Should You Play Sport To Win?

It might be fair to say that sportspeople should focus on themselves more than anything else…

When you play sports, on a fundamental level, your main objective is to win. If you’re playing football, you want to score more than your opponent. If it’s tennis, you want to win more sets than your opponent. On the most basic level, the goal of lining up against an opponent when playing sports is to win.

Obviously, some people just play sport for fun. They gather a group of friends or even random people and play a sport. And while the primary goal of that sport may be to win, those people don’t conform to that, and have their own goals – namely having fun. What that example does is provide context and clarity about the fact that the motivations behind playing sports can be wildly different for different people. A professional football player and a recreational football player will have completely different goals for the games they play. Therefore, I have to clarify that this article will focus on those who play sport to win. Professionals, aspiring pros, competitive Sunday or Saturday league players – those are the subjects here.

There is a distinct difference between playing sport to win and playing sport to do your best. Going into a game with the idea that simply winning is the most important thing is very different to going into a game being primarily concerned with your own performance and how that may affect the final result.

When you play sport to win, you are primarily concerned with the score line, most recent decisions, your teammates’ play, the referees, etc. That’s because these things directly impact your chances of winning in a very immediate and visible manner. When you make a mistake, sure it’s annoying, but if it ultimately didn’t affect your chances of winning, you can move on very quickly. For example, if you’re playing basketball and miss your assignment on a play, you might be frustrated for a second – but if your teammate still scored on the play, you’re not all too concerned anymore since your chances of winning just went up. Essentially, when you are so focused with the final result, your vision (of the game) is short sighted. You don’t think about what might happen if you miss that assignment again because winning, and the fact that your teammate scored anyway is all that’s on your mind.

When you play sport to do your best, you are concerned primarily with yourself and doing the best you can. When you miss that assignment on a play, you’re focused on not making that same mistake again. Sure, your team may have scored on the play, but you’re more apprehensive about the next time you run the play – will making that same mistake be the reason the possession ends poorly? The scoreboard is not the most important thing anymore, the way you complete your individual tasks is. You are not concerned with the performance of the referees, your teammates, your coaches – you simply want to do the best that you can on every play – because that is what will give your team the best chance to win.

So which way should you lean? Should you be the emotional winner, or the reserved perfectionist?

Well, the answer for me is the latter, and on the whole I’d say that’s true for most people too. If you focus of yourself and your contributions to your team more than anything else, you’re more likely to contribute more to the team. And if you contribute more to your team, your team is more likely to win.

But there is value in being the guy who shouts at referees, demands a lot from his teammates, and lives every second of the game like it’s the game’s biggest moment. Thus, for you or your own team, it might be the former. What’s most important is that you understand yourself and your team, and carry the right mentality for your situation.

But what is it about being uber-invested in your own game that holds so much value? Well, if every single player on a team buys into the role they’re supposed to play, and dedicates all their energy to playing that role well, they are more likely to win than a team that is easily influenced by things like blown calls by officials, being behind on the scoreboard, or their teammates making a mistake.

At the highest level of sport, the margins are so slim between teams that the smallest lapses in concentration or missed assignments can be the difference between winning and losing. So, if you can mitigate the number of individual mistakes you make as a team, you have a great chance to be on the better side of those fine margins.

Any time you react to something that just happened instead of focusing on what you should do next, you run the risk of not being dialed in enough to play your role to the level that you need to in order to win. So, in an ironic way, caring too much about winning might reduce your chances to win. Caring less about the score and more about yourself (in the moment) might give you a better chance to win, because you are more likely to play your role in a way that is conducive to winning.

And if that didn’t resonate with you, let’s frame it another way. When you gameplan for an opponent, you (as players) will know what your role is, what your strengths are, and how you can win the game. Those roles, strengths, and strategies are not dependant on the state of the game. They are not influenced by referees, and if your teammates make a mistake, your roles don’t change.

So why get caught up in it? Why not divert all your energy into carrying out the plan that you know can win you the game? If you really want to win that badly, you should just do your job. Forget the referees. Forget the current scoreboard. Forget anything that doesn’t affect your ability to do your job. And at the end of the game, if the entire team did their utmost to play their role – you can be content with the outcome. If you won the game, you’re happy. If you lost, at least you know that you tried to do as much as you could to play your role in winning. If you spent time worrying about the scoreboard, assessing your teammates, or arguing with referees (actions that come with being overly concerned with winning), you might not leave the game thinking you did all you could, in your role, to win. And that is one of the worst feelings you could have as a sportsperson.

