, leaving athletes with no standard mechanism to capture value. The company pitches its service as infrastructure that bridges traditional broadcast arrangements and the emerging market for training rights tied to machine learning systems.
How the registry functions
Callandor’s platform lets rights holders register a player’s or club’s profile so that third parties can request permission to use that material. Through standardized contracts and tracking mechanisms, athletes and teams can set terms and collect fees when their likeness or performance metrics are accessed. The offering also gives content owners a way to convert video libraries into licensed training material while staying in line with regulatory demands like the EU AI Act and recent transparency rules in California.
Technically, the company emphasizes tools to monitor and audit requests from models that might ingest sports footage or biometric streams. By cataloging metadata tied to specific performances, the registry aims to make it easier to identify when an AI system has relied on a particular athlete’s data and therefore whether a royalty should be due. The approach reframes athletes not merely as participants in a game but as contributors to the datasets that power new digital entertainment products.
Leadership, technology and advisory support
Callandor is led by an executive team with backgrounds across studios, sports and engineering. The company’s chief executive draws on long experience in entertainment operations, while the co-CEO is focused on building relationships with elite European clubs. Their chief technology officer brings an engineering pedigree from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is developing what the firm calls the Event Horizon API, a tool intended to secure queries against athlete-related data and manage access controls for model training.
Event Horizon API and compliance
The Event Horizon API is described as a gatekeeper layer that logs requests, enforces licensing terms and provides an audit trail for regulators and rights holders. For clubs and studios, this means a potential mechanism to commercialize archives while meeting emerging legal standards. The company positions the API as both a technical product and part of a compliance stack that aligns with transparency legislation and regional AI rules.
To strengthen its market credentials, the startup has added senior advisers with financing and distribution experience. One adviser brings a track record of backing creative projects and building platforms that scale to tens of millions of users and large sports partnerships, underscoring the company’s ambition to link IP finance with sports media rights.
Market focus and industry implications
European soccer is the initial target for the registry, with Callandor highlighting the global reach of the continent’s top leagues and the regulatory momentum coming from the EU. The firm also notes relationships with prominent clubs’ digital arms and connections to figures with access to major teams and motorsport circles. Those ties are intended to help onboard the kinds of high-profile content that make licensing a viable business.
What this means for athletes and clubs
If widely adopted, the registry could shift how rights are monetized: beyond live broadcast and highlight packages, clubs and players might sell structured access for model training and derivative experiences. For athletes, the change would create a formal channel to claim royalties when their movements, voice or biometric signatures are embedded in AI-driven products. For teams and studios, it provides a clearer route to commercialize catalogs while documenting compliance with evolving AI law.
Callandor’s messaging likens athletes to core components of the digital entertainment stack, arguing that without standardized systems, value created by AI will flow to developers and platforms rather than the individuals whose performances powered those innovations. Whether the industry accepts a new registry as the standard mechanism will depend on club buy-in, legal clarity and the ability of technical safeguards to reliably match model behavior to specific source materials.
As sports increasingly intersect with machine learning, projects like Callandor’s raise practical and philosophical questions about ownership, consent and pay. The company’s registry is an attempt to answer those questions with a mix of product, legal scaffolding and partnerships—offering one pathway for athletes and organizations to assert control over their digital legacies in an era where data is as valuable as the game itself.