... professional sport did not exist?

There is the Championslague final in football, the Super Bowl in Baseball; there is the world cup in athletics and the Grand Slams in Tennis. Professionalized sports have brought us so many big events, you can’t even count all of them. Those events fascinate the masses unlike anything else, they unite people, and drive them crazy. Professional sports, with events like this, are a part of our lives. So what if… professional sports would just not exist? What if no one ever would have had the idea to commercialize sports?

Well, there would definitely be a good side. Our own fun at making sport still stays; therefore a very cynical person might say the only thing we lose with professional sports is a big commercialized business, which deals with humans like with things. And this has certainly a true core. Nowadays professional athletes (especially in football) are used like meat, they are sold and bought to prices which are just insane, get paid crazy amounts of money. Premier league club Manchester City last summer spent 60 million on a 20 year old not even so good player while in Africa every day thousands of children die of hunger. This is just not right, and shows a big deal of the commercialized world we live in. And then there is also the way, how the athletes themselves are dealt with. Even if they choose to live so, they are every time under an enormous pressure, doping and thus the slow but permanent destroying of the own body, is the consequence, just for the better Performance.
Therefore the business, professional sports over a period of time have transferred to, is a in many shapes very critical thing, whose nonexistence wouldn`t be such a big problem, it seems.
But there are always two sides of a coin. Only because of the professionalization of sport, a competition exists, and out of competition the ambition to get better and better arises. This is what pushes athletes to their limits, what makes them great, even if it sometimes leads on the bad track of doping. A big part of the fascination of sports is the will to get better, to win every time (and everyone who does sports, knows this), this is, what makes sports. And it only exists because of the opportunity to compete against the best athletes on a professional basis. Therefore, sports on such a high level, even for the hobby athlete who takes example and ambition out of watching professional sport, only exist because of professional sports. And it really is a pleasure to watch athletes perform on the best possible levels.
And then there is also the point of supporting athletes, a point, a person not fascinated from sports will never understand. And now I am talking to all you out there, who call yourself a fan: Is there any better feeling, than the supported team or athlete winning after a long and hard fight? Hardly!
This feeling can also unite complete strangers, for example if a whole nation celebrates the world cup win of their national team. Few things awake emotions like professional sports do, and fascinate the masses on that way. People lying in the arms of complete strangers, because their team or athlete won.
Thus I think a world without professional and therefore commercialized sport would be a big loss compared to the world we live in today. Even if the, with the professionalization of sports coming commercialization of them is in many ways a big problem, the joy professional sports bring us, overweighs its problems.