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This book is a clarion call to sports fans. It proposes a significant restructuring of sports leagues. The book sets out a rational program for a revolution that will serve the best interests of the fans and of the sport itself. But the book is not Marxist: it shows how a revolution in the organization of sports might even benefit the owners. By harnessing the power of markets, sports leagues can be made both more responsive to the needs of the fans, and more efficient. Many years were spent before this bok was written evaluating the ways in which leagues work across the globe. Drawing on an extensive study of leagues, the book boils down a plan to two major reforms. Borrowing from NASCAR, the book proposes that team owners should not own sports leagues as well. Rather, league ownership should be separate. The second proposal is drawn from soccer: introduce competition through a promotion and relegation system. In this type of system, the worst teams in the league are kicked out at the end of the season and replaced by the best-performing teams in the next division down. This gives poor performing teams incentive to step up their game, and allows fresh blood to enter the leagues if the poor performers fail to do so.

This book presents readers with an exercise in modeling human ways of being—thinking, feeling, acting. It does not merely introduce models, but also attempts to teach modeling, and to produce, within the reader, the predispositions and attitudes of the modeler: a distance from the individual whose behavior is modeled, an engineering approach to the model-building process, a (self)-critical approach to the model testing and elaboration process, and a pedagogical and a therapeutic approach to enacting and communicating models. The author makes the process and the phenomenon of modeling transparent and explicit, and clarifies the reasons for which modeling human behavior has to be an interactive process between the modeler and the modeled. This perspective situates the book at the intersection of analytical and computational thinking about rationality, reasoning, choice and thinking, and the tradition of action science and action research.