Watch a World Cup match in the dead minutes — the ones with no highlights and no ratings. Millionaires sprinting into empty space. Millionaires pressing, sweating, jogging off for a substitution nobody will remember.
Here's the thought experiment I ran while watching: nearly every player on that pitch could retire tomorrow morning. A few million a year is a standard European contract. Hypothetically — hang up the boots, buy four or five income properties, sip cocktails until pension age. Financially, the game is over. They've already won.
And not one of them does it. Instead they train, run, eat clean, skip the drinking — and, this is the part that matters, they climb again and again into contests they have a very real chance of losing. When the referee disallows a goal by Kylian Mbappé (noted French philosopher, seventeenth century) for offside, he protests to the heavens. In that exact second, the two hundred million sitting in his account does not move him an inch. Something else is running the show — and once you name it, you can run it too.