What is a sport?
Before we can talk about the role of sports in our society, it’s probably a good idea to ask ourselves a simple question first. What makes a sport a sport? The main criteria of a sport is the use of a skill to compete with another person for entertainment or accomplishment. Many believe that sport must involve physical exertion too, and they may be right, but there are also Esports, involving video games, which have made it into the Olympics recently, as well as “cerebral sports”, which are usually intellectually challenging puzzles. Who’s to say that burning calories with your brain isn’t physical exertion anyway.
Some might even argue that in certain sports, you only compete against yourself, but this is usually only true to some extent, since no one is truly in a league of their own. Whether you like it or not, your performance falls somewhere on the grand podium of past and present competitors. Fortunately, it’s up to us which standards we hold ourselves to and which groups we compare ourselves with.
What you might gather from my generalisations, is that sport has an extremely flexible definition, and rightfully so, because it is an important part of (nearly) all of our lives. Whether we are participating or watching, sport is part of what it means to be human and one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals on earth.
Sports in Human History
It is up for debate as to what we can consider the first sport played by humanity, but the main contenders according to historians are wrestling and running. If we reflect on our childhoods, it’s probably easy to see why, considering how much time we spend play-fighting and racing with each other. It took the form of a pseudo competition between us, before we even knew what those words meant.
What about the first organised sport with teams? The first ball games would come from Ancient China, or Mesoamerica. Potentially as far back as 5000 BC the Ancient Chinese would begin the human tradition of using anything but our hands to move a ball into a goal. Despite a separation of continents, the Mesoamerican ball game, (which we explore in more depth in our article about technology in sports), also consisted of trying to get a ball through a hole without the use of hands or even arms in this case.
The Mesoamerican ballgame is one of the first very clear examples of a sport holding a great deal of cultural significance; the sport even became a ritualistic practice, with the losing team being sacrificed to appease the gods. Talk about a way of adding high stakes to a game!
Horseback sports can also trace its roots back many thousands of years to Persian Polo, where mounted nobles would try to work as a team to knock a ball through the opponents goal using a long hafted mallet. This sport was allegedly inclusive to women as well, provided they had the money and status to own a horse.
The most notable thing about all of these sports is that they continue to be played to this day, even the Mesoamerican ballgame is making a postcolonial comeback under various names and without the human sacrifice of course. The cultural significance of these sports runs very deeply in societies all over the world, and the global appeal proves that sport is an inextricable part of the human experience.
The Role of Sports as a Form of Exercise
What makes sport so deeply rooted in our communities? Usually, when humans or animals do something universally and consistently, it means it has some benefit to survival and reproduction. This is certainly the case if sports fills a physical, social and psychological purpose for humans that indeed helps us greatly in our day-to-day lives and ensures our continuation as a species.
Social:
Socially, sport provides us with several things that we need. Firstly, it gives us a reason to get together and participate in something that isn’t necessarily “work” and doesn’t carry serious consequences in the long term; in other words, sport is a much-needed form of leisure.
Sport also acts as a form of non-lethal competition where people can prove themselves as the winner or the best. The reason I emphasise the non-lethality of sport is that in evolutionary terms, a non-lethal test of physical aptitude is the most efficient way to impress a potential mate and procreate. There are plenty of species where the males brutally fight each other during mating season to decide who has access to the females, but the drawback of this is that they might subtract from their population at the same time as adding to it. It therefore makes sense that an intelligent species like humans would find a way to achieve the same thing without needing to spill any blood.
Physical:
As we mentioned before, sports gets everyone together and gets us physically active, meaning that sports and the peer elements that go with it is a great way to keep a population fit and healthy. You might have noticed that in the modern day, it’s quite hard for people to find the motivation to head to the gym on their own and do their exercise in isolation, despite the fact that most people, even those who we generally consider unfit, probably had a favourite sport in school. The conversion of simple and often boring exercise into a “game”, helps include and encourage people to take part.
Psychological/Mental:
Mentally, sport, although physically draining, can have a massive positive impact on our mental health. Science has proven to us that regular participation in sport can improve mood, in addition to reducing the effects/risks of depression and anxiety. It is leisure after all, so in the same way that you can unwind by relaxing on a deck chair in the sun, you can actually de-stress and calm your mind by playing a hectic and intense physical game.
In many sports, the complex motions, tactics, and co-ordination required is a boon to our cerebral functionality and helps us maintain a sharp mind as we grow and learn, even into old age.
Even though we already covered the social element, it’s worth mentioning that this plays into the psychological effects as well. An opportunity to socialise will do wonders to combat loneliness and reduce isolation.
The Significance of Sport as an Industry
In recent history, sport has taken on a larger role than ever, now not only being a large part of our social and physical activity on an individual/community level, but also forming a massive part of the economy. If we try to put things into perspective, sports is a global phenomenon, and now thanks to broadcasting and increasingly broad communication, it is viewed internationally on televisions, in pubs and restaurants and of course in enormous stadiums with capacities of hundreds of thousands.
So just how much does the sporting industry make then? The answer is of course an ever-changing estimate, but currently sits at around $600 billion annually. This is a colossal figure that is probably quite hard to imagine. The best we can do is compare it to other industries.
While sport is not quite as big an industry as healthcare or technology, for example, the fact that its size and significance is even comparable to such pillars of society should indicate just how profound a role it plays in international daily life.
One of the best ways to contextualise the impact of the sports industry is to have a look at the global phenomenon known as the Olympics. Despite its origins in Ancient Greece, the Olympics has since become an international competition involving over 200 countries. This means that every 4 years, almost every country in the world gets together to play sports against each other. If we think of the Olympics as a convention of sports, can you think of any other conventions of comparable size? It’s hard to imagine.
In this way, sports helps us set aside our differences and share in moments of excitement and anticipation together as a global community. It also provides us with a way to transcend language barriers and share in something that all of us understand on some level or another.
A slightly sadder way of thinking about it can be to look at the environmental consequences we humans cause for our love of sports. We are willing to go to some extreme lengths to play our games, such as stripping entire fields of their biodiversity to accommodate a sporting green, or a golf course. We even litter and pollute our own environments like towns and cities when we converge on a stadium to watch the big game, leaving behind harmful waste and rubbish in our streets and roads. While this might seem like a grim picture to paint, it serves to show how much relative value we place on modern sports and how culturally significant it is to us, such that we forgo our roles as the wardens of our environment.
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and I hope that you were able to learn something about the impact and role of sports in our society. If you did, make sure to check out some of the other articles on Superprof, which cover a wide variety of educational topics that are sure to interest you. In any case, thank you for reading and have a wonderful day. Until next time!
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