Sport and purpose?
TurquoiseTastic
Shipmate
in Purgatory
Nico Rosberg says sport must have a purpose.
My instincts are that this is all wrong - sport should not have a purpose, otherwise it isn't really sport.
Perhaps it is unjustifable to spend so much on mass spectator sport if it doesn't have a purpose. I would suggest that the answer is to reduce the amount of mass spectator sport rather than trying to give it an artificial "purpose". "Environmentally friendly" F1 seems especially absurd. Surely it would be even more environmentally friendly not to have F1 at all?
Thoughts?
My instincts are that this is all wrong - sport should not have a purpose, otherwise it isn't really sport.
Perhaps it is unjustifable to spend so much on mass spectator sport if it doesn't have a purpose. I would suggest that the answer is to reduce the amount of mass spectator sport rather than trying to give it an artificial "purpose". "Environmentally friendly" F1 seems especially absurd. Surely it would be even more environmentally friendly not to have F1 at all?
Thoughts?
Comments
To the promoters, it’s a business. To the participants, it’s an income.
To viewers it can be many things: entertainment, a way to pass the time, an appreciation of skill, or if one is the sort of person who enjoys the herd mentality it can be comforting to go to, for example a football match, and all gather together once a week in one place with a common purpose, chanting and singing in unison the praises of one's favourite person or team.
Sound familiar?
Anyway, taking F1 as the example, it’s fast and furious, good fun, I enjoy it, and the teams will tell you (and it might even be true) that successful developments in F1 in economy and performance find their way into road vehicles soon after.
Same could be said of Formula E, or Extreme E, which I also enjoy.
I can see Rosberg's point, up to a point. But it’s a small step from what he suggests to pompous virtue signalling, and that’s just dull and boring and will kill any joy in sport.
The human animal is a herd animal, and the great majority still needs to satisfy the urge to be part of the herd. There are very few of us who can manage without at least a little touch of a collective identity. We might not need to be part of the herd every day, but if we can get our fix for a few hours on Sunday? Then that might be enough.
Being part of a group, tribe, herd - whatever you want to call it - has a few problems though. One of which is that you're exposed and influenced by the values of the group. Those values might impact how you act in society otherwise. There's a lot of power in this. In Turkey, the leading football teams have been fairly secular and not aligned with Erdogan, leading Erdogan at great cost to pretty much making his own team. (Successful on the pitch, not so much outside of it.) https://atalayar.com/en/content/basaksehir-settles-top-turkish-football-thanks-erdogans-drive
That power can be used for positive purposes. For instance battling racism, homophobia, etc., which some sports clubs already do.
Fixed broken link. BroJames Purgatory Host
And although supporting/ watching our local football team was a thankless task, my purpose in going was Legitimatised Letting Off Steam. I could yell and holler for hours and it was absolutely permissible
You may be right. But, if so, this corruption goes back at least to the ancient Greeks.
Well Barclaycard had the splendid wheeze of paying a 'Chant Laureate' when they sponsored the Premier League ...
Basketball was originally developed as a way of keeping our football players in shape, though it has long separated from that purpose, Also a good way to pass the long winter months.
Track and Field activities also come from military functions
Cricket apparently came from a children's game. I can see how it helped to improve eye-hand coordination. Same with our baseball. Tennis also has the same function.
My football team is about to be relegated from the Premier League but we will be back. Today we had a really good win and that is something to be celebrated.
When I retired from playing cricket I became an umpire. I enjoyed being out there, involved in the game, but it bought me no joy because I was not a member or supporter of the winning team. It also gave me no joy to spoil a batter's afternoon by giving them out
None of the adults I know who play sports have unrealistic expectations of what they're going to accomplish - they play for fun and exercise and because they enjoy competition. My 52-year-old sister-in-law isn't up at an ungodly hour for hockey practice on winter Saturdays because she thinks the NHL might come calling.
Professional sports are a different thing, to some extent, partly because people make a living at it and partly because the spectacle is a huge part of it. Players wouldn't be paid to devote themselves to sport full-time if people didn't pay to watch them. And the ones who played in empty stadiums last year say it wasn't the same without the crowds; they had to find ways to psyche themselves up and get their adrenaline flowing for games. It's a performance comparable to performing music - it's different with an audience.
Some people play only for themselves, and some play for others. Professional sports don't ruin sports any more than professional orchestras ruin music.