It’s a bit like asking someone for advice, it being contradictory to your own ideas, using their advice anyway, and things not going your way. If you’d stuck with your gut and got it wrong, you could accept it, but because it didn’t go your way and it was someone else’s advice, it’s difficult to accept.

With sports, if you leave a game feeling like you did all you could to win, and you lost, you can accept that since you couldn’t do any more. But if after the game you have the feeling that you left some on the table, and didn’t do as much as you could, that’s difficult to accept.

When you’re super concerned with all of the noise around winning, and not so much on what it actually takes to win, you’re more liable to feeling like you didn’t do all you could. Every time you argue with a referee, you take away from what your next action should be. Every time you disregard a missed assignment just because you scored on the play anyway, you aren’t playing your role to the best of your ability.

But there’s an argument that says that I’m wrong.

There’s an argument to be made that you really ought to focus on winning first and everything else after. In fact, one could argue that if you’re uber-focused on winning then everything will fall in place and you’ll actually play your role better as a result. You hear sportspeople say things like ‘the win is all that matters’ or ‘we may not have played well, but we did the job and won’. When you hear statements like that from players and leaders like Jalen Hurts and Virgil Van Dijk, you must think there’s some substance to the idea that you should play sport to win above all else.

If the primary goal of playing sport is winning, and you are satisfied with winning in whatever form it comes, then being primarily concerned with the things that affect winning makes sense. Why bother yourself with doing everything right if you don’t need to be perfect to win?

And you can see how that thinking has been successful for many players and teams over the years. The 2025 Philadelphia Eagles are currently 7-2 (at the time of writing), which is the best record in the NFC. They haven’t been as good as they were in their Super Bowl winning season last year, but they’ve been ‘getting the job done’. They’re giving up more points per game (17.8 to 23.1), they’re scoring fewer points per game (27.2 to 26.0), and they’re on track to have considerably fewer rushing and passing yards than last season too. Along with many other underlying stats, the 2025 Eagles have been objectively worse than the 2024 Eagles. Fewer players are playing their role as well as they did last year – but they’re still winning football games. That is in large part due to the way they think about football. Jalen Hurts, the team leader, has consistently held the position that the team does not care how they win, as long as they win. They play sport to win primarily – they know that playing their role as well as they can will lead to wins, but they’re not as concerned with that as they are with the scoreboard. Surely the success of the Eagles gives rise to the idea that maybe I’m wrong, and winning being your primary concern is really the best course of action.

Now, contrast that with Pep Guardiola, a supreme perfectionist. The kind of manager that isn’t satisfied with a win if his players haven’t done their jobs to a high enough standard. He is the saviour of my argument in a way. His practices show what a deep obsession with yourself and your own job can do in terms of generating wins. In his now 1000 games of coaching, Pep Guardiola has won 716 games. He has won the Champions League 3 times, the Premier League 6 times, the Bundesliga 3 times, and LaLiga thrice too. Along with an embarrassingly large number of complimentary trophies, Guardiola is a serial winner. And he is often far more concerned with the way the team plays than he is about the scoreboard at any given time. In the minds of players and coaches like Guardiola, if a player or group of players play their roles well, the team will win as a result. They need not worry about the scoreboard, the referees, or their teammates too much – if they focus on themselves, they give their team the best chance at success.

And that is my flashy and cool idea. Worry about yourself, worry about your contributions to the team, and you will likely contribute more to your team. And if you contribute more to your team, your team is more likely to win.

In conclusion, most players and coaches will employ some combination of both approaches. They will see the short term value of winning and being concerned with the things that will directly affect their ability to win, even if they are out of their control. And they will also see how placing an emphasis and having a belief in the gameplan and the roles that need to be played in order to carry it out is also important. I’d argue that it’s more difficult to do the latter as it requires you to ignore a lot of noise and frustrating aspects of not winning in the short term, and asks you to believe that in the long run, your belief in the plan, and your role‘s importance to it, will eventually lead to winning.