YouTube extended highlight videos are ruining sports, and I feel fine

A number of months in the past, I found a brand new style of YouTube video. It’s referred to as the “prolonged spotlight,” and it usually takes the type of a video someplace between eight and 18 minutes lengthy, with rapid-fire leap cuts between all a very powerful components of a sport.

Since I embraced the glory of the prolonged spotlight, I really feel like I’ve watched extra sports activities than ever. I’ve seen each Arsenal aim and almost-goal, each cool Steph Curry shot for the Warriors, each Daniel Jones run for the Giants, each Aaron Choose strikeout or dwelling run for the Yankees. However I hardly ever, if ever, sit and watch a sport. I used to! However why would I now? All the nice components are proper there on YouTube a couple of hours later.

A lot has been made during the last decade about how spotlight tradition is altering sports activities. (Ruining it, some would possibly say.) For some time, there was an ethical panic about SportsCenter’s bite-size renditions of sports activities. Then it was Home of Highlights on Instagram that was threatening to turn into the largest factor in sports activities TV as viewers began to care extra about sick dunks than last scores. And certainly, the entire sports activities fan expertise has shifted! Younger viewers comply with particular person gamers slightly than groups; they care concerning the off-field tales and personalities as a lot because the on-field outcomes; they actually do love scrolling by means of highlights on TikTok. Leagues, groups, and broadcasters have caught up and at the moment are embracing these platforms and angles greater than ever. Now, everyone’s additionally speaking about playing and fantasy and the way these are altering the best way we discuss sports activities. 

That is simply… the sport. Minus all of the boring components.

However prolonged highlights really feel like a special factor altogether. This isn’t “the one play you wanted to see from the sport”; it’s… the sport. Solely shorter. It’s just like the radio edit of a track or the TV minimize of a film — it simply chops out the boring bits, and most of the people are going to love it higher consequently. Eighteen minutes of a 90-minute soccer sport is sufficient to present the beginning lineups, the kickoff, each significant scoring alternative, each yellow and pink card, each nook kick, and each cool dribbling transfer that finally ended nowhere. No, you don’t get to see the three minutes of buildup that led to the aim, which is what purists will inform you is the entire level of the sport. However you do get a way of the movement, the momentum, the vibe of the sport. It’s a remarkably full retelling in a tiny fraction of the time.

Nearly each main sport and league gives these prolonged highlights, and I type of can’t consider all of them do. Stay sports activities are the costliest, most coveted factor within the media world proper now, and also you’re simply providing a close to approximation at no cost on YouTube? (To be clear, I like it. Please don’t cease although it looks like a horrible enterprise resolution.) Embracing the web as a sports activities distribution device was the precise name — I’m undecided making supercuts of each sport was.

Pitch clocks made baseball sooner. Prolonged highlights make baseball manner sooner.

I additionally suppose prolonged highlights is likely to be a clue about the way forward for sports activities. The web-ification of sports activities has lengthy been taking place in delicate methods — sports activities tweaking their guidelines to be just a bit extra thrilling and extra action-packed, extra simply packaged right into a TikTok or Reel. Simply this yr, Main League Baseball made the bases bigger and outlawed some very efficient protection, which suggests steals and runs are each up. Extra highlights!

However the MLB additionally instituted a pitch clock, which has made video games upward of 25 minutes shorter. And there are much more excessive examples coming. Take the Kings League, a brand new soccer league shaped partially by soccer celebrity Gerard Piqué. It’s seven-on-seven soccer on groups owned by well-known streamers, with every kind of tweaks designed to make the video games sooner and extra chaotic. There’s no stunning sport right here; there may be, as a substitute, the “golden card” that groups draw earlier than the sport that claims issues like “any aim scored within the subsequent minute counts double” or “instantaneous penalty.” And the entire sport is simply 40 minutes lengthy.

Or there’s LIV Golf, the brand new (and wildly controversial) competitor to the PGA Tour that turned tournaments from 4 rounds into three. It has fewer opponents and begins extra of them on the identical time, which suggests the day’s spherical goes far more rapidly. The aim, as with the Kings League, is to verify one thing thrilling is all the time taking place and to make all of it occur sooner.

It is sensible, proper? As viewers, so many issues are competing for our consideration that hardly anybody desires to observe a pitcher scratch his nostril or two defenders kick a ball forwards and backwards for 38 seconds. In 2023, even an 18-minute video is rather a lot to ask viewers to give attention to. Sports activities, similar to different kinds of leisure, don’t have any selection however to make every thing transfer at a blistering tempo or danger dropping viewers to the TikTok app on their telephones. After all, when sports activities push more durable and get sooner, that creates room for brand new and totally different sorts of content material surrounding the video games. Which suggests much more competitors. It’s onerous to see how any of it ever slows down. 

It’s wild how a lot of a basketball sport you’ll be able to match into 9 minutes and 12 seconds.

For a very long time, the sports activities world has considered YouTube with a kind of side-eyed confusion. Some noticed it as an encroaching pressure threatening the primacy of their stay video games — the NFL, particularly, made a behavior out of selecting copyright fights with anybody who a lot as tweeted a sport spotlight. Others noticed YouTube as a invaluable solution to expose extra folks to their greatest content material. “We’re extremely protecting of our stay sport rights,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver mentioned again in 2016. “However for probably the most half, highlights are advertising and marketing.” 

That’s in all probability nonetheless true, particularly within the context of “have a look at this cool aim.” Which may flip non-fans into informal ones and make folks wish to watch extra. However watching the prolonged highlights of Arsenal vs. Liverpool didn’t make me wish to go watch extra — it made me really feel like I’d watched every thing. And it solely took 16 minutes.