The new Gods of sport – money and machines

We all worship in different cathedrals, some of them built from medieval stone, others are the roads of France, the Crucible or Anfield. We suffer together and make our sacrifices in these places. And we all worship our own God’s, some wear a crown of thorns, others coloured shirts with their names inscribed on the back.   

Playing and watching sport is ubiquitous and engages us at an emotional and spiritual level. Any study of history, mythology, sociology, anthropology or psychology will throw up the reasons why human, particularly male, engagement in sport is endemic. Rules based low risk combat, territorial alliances and defence, shared suffering, family rituals, social bonding, sexual selection, the rush of exercise – the list is endless. Sport is an essential part of our culture and it is culture that separates humans from the other animals we share the planet with. 

I can think of a couple of football related examples demonstrating the cultural and emotional influence of sport, particular over men. First, I know that Trent Alexander-Arnold is not a middle aged, overweight white guy from Telford, yet I was recently in a gym with a man wearing a Liverpool football shirt with ‘Alexander Arnold 66’ emblazoned on the back. In what other environment would one man choose to celebrate another in this fashion? Where else would a male identify with another man so strongly he would wear his name? Secondly, there’s the old joke about a guy finding Alan Shearer in bed with his wife and asking him how many sugars he’d like in his tea. This touches on an ancient a taboo fuelled by eons old sexual jealously that usually inspires men to violence rather than laugher. Mix anything the power of sport and the shape of the world changes.      

However, encroaching commercialisation and mechanisation of sport represents the advance of the profane and a corresponding reduction in value. The amount of money flowing through a sport is not an appropriate measure of its success, it just demonstrates how detached it has become from its followers. Similarly, a mechanical approach to the application of sports rules and laws represents a retreat from the human and the humane. The introduction of Video Assistant Referee (VAR) technology in elite football typifies the foolishness of applying empirical measurability to an environment where interpretation is essential. In an attempt to remove the frailty of human judgement and imagined or real bias, it has amplified it. Endless pouring over super slow motion reruns and the application of laser-like analytics to interpretative rules and laws has thrown up some ludicrous decisions. If anything, the red lines, multiple replays and refereeing reviews emphasise an even greater need for the interpretation of what amounts to no more than ‘data’.  This has certainly not improved the game for players or supporters, nor has it made it fairer. 

I was expecting the machines to take over by marching towards us firing laser weapons. And it looks like they have. We’ve just been lied to by our Sci-Fi movies about what the machines might look like. However disappointing it is that our robot overlords don’t look like the Terminator, we must still resist them for the sake of humanity.

VAR comes from a commercial pressure where winning is judged the number of football shirts sold or TV revenue generated, not by the elation or despair of the players and supporters. The financial implications of a loss or a win in professional sport can be altered with a few keyboard strokes by the club’s accountants but for the devout, the heroic triumphs and catastrophic losses are etched on the soul. The victories are remembered with a warm pride and the losses hurt at depth. They really hurt.  For the money men, a loss shows only on the balance sheet. This is superficial and essentially meaningless to the real value of sport and its multitude of worshippers who will suffer or rejoice at an emotional level.
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The rise of materialism has eroded much of what is truly meaningful for humans and sport has been just one casualty of this. The commercial evolution of rugby is an example where this is having real world consequences for the health of participants. Recall that the game came about by accident but developed into one that could be played by all shapes, sizes and ages. Train on Wednesday, play on Saturday. The infrequency of playing and the physical conditioning of players mitigated injury risk. Now there is a growing litany of young, permanently injured players, performance enhancing drugs and chronic brain damage sacrificed on the altar of those who wear blazers rather than shorts keen to make a few quid. By no measure does this make the sport ‘better’. And of course rugby is not alone.    

So, what’s the moral of the story? Firstly, don’t judge the success of a sport by how much money is involved in it. It’s a poor measure of real value at the best of times and debases sport to the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary. Secondly, however dweeby they look, we can’t let the machines take over control of rule interpretation. Mistakes and all, that needs to be done by humans who you be booed in unison. There’s no point in making up rude songs about machines, because machines don’t care.

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​Not content with telling people how they should ride a bike, Rich Smith is now dabbling in the psychology and philosophy of sport as part of his MSc psychology studies. Flush with meagre academic success, it seems he's now expanding his remit to tell people to rise up and smash the machines. No good can come of this.