A Sociological Analysis Of Every Instagram Post Tom Brady Has Shared Since His Divorce

Finally using my Oxford master's degree.

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We started talking about Tom Brady’s post-divorce Instagram strategy on The Sports Gossip Show around when we theorized that Jordon Hudson was running Bill Belichick’s Instagram account.

At the time, Tom posted a photo of a sunset with The Chicks’ cover of ‘Landslide’ after news broke that his ex, Gisele Bündchen, was having a baby with her jiu jitsu-instructor boyfriend.

It felt like such an intimate look at Brady’s inner thoughts. Almost as if he was reacting in real-time to the news just as the general public was.

Flash forward to the present day and Brady continues to be a very online man.

He’s shared strange AI-generated memes, lengthy EOY recap posts with moody captions, and, of course, photos of him playing football even though he’s retired.

It got us thinking: Given what we know about his relationship with Gisele, his career as a professional football player, and just as a recently divorced guy, how much did his Instagram strategy change after the divorce was finalized?

We go into all of our findings and takeaways in today’s episode of The Sports Gossip Show, which you can watch or listen to, but I wanted to share some of the original content analysis I conducted on his feed for the episode.

Why would I do this?

Well, I did get my master’s degree in sociology from the University of Oxford, where I wrote a 10,000-word thesis on how the top 15 most followed male and female celebrities use Instagram.

For that research, I conducted a content analysis on over 5,000 images and videos and interviewed social media managers for celebrities to understand the extent to which public figures curate their image on Instagram.

While a sample size of one isn’t really the most academically sound, I figured it might be interesting to apply the same methodology and theoretical framework to Tom Brady’s post-divorce Instagram strategy.

Here are the findings: