Sports Twenty Years Into the Future: New Players, Same Drugs

by Bryan Joiner

There is a crush of people on this planet, and every Sunday in the fall a few hundred thousand pack into massive stadiums across America and watch a National League Football game. When it’s over, they go home, make babies, and crush the planet a little more. Consequently, those babies are likely to be sports fans. That is why no matter what happens to America in the next 20 years (really, what would you count out at this point?) professional sports are going to look much the same as they do now.

There are exceptions.

The distinction between natural and unnatural performance-enhancing drugs will become irrelevant within the next decade, forcing all major sports leagues to alter their drug policies. American football will supplant baseball and basketball as our most popular athletic export. It will be popular overseas for the same reasons it inspires domestic mania: the vivid colors, stunning violence, and endless marketing opportunities—the same reasons action movies are popular from Mobile to Melbourne.

Soccer will be slightly more popular in the United States in 2025, but the sports revolution will germinate in Africa. With five teams in this year's World Cup, the continent has already made an impact on the game. There isn’t a lot of money to go around in many of these countries, but there are great athletes. Governments are beginning to learn that sports are a big-time business, and there’s no use in wasting their homegrown talent. Nike’s all too willing to cut a check.

You can also expect China to get in on the action, as it has capitalized at an incredible rate in the last ten years. The world’s biggest communist country will likely become a hybrid of the old Soviet athletic system—where athletes lived and trained in state-run facilities—and the modern American one, with its commercialism. They've got cash to burn (at least $320 billion of ours and counting) and with over one-third of the world's population, China is amazingly underrepresented on the international athletic scene with only one superstar: the NBA’s Yao Ming.

With all this talk of internationalism, you might think that the professional U.S. leagues will branch out to Mexico, Europe, Puerto Rico, and beyond. They won't. You'll see a third or fourth professional baseball team in New York before you'll see one in London or Lisbon. This is one industry where we don't outsource. We gain too much money by playing the games at home.

There are a few things about domestic sports I'd like to outsource by 2025, but they're not going anywhere. Steinbrenner, I’m looking at you. We can expect major innovations in television/Internet coverage of games as the distinction between the two mediums shrink. We can expect the Red Sox to win another World Series.

Skeptics might argue that sports will become less important as the world becomes crazier and crazier, but I disagree. We may not bring stability to the rest of the world, but sports bring stability to us; the harsher the world gets, the harder we’ll holler for that home run.

(Photo from flickr.)