Ideally sport would be about physical activity which enhances physical, social and mental health. Spectator sport is about money. Inactivity is a public health issue.
Lacrosse was mentioned above. Its the only sport where cross checking and charging are legal. I played goal and got hit a lot. It's more aggressive than hockey (the real kind, on ice). We all played hockey growing up and shinny.
I played masters soccer until pandemic. Not sure I'll return, but will sorely miss it. The youngest players are 30 years younger than me. It's the physical activity and the social aspect. People from all walks of life, levels of education, views on things, political leanings, religions, ethnicities. A great way to get out of your echo chamber of friends and colleagues.
When I was young and frivolous, I used to play competitive bridge at a fairly high level. Bridge keeps trying to brand itself a "mind sport" which I think is a bit silly. But there's no doubt that it did a lot of people quite a lot of good - most players were retired (some very retired) and it provided a combination of mental stimulation, a regular commitment to get people out for an evening, and plenty of social contact. I played several times with one old guy who had lost the ability to speak (in a stroke, I think) but was mentally as sharp as ever. He carried a few laminated index cards around with him that he'd point at to tell you what beer to go and get him from the bar, or call you an idiot and ask what on earth you thought you were doing when it was quite obvious that you should have played a heart. He could communicate quite well by tapping with various degrees of force on his pre-made list of words.
Aye, right.
I think it is very good for mass spectator sport like F1 and the footy to take the lead in social causes. I agree with M. Rosberg about that, and showcasing eco-friendly fuels would be a good fit for his sport.
The Melbourne sport, Victorian Rules Football, has taken a lead on a number of issues, or at least got on board with them. They include disability rights, womens' rights (mainly an ongoing exercise in reform and self-criticism, but also supporting the establishment of a national womens' league), indigenous reconciliation and anti-racism (also an ongoing exercise in reform).
This was originally true. Cricket is the older sport and many clubs started football teams
Association football, maybe. Football itself is centuries old. The early forms were something akin to what is played in Kirkwall at Hogmanay.
The sports world is quite alien to me so my observations may not be entirely coherent-- my physical activity is quite remote from team life. I hike 30km in a day without real trouble and, before the Plague closed Ontario pools, cheerfully swam a thousand metres four times a week but team sports always seemed to be a war substitute for me.
Lacrosse, as played by the Mohawks in my home town, was very obviously intended to be such, and ambulances were regularly called to the arena in nearby Hogansburg to take seriously injured athletes for treatment. Deaths were not infrequent, but not unknown in the pre-helmet epoch. In those days, private school teams in New England would train for a year when matched against a Six Nations team.
I was related to a former NHL player for some years, and recall a conversation when we spoke of the pay level as opposed to what teachers, etc., received, and he said that athletes' pay was irrational. They were paid as entertainers. He said nobody would call Michael Jackson an impressive musical talent, but the spectacle sold tickets and television advertising. He told me he would play the same way and the same effort for nothing--- he just loved to play hockey. The best man at his wedding was more mercenary-- he quit after two years in the NHL as he had enough to finance veterinary school and to set up shop.
While I find professional sports puzzling, I found that I am inclined to watch the kids at the local flooded corner lot as they shoot across the ice at -15C (cf Jane Siberry's Hockey song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxPEBW4o740), with their shivering immigrant parents watching with bemusement and pride.
These past few weeks the United States has been going through March Madness in which 32 of the top collegiate basketball teams have been paying in a national tournament. We were down to the final four yesterday. Those have been pared down to Gonzaga University, a Jesuit school, and Baylor University, a Baptist school. Gonzaga is undefeated and I think Baylor has not been to the championship in over thirty years. They rest today and will play the final game on Monday. Should be a good one.
Meanwhile, baseball is starting. Some of the earliest games have been played while it was snowing.
And the cycle continues.
Pro athletes' pay isn't more irrational than other people's; in team sports, owners collect enormous sums from customers, and they negotiate contracts with employees and/or employee unions, paying what they have to in order to keep the money flowing in. The harder the employee is to replace, the more money he makes.
The article linked to in the OP talks about sports having a purpose in ways that seem more bolted on than innate - it's good if successful athletes use their money and platforms to do good in the world, but those things are good coming from anyone with those assets and don't seem to have much to do with sports per se.
