A virtue-ethical approach to issues of commercialization in professional football

Abstract

The intrinsic value of professional football expressed as the dignity of players, clubs and the sport in general is increasingly pressured by the extrinsic value expressed in terms of financial revenue. This raises the ethical issue of whether or not commercialization provides morally permissible motivations as well as corresponding outcomes for the sport’s ethos, in other words the attitudes and conducts of sporting humans, within professional football. In this thesis, I will argue that motivations incentivizing commercialization in professional football ought to be morally constrained, using a moral framework derived from agent-based virtue ethics. The first chapter of this thesis explains the preferred virtue ethical approach of research. In the second chapter, an agent-based virtue ethics is defended against its major criticisms in order to construct a working definition that integrates sportsmanship as a moral category as well as a notion of moral dignity. Subsequently, in the third chapter, this agent-based virtue ethical account is applied to the case of football players transfers in particular. Finally, this thesis is concluded with suggestions of some constraints, imposed by agent-based virtue ethics, on the motivations that incentivize the international commercialization of professional football.