Bringing Back a Love for the Game

By Anonymous / Winter 2020

The Fall of 2019 was an incredibly emotional period of my life. In August, I reported for soccer with the impression, from my coaches, that I would become the starting forward because of how instrumental I was for our success the previous year in the NCAA Final Four. I had an amazing preseason, I was the only forward who scored goals in our preseason games, I was very fit, and overall was doing well, but in my preseason meeting I was told I played and performed terribly. They said I disappointed them and that the starting position is still undetermined. I didn’t see any minutes for the rest of the season. I watched my career ending right in front of me and there was nothing I could do about. I am a skilled and talented player, and I deserved to be on the field. I earned it. I had a meeting with my coach to ask her why I wasn’t playing, and, in 15 minutes, she destroyed the all of confidence I had left. She told me I wasn’t playing like I used to, and that I haven’t been playing well (which was grossly untrue). When I highlighted all the skilled and good things I had done on the field, she ripped each one apart and said, “if you were really doing those things, then why wouldn’t we be playing you?” I knew I was really doing those things, but it didn’t matter. She squashed all of my confidence, hope, and passion like a bug. After that meeting, I knew I was never going to play another soccer game ever again.

The last two years of my soccer career evaporated instantly, and I became clinically depressed. I woke up panicked every morning before training, trembling with anger and sadness. On the weekends, when everyone else was out doing something fun, I locked myself in my apartment doing homework, cleaning, and watching hours of television. This isolation got so bad that sometimes I wouldn’t leave from Friday until Monday. My coach convinced me that I was the reason my career was over. Despite my talent, the importance to the team, and my solid performance on the field, it was all my fault that I didn’t play. And I truly believed this. Once our season ended, I was able to gain some perspective.

Once I was able to take some space, I was able to reflect on what had happened from August to November. I realized that none of this was actually my fault. In 2018, I was relied on and adored by coaches, and in 2019 I was not due to the fact that I am a player who is not receiving an athletic scholarship, and the freshman and transfers coming in are receiving those scholarships. The reason why my two years looked so different was because I was no longer viewed as a property or an investment opportunity; the newcomers were. Why would the coaches spend their time coaching and caring about me when there is no opportunity to receive a return on an investment? With money attached to players, they become investments—property. Property worth protecting, nurturing, and developing. If players with scholarships don’t play, then the coaches are wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. It took me a while to realize that my situation was not actually my fault. In my coach’s eyes, I was no longer of value to them, I was not worth their time/energy to care for and develop. I was not an investment and therefore no longer important.

Unfortunately, my situation is not unique. This is occurring around the country to thousands of student-athletes like myself. To address this problem comprehensively, we have to look at the NCAA. As it reads on their website, “The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a member-led organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes” where board members serve on committees that propose policies surrounding recruiting, compliance, academics, and championships (NCAA np). When reading this on their website, and accepting it at face-value, it sounds wonderful, wholesome, and sounds like the student-athletes are well taken care of. Within this system, there are many contradictions. The NCAA is a multi-billion-dollar corporation that revenues 1 billion dollars a year from athletes/teams within the system, major tournaments, games, ticket sales, media, etc. All of this money is made because of the hard work and success of the student-athletes, who are not given any of the revenue and prohibited from profiting off their own name, performance, or image. The NCAA requires amateurism of their athletes and says, “their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental, and social benefits to be derived” (NCAA np) and not forms of payment or compensation.

When looking deeper at these examples of rules and policies from the NCAA, the true meaning of those statements is revealed. What those policies allow is elite, wealthy corporations to continue to use student-athletes to continue to bring in billions of dollars without being payed. While making this absurd amount of money for this corporation, student-athletes sacrifice their bodies, their mental health, financial stability. They have a schedule so grueling that they barely keep up with balancing sports and schools, and on top of that, many have to get jobs. This points to the neoliberal idea of personal responsibility. If one cannot sustain such a busy, draining, and stressful life, the system says it’s the student’s fault; they are the failure because they couldn’t do what so many others can. When in fact, if student’s well-being and lifelong success (NCAA np) was truly important to the NCAA, they would be paid a percent of what they contributed to that billion dollar profit, and students would not be restricted to use their name, likeness, and collegiate athlete status to find endorsements, profit, and earn a living (Tatos np). If the students are able to make money individually, that means millions are dollars will not be going to the corporation; so, this hegemonic business makes sure they make as much money as possible by putting in place these rules and regulations.

