In 2012, as allegations of wrongdoing in the recent World Cup bid process mounted, FIFA appointed Michael J. Garcia, the former U.S. attorney for New York’s southern district, as the chief investigator for its ethics committee and tasked him with looking into the bid process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Though Garcia submitted a three-hundred-and-fifty-page-long report last fall, the chair of the judicial branch of the ethics committee, Hans-Joachim Eckert, refused to make it public, instead issuing a forty-two-page summary which Garcia called “incomplete and erroneous.” In December, Garcia made an appeal to have the report released in full, but his attempt failed and he resigned in protest.
Televised Football Is Looking More Like a Video Game—In Subtle Ways
But television isn’t the only medium shaping the sport. It’s increasingly impossible to consider American football without considering video games, too.
.. The sweeping pans, the ability to follow play down the field from just-above-and-behind, reminds the viewer of what it’s like to play a video game. The cable-cam was introduced by most TV networks in the late 2000s. Murray and Young estimated that Madden players had seen the view or something like it since the game first went three-dimensional in the late 1990s.
.. broadcasts have recently turned to putting concentric circles or icons beneath players to highlight them. It seems to borrow from a certain video-game convention: Drawing concentric circles beneath athletes’s feet to convey you are controlling this character.
Inside Oregon’s Football Performance Center
Plus, Knight has spent more than $300 million over the years ensuring that his beloved Ducks — he’s an Oregon native — have the best of everything. The game Monday night was his reward.
How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond.
And since many studies show that getting more sleep leads to better performance, teams are now worrying about that, too. The N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks have equipped players with Readiband monitors to measure how much, and how well, they’re sleeping.
.. The quality of classical musicians has improved dramatically as well, to the point that virtuosos are now, as the Times music critic Anthony Tommasini has observed of pianists, “a dime a dozen.” Even as the number of jobs in classical music has declined, the number of people capable of doing those jobs has soared, as has the calibre of their playing. James Conlon, the conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, has said, “The professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to twenty or forty years ago.” Pieces that were once considered too difficult for any but the very best musicians are now routinely played by conservatory students.
.. When John Madden coached the Oakland Raiders, he would force players to practice at midday in the middle of August in full pads; Don Shula, when he was head coach of the Baltimore Colts, insisted that his players practice without access to water. Today, teams are savvier about maximizing the benefits of practices, and sometimes that means knowing when not to practice. The Portland Trail Blazers, pioneers in using data to protect players’ health, will sometimes tell a lagging player to lay off practicing, lest he injure himself. To coaches of Madden and Shula’s generation, this would have sounded like mollycoddling. But last season the Trail Blazers had the healthiest team in the N.B.A.
.. Which raises a question: what are the fields that could have become significantly better over the past forty years and haven’t?
There are obvious examples. Customer service seems worse than it once was. Most companies underinvest in it, because they see it purely as a cost center, rather than a source of potential profits, and so workers are undertrained. Customer-service centers have often been set up to maximize the very things—speed and volume—that make for a poor customer experience. Continuous improvement is of no use if you’re not improving the right things.
.. If American teachers—unlike athletes or manufacturing workers—haven’t got much better over the past three decades, it’s largely because their training hasn’t, either.