The case against 'analysis'

From The Case For Less Sports by Ben Johnson

Sports are not — and probably should not be — about netting a championship trophy as the return on investment for optimally-leveraged resources. Nor should sports be about knowing more than your neighbor does about the footwork drills being run with aplomb by your team’s third-string quarterback, and hoarding that information in order to one day crush him in a dynasty fantasy league.
That’s not sports. That’s business. That’s WORK. Let’s stop working so hard, everybody. They’re just sports.

This seems to be a provocative call to bring discussion on sports back to a human level, in which I suppose we tell stories of the bravery and commitment of sportsmen to their craft, rather than considering the circumstances in which that craft was exploited by the controllers of the purse-strings for profit and success. Of course I think there's plenty of room for both, but then I would say that wouldn't I?

In football I've seen a similar case made by Danny Baker.

Anyone who takes football in any degree seriously and treats it like a science that we study – mainly the people who sit on sofas on mainstream television like [US Presidential monument] Mount Rushmore and pore over this stuff like Nostradamus like you can predict it, are wrong. It’s the same old thing. Football punditry is the most bogus science. 

You know, we [England] are not the best team in the world, but it is very hard to say consistently who is. Football’s chaos. If we played the World Cup again next week, we probably wouldn’t get the same results and we might do well. You cannot predict it.

I half-agree with both of these articles. I think the punditry on television is absolutely dreadful for the most part. But I'm not sure I particularly like the unanalytical approach that simply celebrates the fact that fans and players have met together in a place where sport happens to create amusing anecdotes for the likes of Danny Baker to recount later.

I think the reality is probably that the different approaches to looking at sport feed off one another. If the World were full of Danny Bakers we wouldn't need Danny Baker, and if the world were full of human stories about sportsmen then they'd stop being special. Baker is right that football is chaos, but that's part of the fun of trying to understand it.

Maybe the trick is not to forget that these are humans and human stories, and not to forget that football enthralls beyond our ability to solve it with science.