Will our love of play save sport from the robots?
Sport – in some form or other – will continue to be central to modern life for the imaginable future. The question is: what form will it take in the future?
Sport has been changed and changed again by technological innovations. The 19th-century construction of national sporting cultures was made possible only by the invention of the steam engine and the rapid construction of a rail network.
Similarly, the development of cups and leagues at all level of games – from soccer and rugby to American football and tennis – would not have been possible without the mass production of standardised balls. Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber – and the bladders which were inflated beneath the leather panels of footballs – were an essential step in the development of modern sport.
The internet is the latest technological invention to transform sport; we are only at the beginning of the change that it is bringing to how sport is organised. It is not that traditional sporting activities will be destroyed by this process, but they will be changed by them. This is inevitable.
The reach of the internet is transforming our world in so many different ways. From shopping to social life, and from gaming to celebrity culture, there is nothing that has not felt the insistent press of its influence. It is having a profound impact on human behaviours. Take, for instance, the growth of social media. It is a self-evident truth that it has changed how people live with each other. To believe that sports will stand removed from this process is not realistic.
Sport is an essential part of this process; it provides much of the content, in one form or another.
The omnipresence of sport in the media, combined with the rapidly expanding sports applications available on various devices from computers to smartphones, is the ultimate example of the triumph of sport: there is now no event, regardless of how small and insignificant it might appear to others, that cannot be made accessible across the world using the Internet.
The globalisation of modern sports, which began with international touring teams in various sports and deepened with the organisation of Olympic Games and then World Cups in multiple sports, has quickened and assumed new forms through the internet.
The spread of American commercialised sport is a prime example of this.
In the introduction to a report published in 2020 on the future of sport, Jeremy Jacobs, the chairman of Delaware North, the company that owns the Boston Bruins ice hockey team, said: “These are critical years, as franchises and leagues compete for international attention and seek to build ties with fans who live thousands of miles away. It is time to start thinking of the entire globe as our hometown market.” This is a process that is already well underway. It can be seen in the steady advance of the popularity of American sports for more than 100 years.
American influence saw baseball, for example, adopted with great passion in Cuba and in Japan in the late 19th century. As the decades passed, baseball was joined by American football and – especially – by basketball. This sport – invented in America in the 1890s – has proven America’s great gift to the world of sport.
The erection of basketball hoops in city playgrounds, in schoolyards and, ultimately, to the walls of family houses has allowed for everything from pick-up games to one-on-one to solitary shooting.
Naturally, the wider growth of American popular culture as a global phenomenon was central to all of this. American music, American films, American television all promoted the idea of its sports to the point where they became familiar and desirable.
There is nothing new about empires spreading their sports across the world – the globalisation of sport is not in any way a new thing. Every significant empire has brought its sports to the boundaries of its realm. You can see that through the building of Roman colosseums and amphitheatres at El Jem in Tusinia or at Pula in Croatia or at Chester in England.
It was in these spaces that the Romans staged gladiatorial games and wrestling matches and cockfights.
Will the power and gathering prestige of China transform the sports that people play, or the manner in which they play them?
Similarly, what about the sheer scale and increasing wealth of India? Already, the Indian Premier League (IPL) – founded in 2007 – has transformed the game of cricket in a way that has reached into other sports. For example, the league generates billions of euros on an annual basis, primarily to the Indian economy.
It has also added new ancillary businesses, in a mass way, to the traditional revenue streams of gate receipts, sponsorship, merchandising and media rights. The use of new media – for example, the pioneering use of YouTube – has been powerfully exploited, as has the development of fantasy sports and sportsbook betting, drawing in hundreds of millions of fans.
The short form of cricket that is played in the league, the manner in which it is organised with player auctions, and other innovations have provided content that attracts and holds the interest of the public. The scale of the entertainment is perfectly pitched as a product for a new internet age – a traditional game remade for a digital world, drawing at ease from both aspects of past and present.
What it also clear is that the global reach of sports has accelerated in the new millennium. This is an acceleration that is facilitated by the internet. Having a smartphone, or a laptop, or a tablet of some description, allows you to watch any National Basketball Association, National Football League or Major League Baseball match.
You don’t need a television and don’t need to depend on what a broadcaster chooses to show you. No matter where you are in the world, if you are on the internet you can watch every match live and in full, and are not dependent on television stations to broadcast them. More than that, entire matches sit on the websites and can be watched again in full.
As the sports broadcasting market increasingly splinters into ever more slender pieces, this revolution in broadcasting offers a direct route from sporting organisations to fans, and presents the possibility of huge sums being paid by way of subscription.
The sheer scale of American sports and the extent of their existing commercialisation offers them a massive advantage as they seek to extend their sphere of influence. And where American broadcasting of sport goes, the rest of the world follows.
But the internet is doing much more than changing how the world engages with traditional sports; it has also nurtured a whole new sphere of sporting activity. The great transformation of the new millennium is the growth of esports – short for electronic sports. A huge variety of such games exist, including League of Legends, Mortal Kombat, FIFA, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Fortnite, NBA2K20 and Call of Duty, falling into the broad categories of strategy games, shooters, and sport and race simulations.
