¡Moooooooooovies!

Back in September 2024, we published “¡Gooooooooooal!”^[1] — an examination of sports-themed movies and why people like them.^[2] At the end of it, we presented a list of the 90 best sports movies of all time, collated from lists provided by Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, and Vulture. This time, to honor the largest ever FIFA World Cup^[3] that is now coming to a close, we offer the largest ever list of the best sports movies of all time – now expanded to 150 entries thanks to the fine folks at Rotten Tomatoes.

The best summary of why we love good sports movies (even if we don’t love the sports they depict) comes from Rosa Escandon writing in Forbes.

Whether it's about baseball, basketball, football or even roller derby, there is something electric about the best sports movies. While they can be cheesy and overly sentimental, they also capture the ecstasy of victory and the sting of defeat. The greatest sports movies aren’t really even about sports; they are about human will and achievement… well, sometimes they are. Sometimes, they are gross-out comedies about playing dodgeball.

The Rotten Tomatoes list is not just the opinion of just a single film critic. Instead, it is based on their Adjusted Tomatometer score: “[A] special formula which takes into account, among other factors, the movie’s year of release and its number of reviews.” Sadly, in this case, it’s strictly applied to theatrical feature films. That means that one of the best sports movies of all time,^[4] Brian’s Song (1971), is not eligible because it premiered on television.^[5]

Despite that glaring omission, it’s still an excellent resource if, after the World Cup comes to an end and you find yourself jonesing^[6] for some sports entertainment. Baseball and American football may be over-represented, but there’s still plenty of the-rest-of-the-world football^[7] to be seen.

Our original 90-film list was more subjective (based on the individual opinions of the authors who compiled the aggregated lists) than the new Rotten Tomatoes fresh 150, which requires at least 20 reviews to make the list. As a result, a number of films have changed their rankings. The biggest winner was Ford v Ferrari (2019), which rose from 54 to number 2. The largest drop, for a film that still made the list, was Caddyshack (1980), which dropped 117 points from number 8 to 125.^[8] At least Caddyshack fared better than the 27 films that didn’t make the new list at all, including Rollerball (1975), The Big Lebowski (1998), The Hunger Games (2012), and The Boys in the Boat (2023).^[9]

As always, each entry in the list links to the Emmy Award-winning EIDR Content ID registry, where you will find cross-reference links to millions of other resources from around the Web with in-depth information that can answer most any question you may have and help direct you to a suitable streaming service near you.

150 Best Sports Movies of All Time

^[1] The elongated "Gooooooooal!" call was popularized by Argentine-American sportscaster Andrés Cantor during his Telemundo broadcasts for the 1994 World Cup.

^[2] Including me, who famously does not like watching sports, but does love watching a good sports movie.

^[3] The 2026 FIFA World Cup was played in 16 cities across the three countries of North America with 48 teams competing in 104 matches between June 11 and July 19.

^[4] And one of the first sports movies that I really remember watching, and loving. The other being National Velvet (1944).

^[5] However, a slight glitch in the Rotten Tomatoes list led to a duplicate entry for The Way Back (2020), appearing as both #46 and #47. We took the opportunity to sneak Brian’s Song in as #47 to maintain the 150 ranking. National Velvet was already on the list.

^[6] Fun Fact: While “to be jonesing” now means any intense craving that goes beyond a casual want to become a can’t-stop-thinking-about-it need, it originated in the 1960s to describe severe heroin withdrawal either in response to the use of “Mr. Jones” as a slang code for heroin or among New York City’s East Village users who frequented Great Jones Street (i.e., 3rd Street between Broadway and the Bowery).

^[7] i.e., soccer. Americans get a great deal of blame for calling football “soccer,” but it’s not really our fault. The term originated among Oxford University students in the 1800s to differentiate Rugby Football (rugger) from Association Football (first “assoccer” then “soccer”). We just kept using it. Sort of like the U.S. Customary System of measurements, which was based on the British measurement system of the time. We’ve just kept using it instead of following the rest of the world in adopting the metric system.

^[8] A travesty perhaps exceeding the exclusion of Brian’s Song on a technicality.

^[9] I’ll give you The Hunger Games, since not everyone would consider it a “sports” movie (despite its 84% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), and The Boys in the Boat is a sentimental favorite because I’m from Seattle and rowed crew in collage.