Over the past few weeks, most of us went through the same arc: first excitement, then disappointment, and finally anger. I'm talking, of course, about our national football team at the World Cup.
People weren't only reacting to the losses. They were reacting to the reluctance on the pitch. For most of the players, wearing the national jersey and trying to achieve something at the tournament didn't seem like motivation enough. Instead of a team that enjoyed the game and fought to win, we felt like we were watching a team trying to run out the clock without taking any risks.
Then we watched the volleyball
Not long after, we watched our Women's Volleyball National Team. Against Germany and China, the way the players fought made the contrast impossible to miss — in energy, in grit, in sheer commitment to the game.
You could feel how badly they wanted it. In both matches they fought to the very end, willing to risk injury to win. Some players gave everything they had despite already being hurt. The joy they took in the game, the happiness of winning a point, the disappointment of losing one, the ambition, the focus — all of it was written on their faces.
It reminded me of a classic study in social psychology.
A classroom in 1973
Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett ran a study with preschoolers who already loved to draw. One group was promised a reward in advance for drawing. One group got a surprise reward afterward. One group got nothing. Then the researchers watched how much each child chose to draw during free time.
The result was striking: the children who had expected a reward in advance drew noticeably less on their own. The ones who got nothing — and the ones surprised with a reward — mostly kept their interest in drawing alive.
This is exactly what Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory later explained. When people do something out of curiosity, enjoyment, a desire to master it, or a sense of meaning, the motivation tends to last. But once the reason becomes "because they pay me" or "because I'll get a reward," intrinsic motivation can quietly erode.
A different angle points to the same thing. In Festinger and Carlsmith's classic 1959 experiment, people who did a boring task for a small reward came to genuinely own it, while those paid a large reward pinned it all on the money and kept the task at arm's length. Sometimes the bigger the reward, the weaker the internal bond.
So what about the court?
I think this is one of the most important psychological differences between our footballers and our volleyball players. The flood of external rewards showered on the footballers may have slowly worn away their bond with the game itself. The volleyball players never earned anything close to that; no private jets, no promised villas — two-meter-tall athletes even flew economy.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's an illusion that only looks that way through a screen. But as a viewer, here's what I saw: on one side, athletes still playing because they love the game; on the other, athletes trying to protect what the game had given them. If that's really the case, then this isn't a performance problem. The enormous pile of rewards we've heaped around football for years might be slowly consuming the very thing we want to protect — the hunger on the pitch itself.
They say rewarded behavior persists. Maybe that's true. But if we start doing something only for the reward, we also forget why we loved it in the first place. Football matters, of course — but in our country it often takes up far more space than it deserves. If we could redirect even a small slice of that toward athletes who show up simply because they love it, without expecting a steady paycheck, maybe we'd protect both them and the game itself.