It’s only natural that executives try to use the latest technology.

All sports are aware of how much the internet is changing. But then around 2010, the smartphone takes the internet off the desk and then you’ve got a million options about what to do with your free time, and all sports and other forms of leisure were losing time.

The people who run the sports are business people. They love their sports. But they are looking at what’s going on and see people developing new technologies that surpassed things in their own sports, so the logical temptation is instead of trying to beat them to join them.

If they dedicated 5 percent of their time, energy, effort and resources to the heart of their games, as well as doing the technology, they’d be just fine. My fear is that somewhere in the last three years, we’ve crossed the transom from being a sports industry to being a media industry. They are focusing more on the technology and the media than the sport itself.

What obstacles do you face in your field?

It’s something every social scientist faces. Some people are in research in sports who are only collecting behaviors and they do that using machines — Nielsen boxes and clicks on web pages and so on. There’s no interaction with human beings, they’re only collecting outcomes without knowing why. The biggest obstacle we face is that the research I do has always been about why you do what you do, it’s never been just what you do. It’s about understanding the motivations and your fulfillment and what detracts from your fulfillment.

When I began in the 1980s, people were still hungry to be heard. We didn’t have social networking, we didn’t have platforms where we could give our point of view. So the biggest challenge we face is that all people feel like they have a platform to say something, that they want to say something, and they’re so overwhelmed with everybody trying to say stuff to them that they don’t want to hear, that it’s become increasingly difficult to understand why people do what they do.

“My fear is that somewhere in the last three years, we’ve crossed the transom from being a sports industry to being a media industry.”