Rules in professional sports are designed to maximise entertainment value, since revenue potential depends on attracting an audience. It occurred to me recently that this could be why some decisions about changing rules seem dumb.
We tend to believe rules are there to ensure fair play, which is why it can be frustrating when a sport body like Fifa drags its heels over using new technology to ensure that referees don’t make bad calls about things like whether a soccer ball actually crossed the goal line.
But there is a difference between what the team wants, and what brings in the most money for the governing body or a league. Every team wants to win, in theory, but everyone else in the sports ecosystem, from team owners to TV networks, want to make money.
Controversy and conflict on the field don’t win matches, but they are part of the entertainment value that keeps money moving. Getting fans riled about a bad decision makes for lively post-play discussion. The more there is to talk about, the more beer can be sold in sports bars, the more sports analysts have to write about, and ultimately the more bums will be on seats at the stadium and in front of the TV.
The point of sports is that it is pitting human beings against each other, with all their fallibilities, and if fallible refs were not part of the equation, we might as well get rid of them altogether. I’m sure it’s technically possible to replace them with technology, but it wouldn’t seem right, would it?
But we aren’t dealing with “normal” humans any more in pro sports, as pointed out in a recent interview on TED.com, players’ natural abilities are augmented with new kinds of equipment, new training methods and even new drugs.
Some of the advances are technological, like finding ways to give players real-time feedback so they make better decisions on the field. Others use psychology or physiology to get the body to work harder: South African scientists are testing ways to get the brain to allow people to take their muscles past normal limits, to override internal alarms that trigger when we push too hard.
Rules change over time in order to incorporate these enhancements and players adapt with new strategies to keep their competitive edge. Sometimes new strategies make the game less entertaining, not more so, and rules again need to be updated to keep fans watching.
Sports are a completely artificial territory for people to do things that would make no sense in any other context. They use contrived rules to set the limits of play, and it’s what we want from sport that determines the rules.
What got me thinking about all this is that other rules – those we follow and those we break as we go about our daily lives – have also emerged from a complex history of changing circumstances. This is why many of them seem irrational. Often they really are irrational, a legacy of past circumstances that no longer apply; but sometimes what seems wrong is just a difference of perspective.
Those tasked with writing the rules that govern our lives, and those who enforce them, would do well to consider what it might take to gain our trust and compliance.
Too often we hear, in response to our objections, that “you don’t understand why we need this rule; it’s there for your protection”. But really it’s often the rule-makers attempting to protect their own interests, like municipalities trying to minimise complaints against them by setting rules that limit behaviour that could spark conflict in public spaces. Such rules sacrifice freedom for the sake of expediency, and tend to reinforce the idea that it is the municipality that is responsible for our behaviour. Citizens become less autonomous and more like players in a game with some individual choices but increasingly constrained by rules and strategies that aren’t in our interests.
Intuitively, we understand this sleight of hand. Or at least we sense that we aren’t being treated with sincerity, and that the governing body is more interested in its own preservation than in our well-being and enjoyment. And so we play life as a game, complete with deliberate fouls and penalties and red cards and appeals and coaches to guide us to a win. It can be entertaining at times, but I wouldn’t call it fair.
@carbonsmart