People talk about loyalty of players to clubs. But in the everyday world, you don't see people being loyal to... — Brian O'Driscoll

People talk about loyalty of players to clubs. But in the everyday world, you don't see people being loyal to their company when they're getting offered considerably better deals elsewhere.

Author: Brian O'Driscoll

Insight: We've been taught to admire athlete loyalty—the player who stays put for twenty years feels noble somehow. But O'Driscoll points to something most of us live by without naming it: we're actually pragmatic about our own careers. Few people turn down a genuinely better opportunity out of sentiment for their employer. We know our company would replace us if it made financial sense. So why do we expect athletes to be different? The real insight here is that loyalty isn't actually about blind devotion—it's about alignment. When your interests and your organization's interests match, you stick around. When they stop matching, you move on. That's not disloyalty; that's self-respect. We see this everywhere now with job-hopping and side hustles. People aren't less loyal than previous generations; they're just more honest about the fact that loyalty works both ways, or it doesn't work at all. What's worth sitting with is the assumption hiding underneath. We've always known this in business but pretended athletes should be different—held to some old-fashioned standard we abandoned in our own lives long ago. Maybe the question isn't why modern players are selfish, but why we created different rules for them in the first place.