Today’s guest column is by professors John Cairney and Rick Burton.
Question for you: Would you agree that in pro and collegiate sports management, strategy rarely survives first contact with harsh reality?
Say what?
Yeah, for every innovative or mandated game-changer delivering as promised, isn’t there a well-intended policy or entrepreneurial concept that unexpectedly veers off course? This enigma is known as the law of unintended consequences. It’s where outcomes bite the hands of those feeding them.
It’s not that leaders are naive. It’s that competitive league and collegiate conference systems are complex. Making changes usually brings baggage.
Want examples where the ripple effects weren’t what the strategists ordered?
How about when soccer introduced the Video Assistant Referee (VAR)? The aim was surgical. Reduce human judgment errors. But in trying to eliminate controversy, VAR created new issues.
Fans now hesitate to celebrate goals. Marginal offsides and fingernail handballs trigger slow-motion purgatory. Instead of clarity, VAR spawned unwanted layers of argument plus more sanitized game-day experiences.
Need another? The June 2025 House vs. NCAA settlement was designed to resolve a long-standing injustice: Intercollegiate athletes generating billions of dollars were denied any of the revenue they produced. The purpose of the House settlement was never merely to level the playing field. It aimed—by design—to redraw the pitch entirely, aligning college sport with antitrust law. The settlement (still unpaid) includes nearly $2.8 billion in damages and annual direct pay ($20.5 million per school) for college athletes. It is the start of intercollegiate revenue-sharing, the NCAA’s most significant shift in more than a century.
The unintended—or perhaps unanticipated—consequence of blowing up the model has been the sudden destruction and reconstruction of the college sports bureaucracy, a high-stakes case of building the plane while flying it. The amateur model didn’t just evolve marginally; it imploded in real time.
Athletic directors, once focused on rule compliance, new construction and donor development, now find themselves negotiating player contracts, confronting complex revenue models and managing intense public scrutiny.
In response, schools are hiring expensive executives from professional sports leagues to lead their athletic departments. Where ADs once came up through coaching or a university’s administrative ranks, today’s challenges require significant negotiation skills, management of collectives and heightened legal awareness (given the lawsuits still to come).
Whether this professionalization will stabilize or fracture the system remains to be seen. But make no mistake. House wasn’t just a legal settlement but rather a seismic realignment of priorities.
Or try this: The NBA’s 2006 “one-and-done” rule required players to be one year out of high school before entering the draft. On paper, it was about maturity, better scouting and a college bridge. In practice, it also served as a kind of job-protection program, slowing the arrival of high-school superstars who might displace veterans clinging to roster spots. Nearly two decades on, the results have been more corrosive than constructive. The rule efficiently hollowed out the college game. Top talent now moves through college programs like travellers facing a lengthy layover.
Coaches now build rosters knowing half their starters won’t be back. March Madness continuity has given way to churn. Jay Wright’s Villanova teams proved the power of keeping “tweeners” for years—turning them into pros and winning titles. Kentucky and Duke, even with Zion and Cooper-era talent, couldn’t match it. And with the transfer portal, long-term roster building is history. The fan-to-athlete connection has frayed, swiftly replaced by a transactional expectation that elite prospects are just visiting.
Academically, the incentives are backward. Many one-and-done athletes attend just enough classes in the fall to maintain eligibility, knowing they’ll declare for the draft before spring grades are posted. The university is a stopgap, not a stakeholder.
It’s also changed how coaches recruit, donors invest and programs brand. Elite schools now sell themselves less as places to grow and learn, and more as launchpads to financial wealth. With NIL and an unrestricted transfer portal, not to mention the absence of a collegiate collective bargaining agreement, some athletes are short-term vendors.
The NBA is now rethinking its rule. Alternative routes like international play (hello, LaMelo Ball) have proven viable. With the House settlement reshaping compensation models, some college basketball players may soon spurn the NBA Draft for multiple seasons.
Strangely, a rule meant to preserve maturity and education now delivers neither. The truth is, under the old system, plenty of elite players were there only for the under-the-table cash. The “one-and-done” rule didn’t end that—it just made the professional model official, with degrees now little more than background noise.
Unintended consequences don’t just apply to policies or programs. Sometimes, it destroys reputations or reshapes leadership trajectories. Just ask Sebastian Coe.
In 2023, under Coe’s leadership, World Athletics banned transgender women who had gone through male puberty from competing in female events. Coe justified the decision by saying it was necessary to “protect the female category,” even if it meant prioritizing fairness over inclusion. The policy was praised by some—especially within women’s sport—but also triggered fierce backlash from trans rights advocates and human rights groups.
What Coe may not have anticipated was how his stance, though internally consistent and publicly resolute, might carry political costs.
In 2024, Coe was a prominent contender to replace Thomas Bach as president of the International Olympic Committee. But following the 2025 voting, Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe’s former Olympic swimmer, emerged victorious.
The IOC provided no formal reason for Coe’s loss, but many observers speculate Coe’s hardline position on trans athletes likely clashed with the organization’s consensus-oriented, inclusion-forward posture. In a role that increasingly demands diplomacy across cultural and political lines, his clarity emerged as problematic rigidity.
In the end, a move made to protect sport’s conventions might’ve cost its architect the sports world’s most powerful job, because unintended consequences proved indifferent to motive and brutal to ambition.
Say this much, the high-stakes sports world benefits from short attention spans. Quick wins always tempt, but the best solutions traditionally require longer sightlines. Strategists would be well served to anticipate and stress-test their options, as complex systems often spiral into something no one saw coming.
John Cairney is head of the University of Queensland’s School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. He also serves as deputy executive director for the Office of 2032 Games Engagement and directs Queensland’s Centre for Olympic and Paralympic Studies. Rick Burton is an honorary professor at the University of Queensland and the David B. Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University. He is co-author (with Norm O’Reilly) of The Rise of Major League Soccer (Lyons Press).
