This Is Your Brain on Sports [Book]

[nevets88]

Not sure whether this is a what are you reading thread or a sports thread, think it's more a sports thread. Skimmed through a review of the book and downloaded it. Always a sucker for people trying to explain the insanity that is professional sports, the money, its structure, etc... I love watching professional sports, but have dialed back more and more from being a fan due to the corruption, money and politics behind it.

There's also some interesting chapters - Why the best players make the worst coaches, Why ultra endurance athletes are also recovering addicts. 

This may be another Malcolm Gladwell type book, great writing, but superficial, I'll know in a week or so.

Show Them the Money
Is the sports business a bubble?

Quote

Futterman’s other concern is more alarming, at least to the oligarchs of professional sports. He thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of its actual audience. “One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination,” he says. It’s true that hundreds of millions of people watch special events like the World Cup and the Olympics, but the day-to-day audience for sports is tiny. In the United States, it amounts to about four per cent of households. Fewer than three per cent on average watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer than two per cent watch their home-town N.H.L. teams.Futterman’s other concern is more alarming, at least to the oligarchs of professional sports. He thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of its actual audience. “One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination,” he says. It’s true that hundreds of millions of people watch special events like the World Cup and the Olympics, but the day-to-day audience for sports is tiny. In the United States, it amounts to about four per cent of households. Fewer than three per cent on average watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer than two per cent watch their home-town N.H.L. teams.

...

Cable works by bundling: your monthly cable bill is split up among the channels your carrier provides, whether you watch those channels or not. Futterman says this means that about twenty per cent of the average cable bill goes to sports channels, which pay the teams or the leagues for the right to show their games. Which means that sports are currently enjoying a very large subsidy from a public that doesn’t watch them. Cable looks to be on the way to disaggregation, and, when that happens, sports will be worth what the actual audience is willing to pay for them. We may be looking at a bubble.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-professional-sports-bubble

[iacas]

I read the book and tweeted about it a few times. I liked it quite a bit. There were a lot of things that made sense. A few filler chapters, like the one about "why every athlete feels disrespected" or whatever, but on the whole, a worthwhile read.

You can get it here: http://amzn.to/1TdKrh9 .

 

[Buckeyebowman]

I don't know that I trust this guy's statistics. I notice that the segment of his statistics you quote refer to the NBA and NHL, two of the least watched sports. And if "all politics is local" it could well be said that "all sports is local". Why on earth would baseball teams like the Yankees or Dodgers be getting quarter billion dollar LOCAL cable contracts for their telecasts? And who knows what the NFL teams are getting!

[nevets88]

5 hours ago, Buckeyebowman said:

I don't know that I trust this guy's statistics. I notice that the segment of his statistics you quote refer to the NBA and NHL, two of the least watched sports. And if "all politics is local" it could well be said that "all sports is local". Why on earth would baseball teams like the Yankees or Dodgers be getting quarter billion dollar LOCAL cable contracts for their telecasts? And who knows what the NFL teams are getting!

That was a misquote on my part, my mistake. That's from the review of another book:

Matthew Futterman’s “Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution”

I should have quote this:

Quote

“This Is Your Brain on Sports” (Crown Archetype), by L. Jon Wertheim and Sam Sommers, is a reader-friendly look at what the authors refer to as “all the batshit craziness that courses through the sports ecosystem”—a phrase that captures nicely the jocular and good-natured spirit of their undertaking. Some twenty sports-related topics are taken up, from why people believe that quarterbacks are good-looking (they’re not, apparently, or not especially) to why international sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup don’t make Earth a more peaceful planet. (On the contrary, they often seem to inflame tensions.)

Wertheim and Sommers’s basic conceit is that although people seem to behave irrationally when it comes to sports, they’re acting no differently from the way they do in the rest of their lives. If cheering on the underdog, loving perennial losers, and risking life and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt fired out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd things to do, then it’s natural to be irrational. “Your brain on sports,” they conclude, “is really just your regular brain acting as it does in other contexts.”

 

[Buckeyebowman]

Ah, that clears things up a bit. But I still don't trust Futterman's stats, but there is a point to be made. There's an afternoon drive radio talker out of Cleveland who used to talk sports exclusively.  A few years back he changed format and now talks about everything under the sun. His reason was that, even in a sports crazy town like Cleveland, no more than 35% of the total population is interested in even one pro or amateur sport. Thus, a minimum of 65% of the population has no interest in sports whatsoever. In order to broaden his potential listener base, so did his subject matter.

As for Wertheim and Sommers, their comment on the Olympics was interesting. The "one worlders" will try to tell you that nationalism is dying out. Then, what is the Olympics but a gigantic celebration of exactly that?