Personally, I’ve never been one for sports. In school, I dreaded PE — and not just because I was always one of the last to be picked when choosing teams. (Though, that didn’t help.) I’m also not a fan of watching sports. You do you, but don’t expect to see me painting my face in team colors on game day. I also don’t like coffee. (Stay with me here – there is a connection.) However, I do love espresso chocolates and coffee ice cream. So, while I don’t like coffee in its native form, I really enjoy it when it’s transformed into another medium. In a similar way, I couldn’t care one wet slap about who won last night’s big sports team game, but I do love a really good sports movie. In fact, one of the first time I went to the movies on my own was to see a Rocky (1976) / Hard Times (1975) boxing double feature. This seeming contradiction between disliking sports and loving sports movies is explained nicely by Forbes in the introduction to their list of “The 42 Greatest Sports Movies Of All Time”:
“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.”
Before we can determine the best sports movies, we must first determine what qualifies as a sports movie. (We don’t want a repeat of the sort of controversy that surrounds Christmas movies, where there’s vocal support for Die Hard(1988) as the best-ever Christmas movie when we all know it’s 1983’s A Christmas Story.) First, sports must play a significant role in a sports movie, not just make an occasional appearance. For example, The Man Who Would be King(1975) features a variation on buzkashi (best described as polo where the ball is replaced with a goat carcass and players are allowed to whip each other), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) features a professional baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’’s Stone (2001) introduced us to quidditch, but no one would call them “sports movies.” Second, the sport must be about more than just sports. As The (London) Telegraphput it in their article “The 35 best sports films of all time”:
In some films, the sport may have a transformative power, or say something about the players and the country in which it’s played. … The best sports films will also say something about the sport they depict – sport as an expression of the human spirit – or explore why something as basic as knocking a ball around can become a life-affirming state of mind, part of a person’s sense of self.
With all of this in mind, and with the assistance of “Best of” lists compiled by Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, and Vulture, we present to you the absolutely most definitive, all inclusive, entirely uncontroversial, if you disagree with us then you’re clearly wrong, list of the 90 best sports movies of all time. Best of all, each is included in the EIDR Content ID registry, where you can find descriptive metadata and Alternate ID links to a wide variety of resources from around the Web that can answer most any question you may have about these films and help direct you to a suitable streaming service near you.