The Metaphysics of Sport
Why the real action in sports happens before the score.
I’ve noticed that I appreciate soccer (forgive me) more as I get older, and that appreciating it requires a different mindset from appreciating, say, basketball.
Maybe you’ve noticed something during this World Cup, too.
What makes any sport interesting to watch? There’s a certain action that takes place. There’s something happening. What exactly is the thing that’s happening that makes a sport interesting, underneath all the outward mechanics and particularities of putting a ball into a net versus hitting a ball with a bat versus carrying a ball across a line?
Before we tackle that question head-on, let’s notice a surface-level pattern. The simple or naive approach to watching a sports game is to focus on the scoring. Scoring more points is how you win, after all, and ultimately all excitement and energy flows from the final end that is the W, which is instrumentally achieved through the players’ accumulation of points during game time.
You could have a riveting game of soccer culminate in a score of 1-0, like the World Cup, while a championship game in the NBA produces a score of 94-90. The naive view would say that there is no way a 1-0 game could be more entertaining than a 94-90 game, because the former only had one act of scoring, while the latter had ninety-six.
Well, quantity ain’t quality, folks. There’s also the question of which quantity we choose to fixate on.
A sport may seem boring not because nothing is happening, but because the spectator has not learned what counts as happening.
The younger basketball-oriented version of myself may have implicitly defined action as: action = points being scored
So naturally, under this framework, basketball will seem more exciting than soccer because there are more discrete scoring events. But this is not a neutral judgment about the sports; it’s a direct consequence of what one chooses to be his unit of perception.
The mature soccer viewer will see things like:
the movement of possession
the creation and closing of space
incremental territorial penetration
the formation of an opportunity
the interaction of multiple decisions before a shot exists.
When the ball gets near the opponent’s goal, especially if the ball hasn’t been in that part of the field for the last 20 minutes, you can feel the anticipation palpably rise in the air because the probability of something big happening just jumped up substantially and the potency of the goal is closer than ever to converting into its act.
Now, of course, the sophisticated basketball analyst will also notice important variables outside of raw scoring like length of possession and the interaction of multiple decisions leading up to a shot, but in soccer, these factors are stretched out over a longer horizon compared to the relatively compressed flow in basketball, and even the basic spectator is forced to appreciate them at the penalty of becoming bored should they neglect them.
In basketball, the ball player might only need to drive past the first defender, pull up for a jump shot, and then… swish. But for a score to happen in soccer, you might need 6 or so dominoes to line up before the 7th domino of the goal can happen: a couple passes occur in midfield to create an opening, a player takes a risky dribble down the middle and outruns a defender, he passes it to the side, it bounces off a defender, another offensive player recovers the ball and crosses it back to center in the air with another player delivering a header finish into the goal.
I’ll go into some more distinctions down below, but here’s the main point:
The true action of sports is not about scoring but about decision-making. Scoring is just a final stage outcome within a broader funnel of decision and execution.
Sports are containers for meaningful decision-making.
Regardless of what sport you’re watching, the thing that captivates you is watching players make decisions. Those decisions take on meaning within the particular rules and structures of the sport: its teleology, the embodied execution that unites the playbook of theory with the craftsmanship of practice, the risk-reward tradeoffs that arise when those rules meet the requisite skill, and so on.
Sports simulate the experience of consequence through a playground in which choices feel important, must be made under pressure, can succeed or fail, and expose the decision-maker to judgment.
The activity of sport is less consequential than ordinary serious action—what happens on the field doesn’t affect whether your family survives or your vocation collapses—but the activity of sport is more structured and serious than arbitrary amusement. Sport therefore allows people to experience something resembling the gravity of action while remaining within the protected boundaries of play.
It’s like a simulated exercise of the cardinal virtue of prudence.
Prudence is about understanding the big principles and applying them to the particulars of one’s current situation. In any sport, a player with the ball finds himself in a novel situation where he has to analyze the many variables around him with respect to the threats and opportunities they create in service of the ultimate end of winning, assign to the variables the various probabilities of their contribution to success and failure, determine which variables matter most and which can be ignored, decide which course of action to take, and then execute the physical movement required to make the plan work according to his own finite capacity.
In other words, we’re talking about an exercise of applied pattern recognition that we can observe physically over the medium of accidental properties such as kicking, hitting, throwing, running, or catching.
Concretely, this entails the athlete asking things like:
Which foot is the defender leading with?
Is the driving lane open?
Will the center rotate?
Should I finish, pass, or delay?
Once you understand what’s going on in an athlete’s mind—or what should be going on—and then see what actually ends up happening in contrast to that, then any sport you’re watching will become interesting. Know the ideal, and the deviation from that ideal will tell the story. There is a system of variables that the player calculates to aspire toward that ideal action. If you don’t know what that system is, then sure… the sport will be boring.
But baseball is not just about the pitcher throwing the ball and the batter merely trying his best to hit it.
Speaking of baseball, notice how the distribution of decision-making impact varies and can be more vs less concentrated in specific actions compared to others. In baseball, the cause of meaning is front-loaded: most of the game-changing effect will happen when the batter hits the ball, with the rest of what follows being fairly deterministic (you run from 1st base to 2nd base to 3rd base to home — there’s not much choice for a player there).
Again, with soccer, the impact-distribution is spread around a greater number of decisions. The defender who takes the ball and then kicks it down the field launching a counter-attack becomes almost as essential to the scoring act as the striker delivering the eventual goal 5 touches later.
American football operates somewhere in between: The run vs pass vs play-action decision that the quarterback makes dictates a lot, then the actual execution of pass→catch accounts for a big chunk of meaning, and then finally the decisions of the wide receiver or running back who jukes past multiple layers of defense capture the last slice of meaning capture.
