And again and again is the term greed that appears in the meanwhile already inflationary statements of coaches and players. You have to be greedy in the fight for points and titles and if you haven’t achieved anything then your greed was not right and the next task has to be approached humbly.
Greed as a mortal sin in the Christian faith
Now, greed is one of the deadly sins in Christianity and one of the three poisons in Hinduism. In sport, however, it is often just a thoughtless or wrongly chosen synonym for striving for success, according to Professor Peter Schallenberg. He holds a chair of moral theology at the Paderborn Faculty of Theology.
Effort is something that belongs to man. This is why I would say as a theologian: he looks closely, he looks at the personality. It goes without saying that a person must be greedy to want to win in a sport. Even the fact that he wants to make money with his sport is normal and not questionable. I think you can tell he’s greedy only if you tell him yourself.
For example with a coaching. Because the line between craving and overdependence has to be measured individually, says Schallenberg. “But it has never been defined quite precisely and exactly where is, as it were, the difference between the justified pursuit of merit and greed.”
Greed is individual psychological
In this regard, a player can certainly exercise his faith and at the same time indulge his coach’s desire for greed. He knows what he means. Considering that greed must be considered from an individual psychological point of view, the demand for it by a team is still difficult to satisfy.
“No doubt, of course, in team sports it is the combination of fire and water. So a team sport of many I-AGs, clearly, is something other than a pole vault or an absolute individual sport. The team sports are characterized by the fact that the I-AGs move into a team with very, very different aspirations, with very different ambitions and goals,” says Schallenberg.
If these are not met, humility often comes into play in the athletes’ statements when exchanging sentences in front of the microphones.
I would prefer the word modesty to the word humility. Humility was originally a beautiful word. Courage to serve is in the German word. But the word humility, I think, has worn out a bit. And I got a little under the wheels of speech. I would use the word gratitude and the word humility.
The development in recent years is remarkable. It’s about more and more money and at the same time idealistic things are more and more in the foreground. Even sport has discovered its suitability for campaigns.
“It’s about reach. Sport is very popular. Football is very popular with us. And that’s why you like to use sport to use it for a campaign – look, they do it too, so you can too.”
Athletes become testimonials
Athletes become testimonials, to stay in advertising language. Moral theologian Schallenberg argues that athletes should focus their campaigns more on their sphere of activity instead of acting as mere advertising vehicles:
“If you had to campaign on the topic of fairness: playing by the rules, fitting into a general structure, decency even in acute situations, controlling aggression – then it would be something more specific to this sport, to this team sport, it has to do with football.”
