Managers – the new heroes of sports

Fred Mason
Faculty of Kinesiology, University of New Brunswick

In his book Front Office Fantasies, Branden Buehler analyzes the rise of what he terms “managerial sports media,” media focused on the jobs and tasks of managers in professional sports, across the contexts of film, sports talk radio, television and video games. Throughout the book the author describes how trends such as the ever-burgeoning use of analytics methods in sports, the financialization of everyday life, and a discourse of ‘managerialism’ – that educated managers offer abilities that can help any organization – have pushed the work of managers to the forefront of attention in sports media. Buehler argues that the prevalence of managerial sports media coverage repositions White masculinity at the center of sports, a position based on knowledge and risk management rather than athletic ability, holding out a new form of the athletic American Dream.  In a volume of only 217 pages, the author covers a lot of ground with good depth.

Buehler documents an increase in managerial sports films since the mid-1990s, where the focus is not on “the big game,” but on managers engaged in draft-related activities, supposed underdogs crafting winning teams with an odd assortment of players, or agents searching for potential stars in unusual places. While sports films have long been a major proponent of the American Dream, these films shift the focus from athletes, suggesting that administrative work is the new key to the American Dream through hard work, masculine aggressiveness and specialized knowledge. These films speak to class maintenance, rather than class ascension, ultimately recentralizing white collar, White masculinity, in an era of much anxiety and social change.

The book sketches an insightful history of the massive expansion of analytics in sport, bringing us to the point where statistical data weighs heavily in personnel decisions, all kinds of data is generated by trackers on the field, and athletes’ biometrics are monitored during play

The next chapter of the book considers the expression of financial logics in sports talk radio, podcasting and television debate shows, where commentators spend endless amounts of time discussing transactions, the performance of sports executives, and what they would have done in their place. Managerial sports talk allows media to engage in a 24/7, all-year-long news cycle, even for media outlets that do not have rights to live content. While the language is specific to sport, with things like salary caps, roster bonuses and the specific contract nuances  discussed, this discourse demonstrates how financialization creeps into other areas of life. The discussion of athletes as investments or resources, and managers as the ones doing the speculation with technical knowledge and intellectual ability highlighted by sports commentators, lionizes executives  and dehumanizes  athletes. The author sketches links of all of this to the financialization of risk in everyday life and the  promotion of neoliberal ideals of people “taking responsibility” for themselves in the decline of the welfare state.

The book sketches an insightful history of the massive expansion of analytics in sport, bringing us to the point where statistical data weighs heavily in personnel decisions, all kinds of data is generated by trackers on the field, and athletes’ biometrics are monitored during play. To keep up with changes in the sports industry, ESPN moved to having its own department of statistics and information going back to the mid 2000s. This, with an increase in television technology that opened up more on-screen space, led to “data visuality,” where tons of data is presented visually on TV screens, data can be the focus of entire live broadcasts on secondary channels, and entire games are regularly subject to graphic enhancement. The author reads this as one of the most visible indicators of the “datafication” of society, where a faith in quantification and numbers supplants other ways of creating knowledge.

One of the more interesting inclusions in the book is the chapter on managerial sports video games. Sports video games are too often left out of scholarship and criticism of sports media, despite being a space that interacts heavily with television broadcasting forms, and which engages consumer’s sports fandom and identities on a very personal level. As the author describes, there is nowhere in sports media with as much of a managerial fixation as digital games. There are managerial gameplay modes within many of the major game franchises, including those for the NBA, NHL and NFL, and being a sports administrator is the primary gameplay for games such as Football Manager and Out of the Park Baseball. Historically, these digital games were pre-empted by tabletop games, mostly related to baseball, in the 1970s and 80s. Fantasy sports took off in the 1990s, after the internet enabled ease of play. The game play in most of the digital manager games looks like other white-collar work, where the player must manage spreadsheets of statistics and frequently respond to notifications that pop up in the form of onscreen emails.

The chapter on managerial sports games goes into detail on how the game interfaces model work, and how the internal logics of the games model professional sport. The author argues that these games habituate players to neoliberal modes of thinking where market logics are king (players are mere ratings systems), quantitative aspects of life get emphasized over qualitative aspects, and effectiveness is prioritized over empathy. However, it is one of the few places in managerial sports media where some hope may be held. As players play and replay games, they may come to recognize the effects of neoliberal principles on commercialized sport, and their own place within capitalist systems,  leading to resistant forms of gameplay such as supporting minor teams, or completely subverting the game logic by attempting to get fired from the management position in the game as quickly as possible. Whether this leads to raising questions and resisting systems in real life needs further investigation.

Overall, Front Office Fantasies is a work that does well to cover different types of sports media and the way that a managerial focus became incredibly prevalent in the last two decades. Buehler cleverly links this trend to broader ideologies and discourses around managerialism, financialization, and neoliberal approaches to society. The author suggests that managerial sports media collectively repositions White, hegemonic masculinity at the centre of sports and leads to a dehumanization of largely racialized professional athletes. Scholars interested in critical approaches to sports media, how it evolves and how it relates to broader social issues, will find this a useful read.

Copyright © Fred Mason 2025