How Capitalism Took Over Sports Movies – The Atlantic

For decades, most sports movies were little more than variations of the same story: An athlete or team that’s never gotten a shot captures both victory and the respect of the masses, usually with the help of a wise old coach tormented by personal demons and past failures. Think Seabiscuit, Hoosiers, Major League, The Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own, 42, Remember the Titans, Rocky, Slap Shot, and countless more. These films have been both noble and crass, and they’ve celebrated virtue and vice alike, but they’ve worked so well because they’re always, at their heart, stories about underdogs and redemption.

Though some recent films including Creed, Race, and Eddie the Eagle hew to this model, the last few years have seen the emergence of a new kind of sports narrative. Thanks to the precipitous rise of fantasy sports and wildly lucrative video games such as the Madden NFL series, audiences are also seeing a slew of works that focus on the business side of the action. Movies such as Moneyball, Draft Day, and Million Dollar Arm, along with TV shows like Ballers, The Agent, and The League, have recast the principal characters of sports-themed stories. Suddenly it’s managers and owners, not players and coaches, who are the heroes.

This shift in narrative coincides with the increased focus on analytics in professional and amateur sports. It also echoes a more general cultural interest in charismatic, visionary entrepreneurs—consider the three movies made to date about Apple’s Steve Jobs, The Social Network, Joy, and the high public profiles of people like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Mark Zuckerberg. As the model for success has shifted from teams to individuals, these new kinds of stories about sports seem to exemplify the essence of the American Dream, where glory and victory is about strategy, vision, and hard work rather than innate talent or ability. But they also celebrate a redistribution of power from the many to the few. In asking fans to root for the wealthy businessmen behind the scenes, these stories lose sight of the big-hearted, populist spirit that makes sports narratives so appealing to begin with.