By 2017 video gameplay was the leading consumer-entertainment industry in the world – larger than both the film and music industries. This vast hinterland of amateur players is the mass from which an elite of players has emerged to win fame and riches. These players compete in esports competitions, which are organised as a spectator sport, involving professional contestants and watched by viewers online or on television. Professional esports players make their money from tournament winnings, as well as from sponsors and live-streaming revenue.
By 2020, more than 150 million people were watching esports events each month and the industry was valued at more than €1 billion. The industry is driven by Asia, with the western world now following rapidly. The extent of the change is made apparent by the development of esports programmes in American universities and high schools. The inclusion of esports in the 2018 Asian Games – and the success of that inclusion – demonstrates just how far the discipline has come in a very short space of time. Ultimately, esports will take their place in the Olympic Games.
Those who doubt this should be the case should consider that for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, skateboarding – to give just one example of a sport that moved mainstream from the margins – was sanctioned as an Olympic sport.
The internet is only one aspect of technological change that will matter in the coming years. Coaching will be transformed by in-play communication with players, in much the same way as Formula 1 drivers are communicated with by team leaders.
High-tech playing surfaces will allow for incrementally improved performance, as will enhanced equipment and playing gear. Evolution in knowledge of nutrition and hydration will similarly lead to incremental gains.
In general, the ongoing medicalisation of sporting performance will also be essential to the success of any competitor as new insights are used to condition physical performance. Games will also be transformed by medical knowledge in a different manner in that awareness of the adverse impact of sporting actions, notably collisions, will lead to the revision of playing rules; this will most likely lead to a ban on heading a ball as well as severe restrictions on the nature of tackling.
The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to be immense. Advances in computer power and in the gathering and usage of data, with the possibilities for enhanced cognitive abilities in machines, will undoubtedly change many aspects of sport. It will obviously impact on the business of sport by allowing unprecedented insight into consumer behaviour and personalised marketing.
It should lead to better officiating, with a sport such as boxing ripe for more accurate judging. The more significant question is the extent to which AI will be applied to sporting performance. One of the great challenges in sport is how to use information, how to sift through evidence, prioritise that which is considered most relevant and use this as an aid to enhance performance.
The logic of AI is that it should allow an increasingly information-based approach to such matters as pre- and post-match analysis of both teams and their opponents. For example, AI – properly harnessed – will help teams understand patterns of play used by their opponents. And in terms of preparing players, workouts will increasingly be personalised and managed through realtime information feedback to improve both technique and efficacy of effort. The bottom line in all of this is not just accuracy of information, but also accuracy of analysis and accuracy of application.
The great unknowable is the extent to which AI will play against the undeniable emotional aspect of sport. Will human behaviour be so fundamentally changed by AI that emotional actions and reactions will be overwhelmed? And even if not overwhelmed, to what extent will they be tempered?
It will be fascinating to what how this unfolds; emotion is fundamental to the meaning of sport, to the connections between participant and spectator, to the drama that unfolds. Any significant loss of emotion will diminish the experience and the spectacle.
In all of this, the manner in which global society is changing will impact on sport in ways that we do not yet appreciate. Rapid urbanisation is a prime example. The United Nations note that some 1.5 million people are added to the world’s cities every week.
This urbanisation is – in large part – driven by population growth. Indeed, the estimates are that some two-thirds of the estimated nine billion people on the planet in 2050 will be living in cities. How will international sport, currently largely organised on a nation-state basis, manage in this context? Will there be a greater shift to global competitions between clubs which represent cities?
The search for rapid economic growth, the cycles of boom and bust, the vast income disparity and the dislocation that flows from it, are also important. Where does sport fit into this pursuit for wealth and the power that flows from economic growth? What will be the sporting tastes and patterns of consumption of this growing global population, and how will those tastes and patterns be shaped?
Given that population growth, urbanisation and increased economic activity are a formidable factor in climate change, the looming environmental crisis will inevitably shape the future of sport.
As the temperature rises and resources of – for example – food and water become more pressurised, how will sporting bodies and event organisers meet the challenges of sustainability? No serious policy or strategy or vision for the future of sport can avoid this issue; it is clear that the context of wider environmental change will ultimately define much of how people play sport.
A great example of this is the Winter Olympic Games. Such is the impact of greenhouse gases that just a little over half of the more than 20 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics will be certain of being able to act as host by 2050.
How does sport react to this? The installation of snow-making machines and of snow-farming might allow winter sports to survive, but there is an environmental cost in terms of the use of water and resources to allow this happen, which exacerbates the problem that already exists. Sporting organisations have yet to seriously grapple with these issues.
There is a thesis that the logical endpoint for the technological change that is underway will see humans replaced with robots, whose talents are refined, time and again, for enhanced performance. The ensuing sport would be entirely premised on entertainment, even voyeurism. Specifically developed robots already excel at such feats as throwing three-pointers in basketball and playing table tennis, to give two instances.
It is true that robots currently have a range of motion that is far behind even non-elite sports people. But it took some five decades of computer programming development before the supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a game.
The prospect of highly developed robots competing against each other in sporting events is a realistic one.
But while there is every likelihood that such a sporting world might be created, it will be to augment that which exists for humans, not to displace it. The love of play that drives sport sits at the heart of the human experience – just as it has across millennia. This love of play is something that is reinvented, again and again, to fit different societies in different places at different times. It seizes the mind as well as the body. And, ultimately, that is what will drive the future of sport.