A Fractal Thought Exercise

Imagine a professional sports industry whose league executives decided that it was beneficial to all if they manipulated the games to be more entertaining. They would do this by having the referees call fouls, or not call fouls to manage the momentum of the game in either direction. The goal would be to keep the game close and interesting. This by itself, if done minimally, would not be necessarily bad as it would sell more tickets and increase the entertainment value for the fans. Mostly the fans would shrug their shoulders and ignore any discrepancies simply because they were having a good time. Even when the owners of individual teams started paying money to the league executives to make their team win, the fans would not be too upset because they were still having a lot of fun.

Introduce into this environment a parasite; a robust gambling industry with smartphone apps that allowed people to wager on every little thing from their TV rooms. With everything else staying the same, this intrusion would destroy the professional sports industry. The fans would start losing money, something that most fans cannot afford to do, and this would make them angry and frustrated. As a result, they would start scrutinizing the plays and foul calls of the game, seeing the anomalies and discrepancies, and eventually discovering a pattern.

From there, as greed only flows in one direction, the gambling industry would start paying the league executives of the sports industry to make sure specific plays and specific games ended a specific way to ensure large windfalls for the gambling industry. The anger and frustration of the fans would explode exponentially at the overt disruption to the natural course of the game, and they would take this frustration out on the players and referees.

All the executives would sit in their offices, oblivious to their own involvement, and blame everyone else for being too soft. To cope with the added stress, the player and referees would do their own thing… maybe something self-destructive like drugs, or maybe their own illegal side hustle.