A lot of us came around on LeBron James leaving Cleveland in 2010 to form a superteam with the Heat. It turns out what was widely characterized at the time as one of the more loathsome betrayals in NBA history was actually the beginning of a trend (stars switch teams to play with each other all the time these days) and occurred as an increasingly adamantly pro-labor sports discourse was taking root (athletes should play wherever they want is now the broadly accepted dogma). Plus the LeBron-Wade-Bosh Heat didn’t end up breaking the NBA. They went 2-for-4 in the Finals, then LeBron returned to the Cavs and won a title for northeast Ohio. Everything worked out fine. 

But The Decision? Jim Gray pattering uselessly for twenty minutes with a bunch of Boys & Girls Club children awkwardly positioned in the background? That thing’s still a stinking mess of ego and bad judgment. LeBron himself has admitted that it wasn’t a good look and just about everybody else has harsher words for it. For other famous athletes, the lesson of The Decision is simple: do what you want, but handle your business with some grace. LeBron is likely to leave Cleveland again this summer. He’ll probably do it with a Lee Jenkins as-told-to piece or an Instagram post. Something perhaps mildly phony and weirdly solemn, but humble enough. There won’t be any hard feelings. 

Antoine Griezmann is not the LeBron James of soccer, but he’s in the neighborhood. The Jimmy Butler of soccer, maybe. The French forward has been the best player on an Atlético Madrid team that made the Champions League Final in 2016, won this past year’s Europa League, and consistently puts heat on Real Madrid and Barcelona in La Liga. This summer is a crossroads for Griezmann; he’s more or less choosing whether to spend the rest of his prime with Atleti, where he’s a crucial presence on a squad that’s always slightly outmanned when they face Europe’s titans, or if he wants to join Barcelona, where he’s likely to have more team success but will blend in a little bit more at a club that already employs Leo Messi, among many other stars. 

Griezmann happens to be a pretty big NBA fan. A goal celebration he was doing a few years ago was modeled on James Harden’s three-point stroke. When he’s in New York, he often drops in on a Knicks game. This feels like as good a place as any to show you this picture of him hanging out with DeMarcus Cousins, who may or may not know what Atlético Madrid even is. Anyway, Grizi likes hoops, and he knows, not just who LeBron James is, but has watched him play a bunch and is familiar with the various arcs of his career. If he didn’t see The Decision live, he’s definitely aware of it. 

And he apparently thinks it was a cool thing that everyone loved? After months of speculation—some of it Griezmann-fueled, some of it the fault of a European sports press that likes to make stuff up—the striker revealed his choice in a short-form documentary, which he recorded a while ago, banking an I’m staying version and an I’m leaving one in advance. We don’t know when he made his actual, lower-case decision, but he dreamed up what he has literally called La Decisión in advance. Producers were hired, cameras rented.

The only difference between Griezmann and LeBron is that Griezmann stayed with his current team. But even that isn’t fostering outpourings of goodwill. We already know he would have taken the same approach had he decided to leave. And the approach, really, is the thing that’s so off-putting. He made millions of people sit through video of him playing Fortnite, walking around his yard, Skyping. All so he could announce where he’s playing next season.

We’re aware that professional sports, viewed through a hyper-cynical lens, are merely a way of getting us to sit in front of a glowing box and watch insurance commercials. ESPN and NBC and all the other TV networks pay so much money to broadcast this stuff because they can turn around and sell ad time to Allstate, hopefully at a profit. And there’s a bunch of other advertising in and around sports—the Gatorade boards by the scorer’s table, the corporate logos on jerseys, the little rectangle at the bottom of your sports score app that tells you to shop at JCPenney or whatever. It is, all of it, this wonderful experience of watching human beings do amazing things with their bodies, monetized to within an inch of its life. To the degree that athletes themselves become walking brands. LeBron James is a magnetically great basketball player, and he is also LeBronCorp. This is fine up to a point—if we’re going to live in a capitalist hell, LeBron is more deserving of billionaire status than NBA owners—but it goes so exhaustingly far. Rumors are Atletico Madrid are going to pay Antoine Griezmann something like $27 million next season. He deserves it. But isn’t that enough? Why waste so much effort increasing your visibility and commanding attention? Just take your $27 million and be happy.

The reason people hated The Decision and why they’re immensely annoyed with Griezmann’s version is that it takes attention-as-currency to its logical, nauseating conclusion, where these people who bring us so much joy become almost indistinguishable from all the squickish dross that borders their remarkable athletic exploits. They enter a kind of uncanny valley of human behavior, where they begin to seem like a marketing strategy made out of flesh. That’s a sad and distressing development, because athletes—not coaches, not GMs, not broadcasters and certainly not Nike or KIA—are the only thing about sports that are purely fun. As our connection to them deadens, so does our connection to the games we love. Is that worth some extra skrill? We’re not in the position to answer that question, but we’ve certainly got opinions on it. Some faint regard for that, from the folks who make Las Decisiόns, goes a long way.