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How different does sport look if all the mangers were autist?
I was recently listening to a podcast in which an ex professional football player talked about the politics that go on behind the scenes.
He said a lot of what determines if you are a "good" player beyond the fundamentals is akin to astrology or colloquially known as the eye test.
At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."
This strikes me as highly inefficient and got me to thinking about the types of people that become coaches, scouts and managers.
This is an assumption but the types of people that become football staff are different from the people who become engineers. People who become engineers may have interest in the sport but they often choose jobs more explicitly built for their way of thinking.
What would sports look like if it was run by the STEM type? I'm mainly talking about basketball and football because they seem to have the highest degrees of freedom.
Will these sports look completely different when the STEM guys get to them? How long will it take for the STEM guys to influence sport? 10 years? 20 Years? 50 Years?
I think hyper optimised basketball contains two types of players. Big men and three shooters. The big men try to stop the shooter from shooting threes. There will be no more dunks or two pointers.
I understand this is kinda like the concept of Moneyball. I never watched it tho.
Who knows? Presumably autistic people aren't all identical. They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.
I don't know much of anything about traditional sports, but I doubt that this is literally true. If you're literally the best in the country then I'm sure a pro team will at least sign you.
I do watch a lot of eSports though so I can make a comparison with that. Top players will regularly stream matches, practice sessions, and analysis sessions on twitch. Stream views are certainly correlated with the skill of the player, but it's not a perfect 1-to-1 relationship. Some top players get far more views (and consequently, twitch sub money) than others because they have more interesting personalities, they put more time and effort into growing their streaming presence, or other chance factors. This is unavoidable. Especially in the smaller games there are no "managers", it's about as close to a pure free market as you can get, and when given the choice, the revealed preference of viewers is that they care about other factors besides just raw game skill.
The streamers who make a career as full time commentators or "personalities" get even more viewers than the top players themselves, which is to be expected, because they can focus 100% of their time and energy on growing their twitch/youtube presence, instead of splitting their focus between streaming and actually learning/practicing/competing in the game in question. So things like reputation and brand recognition can't be pinned solely on "managers", the person themselves also has to take an active role and put work into growing their reputation.
It's a game. Why does it have to be efficient?
Presumably because there is a lot of money in making it so
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