The Enshittification of Sports
Why do sports just feel... shittier?
Growing up as a kid sports felt magical. From my nightly ritual of watching baseball games in the basement with my dad to more special events like the home run derby, super bowl, and of course any Illini football or basketball game. No matter what it was, I was enthralled. Captured by the magic of "anything can happen". Every event was like a brand new episode of my favorite tv show where I had to stay locked into the story, character development, and of course the thrilling endings.
Now don't get me wrong I still feel a lot of this magic today. Why else would I remain so engaged? But I can't help but notice how some of these feelings and excitement have been muted. One factor is certainly just my graduation into adulthood and losing some of that child-like wonder. However along with that graduation came a whole new dimension of my fandom where I have a stronger interest in the game outside of the game. Front office strategy, deeper statistical analysis, and the acceptance that sport, at least the commercialized sport that I consume as a fan, is just a business.
But sport has always been a business. Why do I still look back to clips from before I was even born with a sense of nostalgia and yearn for a return to the good ol' days? Things have changed and it has me worried.
Prioritizing eyeballs, not entertainment
Ultimately the root of this change is that the content curated by the commissioner of each league is developed with a money first mindset. Fan enjoyment and fair competition are both far lower on the totem pole. Now this is certainly not a new phenomenon, why have things changed? That's because the source of the money changed.
In the pre-television era revenue was generated by fans being physically engaged in their team and attending games. Owners were incentivized to fill the stands to maximize gate sales. This is why barnstorming was much more common as the novelty of nationally recognized teams appearing in small-town America would draw crowds.
In the early tv era the incentives for owners began to shift. A larger percentage of revenue came from television deals and now teams were able to stay put in their home cities, play for the home fans, and deliver their content to small-town America over the airwaves. This early tv era was in my opinion, the sweet spot for sports leagues. Barnstorming fell out of vogue and leagues were able to prioritize competition within themselves and have nationally televised championship games. TV and consequently advertisers were the main drivers of revenue, but the threat of competition between budding sports leagues forced them to prioritize having a high quality product. This meant a focus on parity with the leagues and a method of determining a champion that solely depended on results on the field.
So where did it go wrong? The enshittification of sports is directly correlated to the rise of social media. Smartphones took the bar of what it takes to "engage" a fan and dropped it lower than was even conceivable just a few short years ago. Advertisers no longer need you to turn on the tv at a dedicated time to get your eyeballs. All they need is for you to pick up your phone for a few quick seconds at any time of the day. This completely altered the incentives of those at the top of the sports business pyramid. We started at "I need to get butts in seats" then evolved to "I need to get eyes to tune into my games on tv" and now stand at "I need eyeballs on my content on social media". And what drives engagement on social media? Bullshit. We are currently incentivizing owners to pump unadulterated bullshit into sports.
What does enshittification of sports actually look like?
There are many different ways that the enshittification of sports rears its ugly head and different leagues are affected in different ways. I could think of countless things to complain about and probably will in future posts so I'll just focus on the two biggest examples.
Expanding Playoffs
Earlier I mentioned that part of a high quality product for a sports league was having a champion that's determined by outcomes on the field. This is starting to be taken away from us. Lets take baseball for example. MLB historically did not even have "playoffs". The top team in the American League played the top team in the National League and that was that. Now we get all division winners plus three wild cards. Yes the league has expanded since the Babe Ruth era, but we do NOT need 40% of the league to make the playoffs. Wtf is the point of playing 162 games if you can be one of the best teams over the course of the season just to get knocked out by some 88 win scrubs who had good injury luck and just got hot at the right time?
Fans (at least real fans. Yes I'm gatekeeping here) want to see the true best team win the championship for any given sport whether its their favorite team or not. Yes it's fun to see your hometown team in the playoffs, but it's exponentially more fun if your hometown team not only makes the playoffs, but is unquestionably the best team. This is the holy grail for any fan and expanded playoffs make this grail even more unattainable. I, and probably most of America, got literally zero joy watching my Chicago Bears make the playoffs at 8-8 after the NFL expanded to 7 playoff teams. They were not even close to being a super bowl team so why even pretend? Sure maybe they could go on a crazy streak, that's why we play the games. But at that point lets not have a regular season and just start the playoffs on day one. Nobody wants that crap. And don't even get me started on the College Football Playoff. That can be a rant for another day.
Pat McAfee
Okay now Pat is just one of many symptoms of a larger problem. It's become harder to find legitimate sports analysis from experts. Owners are incentivized to engage not educate so all our favorite media personalities have become not just spreaders, but creators of the engagement driving bullshit. Fewer and fewer people are truly analyzing games, players, and strategy and major media talking points revolve around power rankings, jumping to conclusions, and what color Caleb Williams decides to paint his fingernails. All bullshit.
Now it's not impossible to find the good stuff. There are many great writers and personalities out there doing great work but they've become the exception not the norm and you're required to sift through the bullshit to find and engage with them.
So now what?
The current trajectory of sports and sports media is concerning. As we continue down the path of prioritizing eyeballs and social media engagement I'm worried that in the long run many fans who make sports great will be driven away and become uninterested. Or even worse sports leagues will evolve into something unrecognizable. Many degrees removed from the competition that created the magic I fell in love with.
All of this is very likely many years away from getting to a point where I would legitimately consider becoming disengaged, long after I'm gone. Sport is also (hopefully) AI-proof, which is another can of worms I could rant about for a while, so I'm confident that there will still be plenty of magic for years to come. This has just kept me motivated to keep filtering through the noise to find the non-enshittified content and continue to enjoy countless the magical moments.
-ox