The Tyranny of Optimization: How Nerds Ruined Sports

Think about what you enjoyed the most in, let’s say, cricket while growing up. For me, it’s still pretty clear. Shoaib Akhtar standing at or near the boundary ropes, a distant figure for the batter. Shoaib running in like a freight train from that distance – hair flowing wildly, chains swinging, and then the delivery itself. Sheer brute strength, almost like a javelin being thrown, but instead of a spear being thrown in the air for distance, it’s a small leather and cork projectile being thrown towards another human being. The fear in the batters’ eyes; the intimidation of watching Shoaib come on to bowl; and the hope in hopeless situations that he was definitely going to get a breakthrough. That, for me, is what sports were all about.

I do not get that feeling anymore. Nobody does. Everything you have loved growing up just sucks now. And you know who I blame for all of this? Nerds. Greedy nerds. From optimization (whatever that means), to making minimums (what?), to strictly adhering to what the “advanced” stats say, everything must now agree with numbers. It can be business, workforce planning, or governance, or it can be things you do not associate with nerds like sports, games, and anything else that you have ever enjoyed growing up.

There is also a popular term for how everything just sucks now: enshittification. The phenomenon of enshittification has mostly been used in terms of goods and services that you pay for. The workhorse brick of an AC your grandparents bought in the 1960s probably still works with minimal repairs needed, but the one you got 3 years ago is already nearing replacement. The National microwave your mom brought with her into your father’s family home after getting married still functions without a hitch, but that new countertop machine keeps throwing problems your way. Even the clothes you bought at “fast fashion” brands 10 years ago hold up better today than the ones you bought six months ago and dared to wash twice. Greedy nerds in private equity, and nerdy investors with a lot of money came into these businesses (I guess that’s what happens in businesses, I don’t know), and just focused on the bottom lines. That’s just capitalism pro-max. The same nerds, with the same spreadsheets, have now come for the things we love.

This rage is about nerds destroying things that they had no business destroying. The things we used to escape the world, and the things that gave us some respite from everything burning around us.

I should admit that I am not far from being a nerd, in the traditional sense of the word. But I have always enjoyed playing sports, watching games, and engaging in other tomfoolery as everyone else does. I have always fantasized about being involved in professional sports, but a lack of athletic talent coupled with the aforementioned nerdiness meant that this was never a real option for me. But you know who did not take ‘no’ for an answer? Those very same people who grew up counting probabilities, making actual educated guesses based on numbers, and optimizing strategy with evidence. They went into the world of sports, and they made the old grouches take notice. They showed them that their approach worked. That if they did A, B, and C instead of X, Y, and Z at a particular time in the game, they would have a higher chance of winning.

And honestly, it worked, right?

Regardless of the kind of sport you watch, you saw the game change dramatically in front of your eyes. All sports evolve naturally, with competitive balance shifting back and forth, and administrators running to level the playing field. And there have always been stats that drove strategy. You always optimized your teams and strategies around the best possible opportunities to win. But the way it happens now is just so different. There are entire teams behind the actual teams who are dedicated to crunching the numbers, finding the best possible combinations, and finding the most numerically efficient way to attain victory. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing any of this. I believe this might just have been the next logical evolution of competition in sports. But the consequence of statistical prioritization in sports has meant the death of what really made sports fun: vibes.

There is a lot wrong in the sport of cricket today. You have the greedy execs running the sport, trying to wring every drop of money out of it; you have the stupid politics of the sport where some teams refuse to play other teams but then play them regardless; you have the dominance of one board over all others because, money. But if you skip all of that and just focus on the game itself, do you even enjoy it anymore? Is the over-focus on roles and batting orders, and specialists or all-rounders fun for those watching or playing? Or is it only fun for those decision makers who can run their little tests on their little screens, and then tell the people who have been doing this their entire lives to do things differently? How does any of this make sense?

How is a contest between bat and ball now mediated by a computer telling batter and bowler how to do what they do? Why can’t talent or ability alone determine who wins the contest between a good batter and a good bowler? You can do your homework, sure. But do you really need to optimize and play a left-arm wrist spinner because a couple of the other team’s batters struggle with that kind of bowling? Why not play your best players and let them figure out what needs to be done?

This all boils down to the age-old debate of substance over style. Winning over entertainment. Would you rather your team lost, but did it in a way that at least entertained you? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes. The nerds would disagree, and they would have the numbers to back it up. Their methods do win more games, and winning is what their bosses pay them for. The fans are the customers here, and like every other customer, we get the cheaper product. But what the rest of us get in return is a soulless product, stripped of individuality and on-the-spot thinking. The nerds won the argument for stats. It was just the wrong argument. Who is any of this better for?

These issues matter a lot more than just playstyles and preferences. Such practices inform how the next generation of players are going to learn to play a particular game, and their chances of being selected to play the sport they have trained their entire lives for. For example, the three-point revolution in basketball, spearheaded by the Splash Brothers in Oakland, was amazing to watch initially because it was a novelty. Curry, Thompson and their teammates were “breaking” the game of basketball and showing the world that the game did not need to be played and won inside the paint. They inspired a host of smaller players to play the game differently and succeed. But the knock-on effect has been the three-point revolution just taking over the game in its entirety. Whether you are a 6 foot 2 guard, or a 7 foot 1 center, you need to be able to shoot 3s, or at least learn to get better at it. You can no longer afford to be a freak of nature like Shaq who could hardly land a free-throw. Sure, there are exceptions, but you get the point.

It’s the same with any product you may purchase. There was once an item that was a novelty. It got copied to the point that there are a million variations of it now and all of them are just cheap imitations of the original. Sure, we have more choices. But do we have the same quality?

At the same time, this convergence leads to parts or players becoming replaceable. That old microwave your mom got was built to last as one machine. The new one is built from cheap parts that are designed to be swapped out. The same argument can be made for players in team sports. Players must converge into systems, and these systems treat players as numbers that can just be replaced. If everyone conforms to a very specific role, once that player is not useful, another one who can do the same role is brought in. And then the next, and then the next, and soon you have no individuality on the playing field but instead a bunch of robots who have been trained into a certain mold. Pep Guardiola and his teams, for all their success and revolution in football tactics, are a good example of this for me. His method is to create a rigid tactical system that assigns roles to talented players and pigeonholes them into on-pitch conformity. The Riyad Mahrez in that Leicester team was a different Riyad Mahrez to the one at City. Jack Grealish at Aston Villa was a different beast to the quieter, more obedient player we saw at City. The examples are endless, the sadness the same.

Maybe age has just embittered me. Maybe life just sucks and I want an escape through sports. Maybe I just want to enjoy the sports I grew up with. Whatever it may be, I have increasingly found less and less joy in the world of sports.

When people who have not seen the likes of Shoaib Akhtar bowl in the flesh or in the moment talk about him today, they might mention his strike rate, or his average, or even how fast he bowled. But when you hear the old-heads talk about him, you don’t hear the numbers. He had a start-stop career due to injuries and other issues. But when he played, he was appointment viewing. That’s what they talk about. The person, the aura, the vibes. Today, an analytics department would flag him as an injury risk and manage him out of the side. The numbers would never have given us Shoaib as Shoaib.