It is apparent that the NCAA is a perfect example of Giroux’s definition of neoliberalism, where all of the power in this system exists in the hands of the corporate and financial elite (Giroux np) which creates and enforces regulations that will benefit them, the elite. Therefore, it is obvious that NCAA Student-athletes can be viewed as investments and property. Each collegiate athlete is a servant, the more you perform, the better you preform, the better you are for business (the more money you will make for your university and the NCAA). The universities recognize this and incentivize the “best of the best” to come to their schools with the use of scholarships. One may argue that scholarships would not make sense for this deep analysis for the NCAA because in this case they are spending money, not making money. However, scholarships are the investment. Scholarships are given to “incredibly talented” athletes, and once training begins, coaches use their energy to improve, develop, and care for that investment. Meaning, they want those on scholarship to keep getting better, so that the team will do better and hopefully make it to, and win, the national tournament. The better a school does, the more attention it gets, the more money it makes, and the more the NCAA makes. This money is made through marketing, ticket sales, paid streaming of games, etc. To help explain, we can take a look back at my story. Before all these new girls on scholarships came in, I was important, I was helping to get good results, and we even went to the final four because of a goal I scored in a very important game. Then, girls come in with scholarship money, and I am no longer of value because if they play me over them, they are wasting their money. I am not here to argue that scholarships are the root of the problem here; scholarships are amazing, and more students should be awarded with them. The problem with the scholarships is that it is used to determine playing time based on a money/business decision, not a decision based on merit and talent.

When athletes believe their hard work and passion are used to make money, instead of used to better the game, quality in sports are going to decline. There is a psychological principle called the over justification effect that occurs when an external incentive (in this case money) decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform well in an activity. This happens because people tend to fixate too much on the external incentives instead of their love and passion for what they are doing (Belding). This is going to impact sports at all levels, and if the greed, corruption, and money-grubbing is excused at such a high level as the NCAA, clubs and other organizations will follow their model.

For my case, we will talk about club soccer in America. Youth league begins with kids enrolling into their local youth team at some point in elementary school, and when one turns 11, the league switches from recreational to competitive. During this switch you have to try-out with other players in your community, and the coaches evaluate you and place you on a team where they think you belong. Teams are ranked as A team (being most talented) to the lowest talented team, whatever they may call it. This seems like a fair and sensible process for dividing up teams, however, talent, a lot of the time, is not the main determinant for team selection. Money and connections make the decisions of where young children are placed on competitive teams, similar to now the NCAA runs things. Once again, players here are used as pons in a game where clubs try to obtain as much money as they can. To do this, top teams and clubs often set fees astronomically high, where families are paying $2000 dollars for basic fees, and potentially another $8,000 for trips, equipment, uniforms, and tournaments. The purpose of making fees so high is to intentionally exclude an entire group of low-income families and players. Even if these players are equally (or more) talented, they won’t play or will be exiled to lower teams, so that they don’t take up critical roster spots on those top teams. Once an entire group has been excluded, it leaves room for the people who can afford it and allow kids from wealthy backgrounds to “earn” those top roster spots. Now, top teams and clubs often participate in a larger number of elite tournaments and leagues, including Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) and Developmental Academy (DA), and teams that participate in those become ECNL or DA teams. Being on one of those teams is crucial for college recruitment into the NCAA because college coaches believe that the most talented and elite players exist on those teams. And through our analysis, we now know that is not the case. Those kids may be talented, but they are mostly on those teams because their families could afford to pay the fees.

This governing of club soccer in America has turned it into a pay-to-play system. The more money your family has, the more you can offer to the club, therefore being more valuable to them. This then effects those who come from under resourced, low income neighborhoods because they don’t have money to offer, and therefore will not be valuable, because in the clubs eyes, why would they take the time to develop a talented poor kid, when they can take the time to develop a talented wealthy kid and get a monetary benefit from it? Notice how similar that situation is to my college soccer team and the scholarship situation. The more money that comes from wealthy families affording the high fees and donating millions, the more the club selects wealthy families who want to “donate” (I would rather say control and manipulate) so they can further line their pockets with cash. Once again showing that money takes priority over players and player development.

