Sport has to disrupt every bit as much as buisness

Disruption and all that it threatens and offers gets its fair share of air on Linked In. We have learned to our cost that sacred cow protectionism is a short road to the poor house.  

Many of us are also sports fans and wonder if the sports we love recognize that self-disruption is a better alternative to oblivion born from indifference to change.

Sport has always been about playing to the rules. Disruption is about breaking and changing the rules. It's often been said that the game is always bigger than the players but what are the implications when the players, in a physical sense, have outgrown the rules and constraints of the games they play?

In football and rugby union for example the rules have remained largely unchanged for decades. They play on pitches of the same dimensions, they play with the same number of people on the field yet, since the rules were written, much has changed.

Citius, altius, fortius is the motto of the Olympic movement. It means faster, higher,  stronger. That's a pretty straightforward description of the evolution of the players in professional sports. The result is easy to see, on the positive side more spectacular plays, on the darker side more tackles and more impact by faster moving and heavier men than the rule makers had envisaged. Add to that truer playing surfaces, better equipment, more substitutes to maintain the speed of the game and you get the recipe for more injuries and catastrophic events. Twice as many tackles per game were made in the 2015 Rugby World Cup as were made in 1999. The 2015 NFL season has featured injury reports longer the accounts of the games in which they occurred. 

In these cases, and possibly also in ice hockey, there is probably only one practical solution. Reduce the number of players on the field both in the initial line up and in overall squad size. Fewer players equals more space, less tackles, less injuries. Sure, the record books would have to start again but that's OK. No one reads the records from the Coliseum these days. Better that than the knowledge that no one ever kept the records from flag football and never will.

Football and rugby are facing most scrutiny but other sports performers have outgrown their sports also. Men's tennis, a generation ago, was decried as boom boom serve and volley, predictable fare. Now, the astonishing fitness of the top players means that four and five hour matches are no longer unusual. Aided by big headed graphite racquets and immaculate technique and physical conditioning the game has reached a level of perfection where it almost ceases to be an enjoyable spectacle. There's only so much Wagner you can enjoy in a two week span.

Here the solution is simple, after all you don't want to reduce the numbers in men's singles. Instead you just have men play to the doubles court. This increases the width of the court by almost a third. So without changing the service box, the base lines or any rule of play you achieve a significant reduction in the time of play and likely the enjoyment of the crowd and longevity of playing careers. Reverting to wooden rackets is as dumb as insisting on playing in long pants. 

Perhaps ironically the one sport that needs no on field remedy is the one most embroiled in controversy. FIFA and world football is in desperate need of reform but on the field the skill, strength and athleticism of the players have served only to make for an exceptional spectacle and as a consequence increased adoption across countries, ages and genders. 

In many sports from athletics to baseball and cycling the problems lie not in the rules but in the breaking of them. The change required here is behavioral not structural. In sport as in business there is an abiding truism. Well aligned behavior and structure is a recipe for success but no structure can survive bad behavior and no behavior can save structures flawed at the core. 

Cricket, of course, has found it's own answer; significantly the development of multiple formats of the same game, less significantly the abandonment of the coin toss. Both offend the purists but without excluding the and both promote multiple layers of competition and fairness. This is disruption at its most positive. 

@robnorman