Thirdly, if you didn’t have motivation you wouldn’t pay money for different activities.
E.g. gym membership, football club signing on fees, tennis club membership, hiring equipment and many other clubs type fees.
Motivation isn’t more important than ability in a successful competitive performance for many different reasons as well:
Firstly, from experience (e.g. football matches) I have realised that if you aren’t a player, with a lot of ability, you wont make it to the team in the first place even if you are the most committed/motivated player on the team. E.g. Sergi Rebrov (Tottenham) he is one of the best strikers in Europe, but he can’t get into Tottenham’s first team because the manager believes other players have more ability than him.
Secondly, also from experience, if you are placed on the substitute bench. It does affect you motivation, because if your put on the bench you start to disbelieve in your own ability and your own performance and you become less motivated.
Thirdly, if you haven’t got the ability of some of the other people in your club/team. You are given the impression from a young age that you aren’t as good as other people and that also affects you motivation (mainly get that impression from school activities at a young age). E.g. in year 7, P.E lessons in school separate the better players from the average players.
Fourthly, if motivation was more important than ability. People with a lot of ability wouldn’t be getting in the starting team and all the people with a lot of motivation would be playing instead. This would be bad for the game you play, because people with a lot of motivation probably wouldn’t make it as far to professional level as people with a lot of ability would do.
Lastly, if you didn’t have ability you probably wouldn’t be playing sport at the age of say 16, so you probably wouldn’t have any motivation. Rather than if you had ability and it was noticed at a young age, you would still be playing sports and would be more motivated than someone who isn’t.
My conclusion is that a successful competitive performance needs ability and motivation in about equal amounts. If you weren’t motivated you wouldn’t want to play the game, but if you haven’t got ability you wouldn’t be able to play. If you have ability at a young age you are probably better off than having motivation at a young age, so you could say at a younger age ability is more important. But if you don’t want to play your ability means nothing. At the end of the day, you need 110% motivation and more ability than 1000 other players to make it to professional level in any sport.