Yeah - I don't think there's much that a famous sportster can do in terms of "good" that someone like a Kardashian, or whoever the "influencers" the kids all know about couldn't do. Some sports players do indeed use their platform to do good things. Others don't use it for anything, and just want to sport. And some are thoroughly unpleasant people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football
Whoever told you that was wrong. Football was known, and banned, in England well before European contact with the Aztecs.
The problem of unrealistic expectations is probably seen most accutely in (British) academy level male footballers. Unlike the USA there isn't any kind of "not quite pro" college level competition. University sport is very definitely an amateur thing, with the possible exception of people in some more niche things like (field) hockey, and athletes studying sport related degrees at Loughborough.
For teenage footballers with decent talent the goal is to get a professional contract. They will go and train full time, and although things are improving on that front, they often tend to ignore studying to pass exams assuming they will make big bucks playing and it won't matter.
The problem is that very few do, certainly not at Premiership level, and there are well documented issues with these young men suffering mental health crises or struggling to earn a decent living without any qualifications when they are dropped due to injury or labelled "not good enough" to go on the club books as an adult, having grown up (and some academies start recruiting at 9) devoting their life to "the beautiful game". If they're lucky they'll play in the lower leagues, but the money is definitely not as good.
Women's football is still sufficiently second fiddle in the UK, even at full time pro level, that going into a playing career without a plan B is rather silly
Hollywood is famously full of "actors" working as waiters while waiting for the break that never comes. There are whole TV shows based on the premise that many people want to be pop stars and have a wildly unrealistic assessment of their own abilities or prospects. A few published authors make a lot of money; most barely make enough to live on, if that. And apparently these days everyone wants to be a youtube star, where a small handful of people without much in the way of discernable talent make millions of dollars making pointless videos, whereas a much larger number of pretty similar people make nothing.
At least with something like football, there's a somewhat objective measures of ability.
Various references to football (by name) start in the early 14th century:
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/no-ball-games
I believe most parts of the world have indigenous ballgames. That soccer, rugby, et al developed out of the English ball games played between villages often on indefinitely sized pitches is not I think seriously in doubt.
There's reasonable scepticism and then there's ignoring the historical record.
Whose historical record? That's the point.
Except in this case, the historical record is older than the colonialism. The earliest reference in England I'm aware of is a 1314 decree by the Lord Mayor of London banning "hustling over foot balls". If you want to posit indigenous American origins for the modern game of soccer, then you need Leif Ericson and his merry band of Vikings to bring the game from Canada, and have it subsequently imported into England that way. And then you'd need some evidence that the people in Canada a thousand years ago were playing football. And I don't think you have any of that.
Are you suggesting the order banning football in London in 1314 (and similar orders under various monarchs over the following two centuries) was forged or are you suggesting that football crossed the Atlantic pre-Columbus?
I think there's a difference in that football clubs in a sense require unsuccessful trainees to exist in order for the successful trainees to have someone to train with, whereas successful films and actors aren't dependent on unsuccessful actors in the same way.
E.g. the major academy product at Liverpool at the moment is Trent Alexander-Arnold; for him to reach his level of success, it was necessary for him to have a decent selection of other lads in his academy cohort to train with; but simple economics means the majority of those other lads will not play professionally.
I'm not sure this is necessarily wicked or underhand, and I don't think it would be cured by having less money in the game, but it is something that academies need to acknowledge so that no-one is under any illusions.
I'm suggesting that it isn't the same game at all, c.f., wikipedia:
"These archaic forms of football, typically classified as mob football, would be played in towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated pig's bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town. "
Sure they were playing some sort of game, not recognizable as soccer. Call it football it you want, but it isn't. The non-use of hands as a prime feature.
It's not me calling it football, it's the historical documents themselves (not just in England either but in Ireland too). It's the precursor to Association Football, Rugby Football, Aussie Rules Football, American Football, Gaelic Football and so on. Association Football is probably the furthest from those roots (as you say it now almost completely forbids handling the ball) but the divergence in codes as they were formalised in the 19th century is fairly well documented.
Incidentally I wonder whether the name "football" comes not from the practice of kicking the ball but from the fact that it is played on foot rather than on horseback?
But the Mesoamerican game doesn't sound much like soccer either.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_association_football. It appears that not using hands wasn't standardized until the 19th century, when modern football (soccer) became distinct from rugby and other related games.
I think anyone disagreeing with this:
would need to provide some very good evidence.