This sort of thing is a fundamental problem of professional sports, and one of the major reasons why I'm sort of agnostic about the very idea of pro sports in g

This sort of thing is a fundamental problem of professional sports, and one of the major reasons why I'm sort of agnostic about the very idea of pro sports in general. Sports are supposed to be a game, they are supposed to be non-serious, but also competitive. Therein lies the fundamental conflict at the heart of all sports, especially at a professional level. It can quickly become difficult to find the right balance between utter seriousness and playfulness when it comes to sports. This gets even worse when millions of fans and billions of dollars play a role. They tip the scale from the playful side to the serious/business side. Sport stops being play and becomes more and more a job. A thing to be executed to the utmost at all cost. That's why you get massive steroid and other drug use, which has been a problem in all sports for perhaps half a century, if not longer, though not widely known. That's where you get fans whose emotional well-being are tied to whether their favorite team has won or lost recently (domestic violence is heavily affected by sports outcomes, for example). Then you have sports riots, and so on. It's quite a mess all around, but it's not exactly an easy problem to fix.