There is an increasing movement in competitive sports to rely on data and optimisation to make decisions on player performance. But professor of philosophy Sara Heinämaa and former NHL hockey coach Alpo Suhonen argue that this is a mistake with dangerous consequences. We should not treat players as mere biological organisms, but expressive agents, each like an improvising jazz musician on the field. Only then can we escape the unimaginative and clumsy coaching strategies plaguing contemporary sports and enable creative play on the field.

Contemporary sports management is dominated by idealized notions of human interaction. Competing, playing and games are paralleled to warfare and combat—football teams are said to “battle it out” on the field to win; training and coaching are modelled on the processes of industrial production, and players are treated as mere physical bodies needing to be optimised. The life of the athlete is divided into separate activities and exercises in the same manner that the production of a car was organized into assembly units at the Ford factories in the early 1900s. One programme and one set of specialists is needed for muscle conditioning, another one for speed development, a third one for mental training, etc. The head coach is assumed to have an overview of the process as a whole but, in reality, no one can control such an imaginary assembly machine.

The dominant paradigm operates on the assumption that all sports activities—from basic exercises to final performances in front of an audience—can be adequately understood and interpreted by the quantitative, probabilistic and computational methods of the natural sciences.

This view needs to be challenged. It is problematic in principle but especially damaging for all ball, field and team games. Namely, such models demand, in their very establishment, that the game be reduced to calculable numerical functions and systems of such functions. The capacities of basketball players, for example, are measured by their “personal time of possession” and “touch duration,” but such measures cannot predict much, if anything, about the performances of the players when they are given new roles in the game in unpredictable situations. To apply such models to real life, the freedom of the players and the autonomy of the teams must be minimized. Leadership is to be understood either as control and discipline or else as artificial top-down motivation that trickles down from mental trainers or psychological consultants to the players. For this end, the open-ended and unpredictable dynamism of real play-acts must be neglected or else conceptualized as an additional achievement. Such downplaying of the players’ free aspirations, interests and decisions ultimately equates to a denial of their creativity and ignorance of their talent.

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The playing body is above all the material expression and manifestation of the athlete’s personal aspirations, interests and experiences.

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In reality, playing a sports game is a highly dynamic human activity; understanding and managing it requires intimate cooperation of several different professionals. The life sciences alone are not enough, since athletes are not just biological organisms or psycho-physical systems, but concrete human agents who experience the world in their own unique ways and estimate it constantly as an open whole that not only enables, but also demands their participation in it.