Sports and Writing are Almost Startup-Proof; For the Periphery, Credibility is Earned Through Joining the Mainstream

Sporting culture is one of those things one simply cannot create from scratch. A startup may disrupt an industry through a combination of innovative technology, clever marketing, and novel business models. But startups in the form of athletics draw more frowns and ridicule than admiration. Even after a couple of hundred years in existence, the American version of football is still criticized for being a misnomer. Plenty of new exercises, from Quidditch to paddleball, face uncertain futures, as their popularity is seen more as a fad among certain population segments rather than as universally accepted.

And whenever one tries to change what already works, plenty of conservatives boo the efforts as destroying tradition. Just ask the American officials who face accusations of putting profits first for adopting hydration breaks during the current World Cup matches to show more TV advertisements. And perhaps also speak to long-time cricket lovers who argue that the shorter, more aggressive form of play in the Twenty20 format negates the patience and class of the traditional one-day and three-day Test series. The world may be open-minded on some topics, but sports does not seem to be one of them.

The seeming closed-mindedness of ardent fans may be down to how credibility is measured differently in sports than in the likes of business and politics. Products, services, and policies are measured in outcomes: do they remove barriers for their beneficiaries, in the form of inconvenience, inefficiency, and inability to get ahead? Sports is fundamentally the opposite. Plenty are loved for their inefficiency and almost arbitrary limits to performance. Soccer, for instance, is universally loved not despite, but because athletes can do so much without the use of their hands, and constantly trying not to be offside.

Looking for something "easier," then, is to take away the very reason that people grant that universal sense of legitimacy to certain sports. The value of a soccer player is backed by the general public's belief that they cannot replicate the athleticism they see, highlighted by those rule-based constraints of the game. Many of them may even give it a try themselves and dream of superstardom, motivated by the possibility that they can also win global recognition for succeeding with constraints that are universally seen as a sign of credibility.

Interestingly, sports' rather perverse sense of credibility can find a parallel in the world of published writing. Like sports, writers work with constraints, from grammar and syntax commonly accepted as "professional" to limitations on word count and style unique to each publication. Despite some exceptions, most startups in the publishing world cannot immediately upend the pecking order, with the likes of the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Economist remaining at the top due to decades, if not centuries, of rigorous editing and topic selection.

And just like in the world of professional sports, founding a new form of play is less likely to bring renown than joining an already loved one. Soccer's core remains in Europe and South America, but some African and Asian nations increasingly find themselves capable of competing against the traditional powerhouses by playing abroad and bringing the best coaches to train and lead them. Similarly, while Western media outlets remain the standard of global, if biased, news reporting, non-Westerners gain credibility by becoming part of them.

Indians have found particular success. The Economist runs an Ashoka column on Indian affairs, much as it does for several other regions of the world. But whereas its other non-Western columns are usually run by Westerners or non-Westerners who grew up in Western backgrounds, the Ashoka column is written by Indians who live and work in India. The result is a highly parochial column that touches upon specificities of Indian cultural practices, regional politics, and local concerns that would be almost entirely incomprehensible to the non-Indian audience.

Yet, by creating a space within a renowned Western outlet to write about India almost exclusively for Indians, Indian writers gain the same credibility as African and South American footballers do when they play for major European clubs. In both cases, the goal is the same: rather than doing the impossible job of upending the status quo, might as well elevate one's own status within it. The benefit of the effort, hopefully, is the diffusion of that existing enthusiasm, converting existing love for sports and good writing into knowledge and care for the global South.