What Happens When You Get the Smartest People in the World Thinking About Sports?

Some people who follow the BallerzBantz X account or subscribe to this blog include the former coach of the world’s top chess player; the technical director of a national cricket team; a former engineering manager at a multibillion-dollar technology company; a 21-year-old founder building tools to streamline job applications; a state commissioner for health in my home country; physicians across multiple continents; and many of my high-school classmates who are now new-grad software engineers in the U.S. tech industry – including one of the co-founders of this blog.

Our community spans games, medicine, technology, governance, and entrepreneurship. When people with this kind of intellectual range turn their attention to sports, the results are anything but ordinary.

Some of them have never watched a live professional match, or played competitive sport in any systematic way – yet they are smart, intuitive, and radically clean slates in relation to mainstream sporting analysis.

What unites them is simply an interest in sport. The specific intensities of their interest vary greatly: some are die-hard fans of Manchester United and probably find my tweets amusing; others work behind the scenes to support athletes, building frameworks or tools gleaned from non-sports domains; some are problem-solvers who instinctively ask: What if I apply X from engineering/medicine/data science to sports?

Whatever the nature of their interest, the simple truth remains: they engage with football (or sport more broadly) while maintaining expertise in a completely different domain.

And that brings me to the question:

What happens if you got these kinds of people – outsiders in the sporting world yet experts in their own fields – thinking about sport at large?

What Are Sports Converging On?

To understand the end result of such an endeavor, it’s useful to ask: What does athletic performance seem to tend toward?

At a glance: faster, stronger, quicker, more dramatic, greater spectacle, higher stakes. On one side you have pure performance (how fast a sprinter runs, how high someone jumps). On the other side you have money, attention, broadcasts, viral moments – what we can call “attention performance”.

So, two forces seem to be shaping sport:

• Performance (aka Winning): the traditional axis – athletes, coaches, trainers, and technology.
• Money/Attention: media rights, social media virality, fan engagement, brand value.

If you accept these two axes, then it should come as no surprise that robotics, AI, analytics, and cross-domain innovation are creeping into sport.

What Do The "Outsiders" Bring?

When someone whose primary career has been in engineering, medicine, software or governance asks “Why is this done this way in sport?” you start to get fresh questions.

One of the clearest areas where outsider minds are already in motion is forecasting and analytics. Platforms like Metaculus, originally designed to predict scientific or technological events, show how probabilistic modelling can aggregate diverse expert inputs and surface predictions.

What if a league or sport adopted a similar model – crowd-forecasting major events, player injuries, broadcasting metrics?

Robotics, Humanoids & the Frontier of Athleticism

Beyond analytics, the very nature of athletic performance is being challenged by robotics and AI. For example:

1. The first full multi-sport competition for humanoid robots, the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (2025) featured more than 500 robots from 16 countries across 26 disciplines.
2. Research into robot athletes – e.g., simulated humanoids in “SMPLOlympics” (sports simulation environments for humanoids) show robotics is not just toy-level but approaching serious athletic modelling.

What happens when the boundary between human athlete and machine athlete starts to blur?

Here are a couple of scenario-pathways that may emerge from this development:

1. Humans continue to be the centre of sport but are augmented by robotics, AI analytics, predictive systems, exoskeleton-training, data-driven coaching. The sport still feels “human”, but with new layers of intelligence.
2. Robots/humanoids start to compete directly (or in parallel) with humans; sport becomes one arena of human-machine comparison; new leagues of “robot sport” become mainstream. Spectator value shifts.

Invitation & Open Questions

As this blog’s community shows, you don’t have to be from the sporting world to contribute meaningfully to how sport evolves.

My ask to you: If you were an expert in your domain, and you turned your attention to sport – what would you ask? What would you try to change?

Some open questions:

• What happens to sport if predictive analytics accurately forecast outcomes with high confidence? Does suspense diminish?
• What happens to fans and the fan experience when machines perform at human-plus levels?
• What happens to access when the performance gap grows via technology?
• What happens to the essence of sport when machines are involved? Does the “human struggle” matter less?

Conclusion

We began by listing a cast of individuals: coaches, engineers, founders, doctors, analysts – people outside the conventional sport bubble. We asked: What happens when they turn their attention to sports?

You get change.

You get fresh questions, new metrics, novel modes of competition, shifting boundaries between human and machine, and evolved fan experiences.

And because you’re reading this, you might be one of those outsiders – or you might know someone who is. Maybe now is the moment to ask: What’s your question for sport?

Write me back,

Joel A.