More Than A Game - Why Sport Matters

The end of the 2025/26 football season is fast approaching. It’s a time of the year for pitch invasions, high emotions, alpha males openly crying with their sons. A time of the highest euphoria and deepest despair. There's also the small matter of a FIFA World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico a few short weeks away.

It's a time to ponder once again why sport matters psychologically so much to so many.

In sessions I often find myself talking about what gives a client meaning and purpose, what can motivate them and make them feel better about themselves. It's an extremely individual thing, and it can be that caring about anything at all is hard. There’s a pattern of resistance because caring about anything comes with the risk of getting hurt. People can build obstacles and make excuses. They can find everything boring or stupid or pointless, or they can think that everything is beyond their understanding. Curiosity is dangerous. We prefer to build walls and protect ourselves. It’s a natural survival instinct and self defence mechanism that can be examined, because it can be critical to low mood and depression. Elite sport exists in a bubble, separate to the day-to-day lives of most people. It offers us a mostly safe space to care, emote, vent, get angry, ecstatic, miserable, depressed. You could argue that art does this too: music, film, books. There are tricky issues of comparison here concerning reality, unpredictability and control. So let’s stick with sport. The amount of personal caring and investment in sport might ebb and flow a little with life. It has for me. I cared a whole lot more when I was younger and freer and had fewer responsibilities. These days I can care less, but I still care. I still get sucked back in, almost despite myself, like an addiction. Nothing else hits that spot. Case in point: the Premier League survival of the football club I have supported since 1991, Tottenham Hotspur. One week after a game, with around seven Premier League games remaining, I feel checked out, detached and removed, almost above it all, because this would be the safest and most pragmatic approach. I would protect myself from almost inevitable pain if I numbed myself and felt nothing. (How much do we do this? Numb ourselves in fear of feeling. Often pain, disappointment, failure. But also excitement and happiness). Tottenham are clearly going to be relegated to the second tier for the first time in decades, since before I started supporting the club. I am totally done with the dumb futility of hope. The club deserves that last relegation spot more than any other club around them. It’s over and I can live with it. The next week I am somehow sucked back in, despite myself. This investment is a waste of time and energy and emotion, but hey, what else am I doing? And, maybe there is *some* hope? Tottenham score first against Brighton — it’s delicious and delirious in a way that nothing else is, that nothing else can be. It allows a small bubble of hope. My eyes widen and I smile, but I don’t celebrate. Then they concede an equaliser just before half time and the familiar hollowing sense of disappointment returns. But the players keep playing in a way they haven’t kept playing lately, and Tottenham score a quite beautiful second goal to take the lead again. You can see what the player is going to try to do before he does it, because he’s tried it countless times this season and it hasn’t quite worked. This time it works. I silently fist-pump but remain seated because I’m with my family and we’re having dinner and I’m antisocially sitting in a far corner of the room. Still, I feel my heartrate quicken. There it is: that space of defiance to feel and be alive: that surge of injected hope, that childish glee. Look at those stadium scenes, listen to that noise. What a goal. They look like they might get their first league win of 2026. At the end of the game, Brighton score to make it 2-2 and it’s heartbreaking. You feel punched in the face yet again. It’s a laugh or cry moment. How much should you care? This feels like a key question that can vary by individual, and also game by game, by other ongoing life stressors and frustrations. So to return to why it matters so much. And I reflected on this while watching a new Amazon Prime documentary about Northern Ireland golfer Rory McIlroy’s 2025 win of The Masters, after 16 failed previous attempts to win the major title. The documentary reflected how obsessed he was with the sport as a child, the level of his dedication. It also showed his home clubhouse in Northern Ireland during that final round, largely men of various ages sitting around watching a television screen, going through all the emotional turmoil with him. Why did it matter so much? In that case and many cases, there’s an obvious factor of geographical identification. But there’s so much more. Why do thousands and millions of men attend football and ruby and cricket and any other sporting matches and allow themselves to openly care more than they openly care about anything else in their lives? How do the generational sporting heroes continue to motivate themselves to win competitions they’ve already won a number of times? I’m thinking here of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and his unashamed theatricality, his sometimes uncomfortable aliveness, in good moments and bad. Here’s my theory. It’s the unambiguous metrics. In life there is so much ambiguity and grey, and relentlessness of one day after the next. Sure, you might get a promotion or a new job or a bonus. You might get made redundant. You might get married or have kids. You might feel like you’re winning or losing, but it’s generally all a loose and baggy process with no cup final, no trophy given out. Unstructured moments to try and cherish or process before you have to make the next meal, do the washing up or visit the toilet again. With sport (or even the simplest game), you have a confined structure and set boundaries in which you will be validated and vindicated or denied and deprived. You have a period of time across you will win, lose or draw. The result might not even be a fair reflection of the game. But you have points and goals and tries and runs and wickets, and a league table with cold hard numbers. You can choose how much to care, how much to be competitive. There’s a kind of emotional return on investment, an individual balance to find. Beforehand you will have hope. Afterwards you will have a result. Within a single moment of sublime sport, all that glorious hope is crystallised, even if it shatters to pieces a few minutes later. And it’s worth acknowledging that sport often means a dour goalless draw which makes you angry for wasting an afternoon. But that all adds to the investment, the hope, the sublime moment when it all comes good. Sport reflects our need for hope. The final word of McIlroy in that documentary went to the man himself, and that word was ‘hope’. Sport gives us hope. Hope and the metrics: that’s why it matters so much. That’s my theory anyway.