There’s also the meaningful aspect of part-whole dependency when you consider the maximum possible contribution an individual can make within the system of a team as it relates to securing victory. We consider how individual greatness participates in the whole. An all-star basketball player can almost singlehandedly take over the game and assert his will onto the scoreboard. The “greatest of all time” soccer player is ultimately dependent on his teammates to create opportunities for him. If you’re a tennis player, then it’s all on you. The distribution of potential responsibility varies greatly among the sports.
Sports are symbols that reveal contact with a deeper transcendent reality. Properly played, they exemplify the virtues. We’ve covered Prudence in great detail thus far, so we can briefly note the patterns of Fortitude (having the courage to take the risk at a critical moment in the game), Temperance (keeping a level head and not letting the emotions and drama swing you), and Justice (the extent that the players or teams get the treatment and outcome they are owed). The sports that have stood the test of time are those that best exemplify the underlying structures of human experience in a distinctive way.
Based on the analysis thus far, we can imagine what it would be like if we were to invent a sport with the goal of making it sticky and captivating, which means that we would have to be very intentional in accounting for these core variables:
Decision density: How often must a meaningful choice be made?
Decision concentration: Are the decisive choices continuous or concentrated into isolated moments?
Agency distribution: How many players participate in creating an outcome?
Agency transferability: Can the player retain or transfer responsibility during the action?
Execution burden: How difficult is it to bodily perform the chosen action?
Risk intensity: How much is gained or lost through aggressive choices?
Stochasticity: How much contingency remains after a skilled action?
Coordination dependency: How many other actions must succeed for mine to matter?
Potency runway: How long can an outcome approach actualization before resolving?
Scoring scarcity: How frequently does the final end become actual?
Narrative accumulation: How much does earlier action alter the meaning of later action?
Individual-whole balance: How does the sport preserve both personal distinction and team dependence?
It would be pretty interesting to do this with you—to create a new sport from these first principles that make any sport intelligible and worthy of delight. Have you ever thought about sports in this way? Is there a perspective you really liked here?
Anyway, if you want to listen to the conversation where I brought up these ideas, check out the first 30 minutes of this X Space:
I’ll provide you a generated summary of the arguments made in there below.
Play ball!
—Drago
Syllogism 1: Sport and prudence
P1. Prudence consists in judging what should be done in a particular situation by properly weighing relevant circumstances.
P2. Sport repeatedly requires agents to weigh relevant circumstances and choose actions in particular, changing situations.
C. Therefore, sport visibly exercises and dramatizes prudential judgment.
Syllogism 2: Why scoring frequency is not the proper measure of interest
P1. A sport is interesting principally insofar as it reveals meaningful decisions and their execution.
P2. Meaningful decisions can occur without immediately producing points.
C. Therefore, the frequency of scoring is not an adequate measure of how much meaningful action a sport contains.
Syllogism 3: Why soccer becomes interesting when perceived properly
P1. Soccer contains continuous decisions concerning possession, space, penetration, timing, and coordination.
P2. These decisions are meaningful even when they do not culminate in a goal.
C. Therefore, a spectator who learns to perceive these decisions can find soccer highly active despite its low score.
Syllogism 4: Decision quality versus outcome
P1. Under uncertainty, a rational decision can produce an unfavorable result.
P2. Sporting decisions occur under uncertainty.
C. Therefore, an unfavorable sporting result does not by itself prove that the preceding decision was irrational.
Corollary:
P1. An irrational decision can succeed through luck.
P2. Sporting outcomes are partly affected by luck.
C. Therefore, success does not by itself prove that a sporting decision was good.
Syllogism 5: Sport as embodied intelligence
P1. Sporting success requires both selecting an appropriate action and physically executing it.
P2. Strategic understanding without execution cannot accomplish the sporting end.
P3. Technical execution without appropriate judgment is directionless or misapplied.
C. Therefore, sporting excellence is a unity of practical intelligence and embodied craftsmanship.
Syllogism 6: Soccer and potency-to-act tension
P1. Anticipation increases as a valued possible outcome approaches actuality without yet becoming actual.
P2. Soccer often extends the progression by which a possible goal approaches actuality.
C. Therefore, soccer creates prolonged anticipation through its extended movement from potency toward act.
Syllogism 7: Why goals produce intense emotional release
P1. The release accompanying actualization grows with the duration, uncertainty, and accumulated tension of the preceding potency.
P2. Soccer goals frequently follow long, uncertain, and repeatedly frustrated buildup.
C. Therefore, soccer goals produce an unusually intense emotional release.
Syllogism 8: Soccer and participatory greatness
P1. A soccer goal ordinarily depends upon coordinated contributions that no single player can completely supply.
P2. Even an extraordinary player depends upon those contributions for his action to become effective.
C. Therefore, individual greatness in soccer is real but participatory rather than self-sufficient.
Syllogism 9: Rules and intelligibility
P1. Physical movement becomes meaningful action only when it is ordered toward an intelligible end.
P2. The rules of a sport establish the ends and conditions by which physical movements count as meaningful actions.
C. Therefore, rules transform physical movements into intelligible sporting actions.
Syllogism 10: Sport as symbolic art
P1. An artifact can disclose objective realities through a humanly created form.
P2. Sports use humanly created forms to display prudence, courage, sacrifice, order, participation, and other objective goods.
C. Therefore, sport can function as symbolic art that points beyond its invented rules to objective realities.
This argument depends upon your realist premise that beauty and the relevant goods are not wholly mind-dependent.