This really starts to become a problem when players get older and start preparing to play in college. In order to play at a good school, on a good team, you need to play for a club team that is in the Development Academy (DA) and Elite Clubs National League. The fees in this league are substantially higher than regular competitive league, and families will play closer to 10,000 a year for everything listed earlier, with the addition of required strength and conditioning coaching and private lessons. Who are the kids able to play for these teams? Wealthy kids from wealthy areas because the only places that had elite clubs in these leagues are, for the most part, located in wealthy cities and communities. The top ranked schools recruit players from DA and ECNL because are supposedly the best. If we look deeper into what we’ve discussed, these “best-of-the-best” players are elite but, mostly, because of their elite societal status that accompanies their talent. This is devastating for the pool of middle to low-income players in this country because they are initially excluded from these teams which impacts their chances of being selected for high quality college teams. Because of this these middle to lower class, top talented players often settle for lesser schools. Players are recruited based on where they are from, what teams they play for (which a lot of the time translates to how much money they have), who they know, and talent is only a small portion of that decision.

The future of sports an America relies on change. The hegemonic corporations need to return the power back to the people. The only way that this can be done is if everyone, every player, parent, coach, administrator, spectator, etc., comes together to say enough is enough. We the consumers have the power here, if we were to go on strike and stop funding such money-grubbing organizations and demand to be heard, demand to return to the players and the talent being the central focus, it can be done. Though a big issue, it is of not the same importance as the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. Martin Luther King Jr. and the millions fighting for equal rights had a much bigger task at hand. They were fighting for millions of people’s lives, for basic human respect and rights against, arguably, the strongest and most powerful force, the United States. He prevailed and by using him as our guide, we can too. In MLK’s, “The World House,” he wrote, “We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.” This quote alone could be the driving force for this reform. The corruption originated from powerful people obtaining too much money and control, and in doing so, they disregarded morality, honesty, and integrity. We as the consumers allowed it because we believe we do not have a voice. We believe we are too small, insignificant, and think that we don’t matter, when in fact, we are the only thing that matters. Without us, there is no business, there is no money, and when that disappears so does their power. If we stand up to them, we will take our power back.

We will stand united and fight back using love. A specific type of uplifting, unconditional love for all called Agape. With a movement trying to resist, and change, the corruption of such big corporations, we need every atomized human being to become one. Agape is a force that is seen as a supreme unifying principle of life (Twohig, slide 37), and if we want things to change, we need this powerful of a force. This love comes from every person’s love for soccer, and all sports. This passion comes from every athlete, parent, and supporter who has been mistreated and used for monetary gain. This agape will unite this resistance and together we will take down corporate greed and corruption in sports.

As this movement grows, the support will erupt, and the corrupt system we see now will cease to exist. When we starve the big corporations of their precious millions, we will demand soccer and sports to be run correctly, the way it used to. We will demand fair, affordable fees so every player, of any socioeconomic background can partake in development and have the opportunity to play on a truly elite team based on talent alone. Coaches will be re-inspired to coach from their love of the game because not only will the new system value them as educators and mentors, but show them the respect they deserve, which ultimately is the most beneficial outcome for the players. This movement will ensure clubs value the talent and character of their players and families, not their checkbooks. The most important outcome is the development of players and the game. We the consumers, players, and families (the most important piece of this puzzle) will be critical for the start of this change, but to make sure this doesn’t happen again, the government will need to get involved to regulate the corporations and clubs to make sure they do not monopolize the industry anymore. The government will need to set laws in place where the corporation is only allowed to charge a certain amount, make a certain amount, and must pay their fair share of taxes. It could potentially be a good idea that the taxes that the sport clubs/NCAA are paying not go to the general tax pool, but back the development of the athletes and the sport. That way scholarships could be set up, public parks and fields would be funded to be taken care of so that certain clubs fees could be eliminated altogether.

If we stand up together, this can change. Sports without players and spectators do not exist. We can fix the systemic problems of youth sports and that provide kids equal opportunity to succeed in sports resulting in opportunities to be recruited by, play for, and graduate from amazing universities all around the country.

Works Cited

Belding, Jennifer. “The Self.” Social Psychology . Class, 27 Jan. 2020, La Jolla, UCSD.

Giroux, Henry, and Mitja Sardoč. “The Language of Neoliberal Education.” CounterPunch.org, 27 Dec. 2018.

King, Martin Luther. “The World House.”

Tatos, Ted. “College Athletes Should Be Able to Earn Money From Their Likeness.” The American Prospect, 16 Sept. 2019.

Twohig, Niall. “Everything Is Not Alright!” Warren Writing . Class, 2020, La Jolla.

Vcortez. “What Is the NCAA?” NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA, 10 Feb. 2020.