Applying industrial principles, pro leagues micromanaging fun out of sports

THE NHL REGULAR SEASON starts next week. Hockey being the one sport I follow with any regularity, I’m pretty chuffed about that. Less so about the quality of what’ll be on offer.

This isn’t just some “back in the day” rant. In many ways, the game is much better today. Notably, the players are much more athletic and the equipment more advanced. At the recent NHL cash grab known as the World Cup of Hockey, for instance, it’s very unlikely the players were drinking and smoking in the dressing room, unlike those involved in the now legendary Summit Series in ’72.

The World Cup, which Canada claimed last week, had none of the emotion of the Canada-USSR series. None, even, of the passions of recent Olympic Games. The format and the stakes didn’t lend themselves to the nationalism – both good and bad – of other international tournaments. Lacking that angle, the hockey itself seemed somewhat more pedestrian.

Sure, you had ostensibly the best players out on the ice, but everything seemed much too regimented. Therein lies the issue with the quality of hockey on offer today. And not just hockey, put pretty much all sports, which aren’t as much fun to watch after years of succumbing to Taylorism, which was first applied to the factory floor and has since spread to many facets of our lives, industrializing some of the joy therefrom.

Though scientific management – the study of workflows and standardization of tasks – has evolved from the early work of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s, the basic premises remain. First seen with manufacturing, the practice of breaking work down into smaller, repeatable tasks – thus replacing skilled workers with unskilled or semi-skilled ones – spread through the workplace.

Henry Ford was a supporter of Taylor’s approach, applying it to his assembly line. Thus Fordism was born.

Given the amount of money involved, it was only a matter of time before such principles got applied to sports. Where the stakes were highest, athletes, managers and owners would seek out any advantage.

Bob Stewart, a professor at Victoria University in Melbourne, makes a study of sport management and policy. He notes how sports, particularly at the professional level, have become increasingly commoditized, taking on elements of scientific management.

“The emphasis on quantification is very Taylorist. The need to precisely measure work rates and performance levels constitutes a core part of Taylorism, since the objective of scientific management is, by systematic planning and design, to achieve measurable increases in output and productivity,” he writes in a research paper about the nature of sport under capitalism.

“The time standards of the office have their sports counterpart in the development of ‘scientific’ coaching. Coaches can obtain advice from physiologists on oxygen uptake, recovery rates and blood lactate levels, from biomechanists on proper technique and power to weight ratios, and from psychologists on stress factors and optimal arousal levels. Standards are developed by which subsequent athletic performance, either in training, or competition, can be evaluated.”

We’ve seen the application of Taylorism and Fordism to every facet of our lives. Sports is a microcosm of that, managed to the point that the games are not as good, both from a historical perspective (they don’t make ‘em like they used to) and in terms of entertainment value, which is the larger peril for owners, who are in the entertainment business at the end of the day – lesser product, lower profits.

In that regard, professional sports are victims of their own success. There’s so much money at stake that those involved, from team owners to sports networks, spare no expense in trying to wring every last dollar out of their “investments.” The end result is a whole that is so much less than the sum of the overanalyzed and micromanaged parts.

With NHL hockey, we have the game broken down into second-by-second pieces, every move analyzed and corrected ad nauseam. Because it’s much easier to replicate defensive moves and devise such strategies, we get tighter checking, fewer raise-us-from-our-seats moments and fewer goals ... even as the league laments the lack of scoring. Creativity can’t be standardized and replicated, so it’s largely ignored, except for trying to find ways to negate it.

Fast-moving and fluid, hockey is more chaotic than other sports when it comes to such micromanagement. Even though coaches have tried to stifle the game and take the unpredictability out of it – i.e. the fun for players and fans – they haven’t had as much success as, say, the NFL, where the pace slows to a crawl as every second is orchestrated.

The end result is games that are more boring than they were in the good old days, whatever the date you choose to apply the label – the micromanagement grows worse with each passing year. Is it any wonder, then, that the leagues, team owners and media companies covering sports – often the same groups, as is the case with professional sports in Toronto, for example – repeatedly hype the product, often past the point of ridiculousness? See Rogers’ build up for the World Cup as proof. So, too, for the company’s efforts to hype the coming NHL season, a somewhat panicked move given the mass drop in ratings last year, the first after its $5-billion deal with the league.

The irony that the very efforts of all involved to protect their profits is what may be stifling the games has been lost on pretty much all of them.

Worse still, the Taylorist approach has permeated sports all the way to the littlest of leagues, where organizers and parents with dreams of grandeur often conspire to strangle the joy out of the simple childhood pleasures.

“The common criticism seems to be that sport has become too purposeful, too goal directed, too serious; in other words, too much like work,” notes Stewart, who sees too many parallels between soul-crushing work and play.

“Modern sport is under siege. Social theorists and rank and file sports supporters have variously argued that modern sport is corrupt, commodified and commercialised, a repository and promoter of repressive values, and finally, that it is too much like work and too little like play. Whereas sport is supposed to be, and indeed for some, until recently was, a playful alternative to the world of work, it is now seen to be a mirror image of industrial capitalist society and its concomitant labour process.”