Cathal Dennehy: Dystopian future of sport without leaving the sofa edges closer
SURFING: For those willing to navigate iffy pop-ups, most major events can now be watched a la carte, and attempts to stop illegal streaming have been unsuccessful.
The year is 2040, and you’re in your Saturday afternoon living room. Rather than maintaining relationships with actual humans or doing whatever it is sporting agnostics do at weekends, you settle in for a gluttonous day of live sport.
There’s Six Nations, Premier League, GAA National League and racing from Leopardstown in the afternoon – take your pick – then URC, African Cup of Nations and some fight between two lads you kind of heard of in the evening.
You’ll watch one thing but flick to another of your favourites, dipping into many but diving into none, because that’s the way sport is now: everything, everywhere, all at once.
As night falls, the tap running dry on European action, you might turn to American sport, anything to avoid that show everyone says you have to watch. After that, you could round out a good day, well spent, with your old friend .
But this is no passive activity. As you watch, you’ll fire messages to friends about why player X deserves punishment Y for making mistake Z. Maybe you’ll share those thoughts on the social media site of the day, scrolling and laughing at 68-year-old Keano’s latest quip.
But you won’t need your phone to do this. Nor will you touch the remote. All of it will be done with your mind. Silicon Valley has finally won. The entire world has ADHD and agoraphobia, the concept of giving a full game your undivided attention an absurd one – a relic of the past, like making conversation with strangers, or privacy.
Artificial intelligence has made 90% of the world’s workforce redundant, so most of us live off welfare, filling the days by consuming content, served up by an algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. Enjoyed Barca-Real? You might like River Plate-Boca Juniors.
This is UNREAL. The future possibilities are endless; I don't regret ordering a Vision Pro for even a second.
— Wynnsanity (@Wynnsanity) January 30, 2024
(credit: @briantong) pic.twitter.com/FaAdzuxgif
Last Friday, Apple released its Vision Pro headset which, depending on your view, either augments or distorts reality, with tech reviewer Brian Tong demonstrating how it will change the way we watch sport. Slip on that €3,200 headset and you too could make your living room resemble a Las Vegas sportsbook, with multiple screens showing the sports you love on TVs that only exist in a simulated reality.
Want to watch four games at once?
Done.
Want another screen showing messages from your WhatsApp group?
No bother.
How about a live ticker of scores or in-game odds?
Grandest.
The device went on sale last Friday, a few days after Elon Musk announced his Neuralink company had implanted its first device into a human brain. The end goal there is to operate computers and smartphones through neural activity or, as Musk put it, “just by thinking”.
The dystopian future envisioned in Black Mirror is edging closer.
What will it mean for the sports world? Well, the desire of tech giants to keep us at home, avoiding real-life interactions and consuming an endless stream of content will only exacerbate the current trend, where viewing habits are no longer constrained by a lack of options.
Granted, subscribing to every channel showing major sport would bankrupt most of us, but in an age where there’s always a live stream or a friend with a dodgy box, that’s less of an issue. Is it ethical to watch sport that way? No. Is it increasingly inevitable during a cost-of-living crisis, when policing of it targets providers rather than consumers? Yes.
For those willing to navigate iffy pop-ups, most major events can now be watched a la carte, and attempts to stop illegal streaming have been unsuccessful. The rise of file-sharing a few decades ago shredded the traditional revenue model for musicians, eventually leading to one giant, Spotify, gobbling up everything in its path, paying the creators a pittance.
In time, similar will likely happen in sport as consumers reject the current asking prices in an increasingly fragmented sector. But if everyone can stream everything, illegally or not, where will that leave us?
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said man is “condemned to be free” – the limitless choice in life leaving us with a sense of existential dread. In a way, the modern sports fan suffers the same affliction. It’s a far cry from life before broadband, when the sport you watched was whatever the hell the networks gave you.
As such, a six-hour stage of the Tour de France seemed a good way to spend a summer’s day. So did a five-setter at Wimbledon. A 40-minute safety battle at The Crucible often got the same attention as the Gold Cup or All-Ireland final. Gymnastics. Figure skating. Whatever sport could be looked at, would be looked at.
A generation with no particular interest in skiing learned all about Hermann Maier because in the late afternoon on Sundays, the only thing on the menu was Ski Sunday. Same goes for , which taught us more than we wanted to know about Serie A due to having no sporting rivals in its Saturday morning slot.
Nowadays, GAA die-hards don’t need to sit through soccer, and vice versa. We watch more of what we love but less of what we might also enjoy. And when there’s no live action in our favourite sport? We fill that void with podcasts, Netflix documentaries or scrolling news or clips on social media, the algorithm knowing what we like and force-feeding it – anything to stop us looking away.
When was the last time you watched a full game without checking your phone? When was the last time you channel surfed and gave a sport you don’t usually watch the time of day? Technology has given us much, but it’s also stolen something: that willingness to explore beyond what we know we like, to broaden our sporting interests.
Take the NFL. If that’s your thing, then when the clock strikes six each Sunday, you can settle in and watch RedZone, the sporting equivalent of crack cocaine, which zips around the best bits of each game and delivers, as its excitable host Scott Hansen says, “SEVEN HOURS OF COMMERCIAL-FREE FOOTBALL”.
There’s no downtime, no pause for breath, and it’s hard to look away. Such saturation coverage is great news for fans of the most popular sports, but there’s a hidden downside.
The sports world is an ecosystem and slowly but surely, the big fish are gobbling up the minnows, fattening themselves while smaller sports, which once held their own, are fading from view, sentenced to low-budget live streams, losing the chance to grow a fanbase.
The middle class of the sports world is shrinking, and the average fan is becoming more selective, more specialised, watching more of the sports they know but rarely straying off-piste.
The average sports fan of 2040, wired into those headsets, will surely know who’s top of the Premier League, but they might not be able to name the fastest man in the world or the current US Open or Tour de France champion.
Condemned by the freedom of endless choice, we’ll choose the dish we like best and gorge ourselves on it. And we’ll never really know what we missed.
