With the proliferation of data generated by new technologies, it is increas- ingly important to consider the role of metrics in our understanding of today’s sporting practice. As this chapter has shown, and despite the intention behind their application, metrics are far from simplistic and benign. Rather, they offer ways to assess, understand and disrupt—to territorialise and re-territorialise—the way athletic performance is watched and performed. Through three very different cases, we have emphasised both the difficulty of assessing sporting performance solely on the basis of metrics, and the complex relationships between metrics, scoring, future prediction and rankings.
In theoretical terms, we offer two related conceptual possibilities to explore metrics. In order to emphasise the way metrics can encapsulate particular notions such as excellence, we note how certain numbers have become immutable mobiles; signifiers of a particular standard of
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performance that mean it is unnecessary to see the performance to appre- ciate its excellence. However, we also note how immutability is more easily achieved through less complex measures, such as the 10-second 100 m, whereas it becomes more challenging for contexts such as predict- ing future athletic ability or success.
At the same time, it is necessary to account for the diverse elements that unsettle the stability imposed on sporting performance by immuta- ble metrics. Immutability provides a useful theoretical device for explain- ing the temporal uniformity of timings in sprints, gymnastics scoring and assessments of potential. When the focus of analysis shifts to the emer- gent practices through which various components engage with one another to produce particular outcomes, Deleuze and Guattari’s meta- phor of territorialisation proves more valuable. In this chapter, territori- alisation allowed us to track the changes in the use of metrics as related to unexpectedly strong performances or other disruptions, while simultane- ously offering a theoretical argument for the efforts to re-establish stabil- ity, often via new metrics or measures. What both immutability and territorialisation emphasise, however, is the significant agentic role played by metrics in the production of sport.
Notes
1. William and Manley’s article was published as an Advance Online Publication in 2014 and hence the publication of a critique of the article in 2015.
2. Based on data reported by the International Association of Athletics Federations (www.iaaf.org/records/toplists/sprints/100-metres/men/
senior, accessed 29 June 2018).
3. For example, in 2017, the player selected first signed a US$30+ million contract; the 11th selection received approximately half of that. Contract values ranged from 2–7 million through the remaining selections (data from www.sportrac.com/nfl/draft/2017/, accessed 29 June 2018).
4. https://operations.nfl.com/the-players/getting-into-the-game/national- scouting-combine/ (accessed 29 June 2018).
5. https://thebiglead.com/2018/03/02/orlando-brown-nfl-combine-perfor- mance-40-bench-vertical/ (accessed 29 June 2018).
R. Kerr et al.
117 6. https://thebiglead.com/2018/03/06/2018-nfl-combine-draft-winners-
losers/ (accessed 29 June 2018).
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© The Author(s) 2020
J. J. Sterling, M. G. McDonald (eds.), Sports, Society, and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_6