Let me preface this rant by making one thing clear: I love sports. I have cultivated favorite teams, who I follow passionately, in all of the American sports and several international ones as well. I’ve set alarms for ungodly hours to catch World Cup matches. I’ve sat in rain, snow, and sleet to see terrible football. I am a fan.
However, I fervently believe that sports have had a terrible, poisonous effect on the mindsets of those who watch them, in one specific way: They glorify zero-sum outcomes.
Many fields in life are collaborative, supportive, multiplicative. More hands make lighter work, and the benefits of ambition and initiative can be generalized to a whole. When one succeeds, it brings success for a whole team, company, organization, and often to wider humanity.
Sports, however, have a strict limitation of outcomes. In an NFL regular season, 272 games will be played. There will be 136 winners, 136 losers. There is no way by which two teams can combine to become a larger, successful organization. There can be no collaboration. No generative effect of compounding success that brings more success to all. The outcomes will always square to zero. 136 wins, 136 losses.1Yes, I’m aware of the possibility of ties. These only further prove my point. Listen to any American talk about ties in sports and you will feel the full fervence of our obsession with winning and the hatred of there not being a winner.
Worse, by design in American sports, every organization save one will end their season with a loss. Whether it is losing out on a postseason tournament or losing in that tournament, sports emphasizes the glory to one winner, and the futility for every other organization who did not reach that pinnacle. The penultimate is merely the first loser, seen as a failure and punished for that failing, even in having seen only one victory fewer than their final opponent.
Sports bleed metaphor into common vernacular, and this continual focus on winners taking all and leaving nothing for second leads to pernicious beliefs in the fans and casual observers of sport. It leads us to sacrificing more than is warranted (“Leave it all on the field”), undervaluing accomplishment and the educational value of failing in having striven, and the growth that comes from having done so, (“I hate losing more than I love winning” and “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”), and the winning-focused mindset allowing for taking risks that would otherwise be unacceptable (“Swing for the fences” and “No guts no glory”).
Worse, this focus on one winner allows for a veneration of those we see as having won. We celebrate billionaires, when to possess billions of idle dollars in resources while millions struggle to live, let alone with even having the barest definition of “enough” should be ridiculed and reviled. Instead, we create a belief in many that, if given the right circumstances and opportunities, we too could be the ones who win. Who get the trophy, the glory, the fame. We’re willing to sacrifice equality and equity in favor of allowing a small number to win, while the rest of us continue to lose.
I do believe there is much to value from sport, in fostering individual growth, in building teams, in creating collective mindsets and sacrifice for a greater whole. I caution, however, that the popularized, artificial environments we create, where there can only be one winner, can be deleterious when applied outside these constraints. We can all win, and in doing so, we can all take some, rather than one taking all.
Notes:
- 1Yes, I’m aware of the possibility of ties. These only further prove my point. Listen to any American talk about ties in sports and you will feel the full fervence of our obsession with winning and the hatred of there not being a winner.