Why do people like sports? The answer is complicated, but part of it is surely that when you watch sports, you are watching people at work. Not just in the literal “this is their job” sense—after all, people love college sports and, as the NCAA is always quick to remind us, those players ARE NOT PROFESSIONALS. I mean it in the simpler, Kobe Bryant sense: You are watching people do work. You are watching people labor, at a very high level, facing great difficulty, in pursuit of a goal. And there is something inherently compelling about that.
Most forms of entertainment are about watching people excel at a task, especially ones that involve complex physical activity. It’s the reason people go watch live orchestras, or spend hours watching people solve Rubik’s cubes on YouTube. But sports have some additional advantages. The first is the element of competition. At this point some people will start going on about human nature, and mankind’s competitive instinct, but I’m not talking about any of that crap. Competition is useful because it helps the viewer understand the difficulty involved. Even if you’ve never played football, you can see that a touchdown was impressive because there were eleven people on the field REALLY TRYING to prevent that touchdown from happening.
Similarly, competition makes the task clear. For most workers, the specific goal of their work is clear only to themselves and their coworkers. Any job done at a high level is compelling—I’m sure it would be interesting to see a really good accountant at work, but I have no frame of reference for what that would look like. Even other performers can have trouble make their intentions clear to an audience. Was that show supposed to be funny? Is jazz supposed to sound like that? By contrast, an athlete’s goal is always clear: to win. Fans like that wins and losses serve as a barometer for success and failure. It gives evaluations of a player’s skill some baseline objectivity.
But maybe the most important thing is that, in sports, you are watching workers AT WORK. With most other forms of labor, people only ever encounter the finished product. There is a complex, often collaborative process behind every product you buy, every service you purchase, and every movie you see, but we have only of a vague familiarity with it. In sports, though, you can see the work itself being done in front of you. You can see the challenges players face—a tough pitcher or a new defensive strategy—and you can see them respond in the moment. You can see their frustrations when a win seems completely out of reach, as well as the excitement when things turn around.
In other words, sports are the best showcase we have for the joys of labor. Most labor we do is drowned out by the drudgery of jobs—the tedium of clocking in, the petty tyrannies of bosses and office policies, the stress of being underpaid. And I’m sure that even being a professional athlete is not free of its own share of those annoyances. But the games themselves cut through the bullshit. They isolate the simple pleasure of accomplishing something, of excelling at a task, of working with teammates and competing against others. Even the defeats, while agonizing, are pure—a matter of simply not being good enough that day, rather than some arcane bureaucratic obstacle that nobody can explain or justify.
There will be people who resist this characterization, who say that professional athletes cannot be laborers in any real sense. After all, they do not make anything or build anything—they are just coddled and overpaid to play a children’s game. People will say it is actually insulting to REAL workers to insist that what professional athletes do is labor.
And while I get this temptation—it’s a little weird to imply that multimillionaires like LeBron James are part of the working class—we should be careful to resist it. After all, think about the implications: that any work people enjoy doing is not real work; that work is only worthwhile if the people doing it are poorly paid; that real workers can never be people who are widely respected and admired. Rejecting those conclusions means accepting sports as real labor.
We don’t think of sports as labor because they lack so many of the features of normal jobs, but this is precisely what makes them a useful comparison. They help to isolate what aspects of work are inherent to labor, and which are imposed on people who lack the money and spotlight and bargaining power of professional athlete. More simply, all the time that fans spend analyzing players and ranking them and obsessing over their performance allows us to see what it is like to actually value labor. It’s obviously unrealistic to imagine every worker getting the level of scrutiny and valorization as Pat Mahomes. But anyone who does something wants to be the best at what they do. That impulse is what draws us to sports. And without the blinders of normalcy, sports help us see things about the nature of work that we cannot otherwise.