MVP Sports & Entertainment owns the Lennox Lions, a professional football team. The values and principles established by MVP Sports & Entertainment, Inc. are conducive to guiding and shaping the behavior of professional athletes who also represent wealthy, famous, entertainers in modern culture. The mega-money world of professional sports, the ownership of many professional sport franchises by media companies, and the use of athletes as highly paid product and service spokespeople all contribute to the ethical dilemmas faced by modern professional athletes, owners, coaches, the sports media and even fans themselves.
The following ethics policy is meant to guide and shape the behavior of those representing or interacting with MVP Sports & Entertainment, Inc. Such policies are necessary in today’s litigious, professional sports environment, one where each individual must struggle to prevail over, resist, or succumb to the ethical situations, moral temptations, psychological artifices, and self-deceptions involved in modern sports.
Honesty, legal duty, moral and professional responsibility, autonomy, and privacy all converge for individual athletes with respect to ethics. The professional athlete has an ethical obligation to owners, co-players, fans, the media, and their sport. There are a variety of ethical obligations too numerous to be brought up here, but two in particular show how the nature of professional sports engenders ethical issues not relevant for all occupations. For example, athletes have a legal and ethical duty to be honest with their employers regarding their personal behavior. Many sports contracts come with a list of high-risk activities that are prohibited, like motor-cycle riding and sports car racing. Athletes who are dishonest when they injure themselves engaging in such activities, cost owners their salaries per game because typically they would not be paid if honest about the nature of their i...