Bullshit you wouldn't. In effect, it's more than a game to the players, it's also their job. In today's professionalism of the sport, that's their only source of income (inc sponsorship) before they're forced to seek other alternatives after they retire at a young age relative to life.
Any sane person would take the money and run.
1. It sets them up for life.
2. It can also set their family up for life.
Wayne Harmes has been quizzed as to why he knocks back offers to return to Carlton. He answer was I wasn't really interested in the club, it was merely a job. People in all aspects of life seek other avenues when their source of income will increase as a result.
This is the reason I would never begrudge Ablett for disappearing to greener pastures. He helped the club achieve success, and he was offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to set himself and family up in the future.
Why should when he was a fav of mine, and someone I took pleasure in witnessing play for Geelong.
Should I now think differently because he wears a different colored jumper?
Do you fight tooth and nail to declare your bank manager is the greatest of all time? Or your butcher? Do you cheer when the newsreader pronounces Susilo Banbang Yudhoyono correctly?
Football is not like just any other businesses because of the deep emotional engagement of the customer. They invest huge amounts of time and energy and love into their clubs and, by extension, the players who play for those clubs. And when a player walks out for more money, especially to a hated opposition, some if not most will feel betrayed.
For most it will be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, quickly replaced by half-jesting hatred and pantomime booing. Scully is in my avatar and if I went to a Melbourne GWS game I'd boo him just as heartily as I booed Staurt Broad at the Boxing Day test. Not because there is any genuine hatred or because I would hurt him if given the opportunity, but because that's a part of the gloriously silly side of sport, the theatrical, suspension-of-the-worlds-worries tribal nature of it. I don't hope he gets horrifically injured, but if any single player in the AFL was to have a long but completely fruitless, unsuccessful and anonymous career of unfulfilled potential, endless losses and a constant inability to perform against his old team then Tom Scully is the player who would evoke the least sympathy from me.
I'm sure there are Collingwood supporters out there who really would wish Daisy's ankle problems would eventually end in amputation, preferably at the neck, but I don't think any of them are in the Sweet FA, and I don't think TFB is one of them for a moment.