oh boy, glad to see those thoughts are on HN, but it barely scratched the surface of the problem. It's a special topic of interest for me, as I'm currently trying to reform sports in my country (figure skating in particular) and involved with number of projects (software and hardware) for sports.

The main point I want to praise this article for is that sport should be designed. Most sport are not, they just emerged from free play activities and for the last 70+ years are mostly being changed reactively as a response to professionalization, tragic events and TV requirements (as TV rights are the major source of revenue for many international federations).

There is no book or theory on how to design the sport. How to choose tradeoffs to satisfy different stakeholders. The closest thing I could find is actually body of knowledge from computer game designers – how to keep users engaged, how to ensure the incentive structure is aligned, how to fit into requirements of the game/tournaments etc. Because of this I suspect eSports will outperform many traditional sports soon in terms of member base by a lot.

In traditional sport if you want to know how a smallest change in rules will alter the whole game – you out of luck. The only way is just to push hard for the change and watch. Here is a great read about cascading changes in hockey provoked by tiny changes of the equipment regulations. [1]
Or how suboptimal incentive structure in Badminton tournament resulted in weird incentives to loose [2]

But sports officials and decision makers are often ex-athletes themselves. They carry too much burden of attachement to particular styles or traditions, and very few are trained in system design or math or economics. Sports industry is very conservative.

Take athletics pole vault mentioned in the article. How does it differ from long jump? Long and high jump/pole vault are jumps and the goal is find "the best jumper". But historically it was easy to measure distance and hard to measure height. So high jump/pole vault uses this progressive system, and long jump does not. Why? Tradition, even though progressive system is suboptimal, because athlete becomes more and more tired towards increasing the height (and doesn't show their true best). Also the winner is always the one who failed last, which is a bit disappointing but might be more engaging for the audience.

I'm not even starting with figure skating judging. In a 100 years it moved from literally voting for style to measuring individual elements. The problem is that for measuring it uses biological sensors called "humans". As with many imperfect sensors they use sensor fusion approaches (7-9 judges in a row + trimmed mean), but the nature of the error and bias still makes a lot of room for subjective judging and building coalitions (especially from judges in ex-Soviet bloc). Japanese IceScope system is one step forward to start augmenting judges with objective numbers but it's really primitive (2 4K cameras measuring skaters' jump as a pixel movement and only can assess length and speed of a jump). Olympics used FreeD system, which is impressive but way out of price range for most federations in the world.

Anyway, this topic is huge. Would be grateful for any links or papers that you think might be relevant to sports design.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/hockey-g...
[2] https://agtb.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/olympic-badminton-is-n...