Reconceptualising sport as a sacred phenomenon

Sociological studies of sport have established their subject matter as significant to a wide range of sociocultural concerns. Despite a broad consensus about its global importance, however, the reasons for the particular, even ‘extraordinary’, societal importance of sport today remain deeply contested. Most studies account for it by highlighting its entanglement within a range of secular phenomena including state building, rationalization, biopolitical regulation, and the ‘controlled-decontrolling’ of bodies and affects. Occupying a more marginal position within the discipline, others focus on the religious or quasi-religious characteristics of sport. Our paper suggests that neither of these positions, on their own, is best placed to capture the nature and implications of sport’s particular centrality to social life. Proposing a new theoretical approach to the subject that places competing conceptions of what we refer to as the ‘sporting sacred’ at the center of discussion, we outline, via a reconceptualization of the writings of two major classical theorists, Durkheim and Weber, a number of contrasting modalities through which sport is prized within contemporary society. These modalities, which embrace both secular and religious phenomena, can, we suggest, provide new insight into the divergent paths along which sports are being ‘pulled’ and steered in the modern era.