Sports, Geography of

Sports throughout the world are influenced by both the physical and the human geographies of a given location. Despite this relationship and the wealth of potential research topics, geographers tend not to treat sports as a serious academic theme, although economists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and even psychiatrists have done so. This void is evident in the discontinuation of the only journal on sports geography—Sport Place—due to the lack of submissions. This intersection of sports and geography has been studied by geographers since the 1960s, first by John Rooney and more recently by John Bale. Today, there continues to be a small group of geographers who study sports.

Topics in the geography of sports cover a wide range of human as well as physical geography themes. The ...