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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.
Some sports like baseball and basketball are pretty autistically data-obsessed and managers have based a lot of decisions on data for many years.
I read somewhere that soccer/football is pretty unique among sports because games are usually decided by a single point, which means there are far fewer datapoints. The argument was that this makes management much less scientific than most other team sports where scoring is regular and consistent through the game. Soccer is more stochastic, overly reliant on luck, on a sudden mistake by the other team that allows you to convert one of dozens of scoring opportunities into a goal.
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