Sport, Geography of

The field of sports geography examines the intersection of sports with human geography and, to a lesser extent, physical geography. The field began during the 1960s with the work of American geographer John Rooney and continues with the work of British geographer John Bale. However, sports have been understudied by geographers, and few geography departments in the United States offer courses in sports geography. That geographers have by and large ignored calls for a critical engagement with sports is surprising given both the important role that sports play in modern American culture and the more serious treatment of sports in disciplines such as economics, history, and sociology.

At the most basic level, geography and sports intersect in terms of the impact of physical and human geography on athletic performance and on the outcome of sporting competitions. Physical geography has had dramatic impacts in terms of sports performances in more extreme physical locations (e.g., the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics, Major League Baseball in Denver), whereas students of sports have long noted social geography phenomena such as home field advantage, where teams tend to win more games when playing at home than when playing away from home (as was the case for all 29 teams in the National Basketball Association during the 2003–2004 season).

The most studied area in sports geography has been the recruitment of players for college and professional sports teams. Answering the question of where players come from gives hints as to the areas and regions where specific sports are most popular. Recent decades have seen a growing trend toward globalized recruiting in North American professional sports leagues, especially in professional basketball (with players coming to play from all parts of the world), professional hockey (with players coming from Northern and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), and professional baseball (with players coming from Latin America and East Asia). At the same time as players have been recruited from various parts of the world to play professional sports in North America, team owners and leagues have been marketing their teams and sports in other parts of the world through broadcasting and licensing agreements in other countries and by scheduling regular season and exhibition games in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

The globalization of sports is also seen in recent cross-national ownership of teams such as the Nintendo Corporation's ownership of the Seattle Mariners baseball team and the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team's recent purchase of England's most famous soccer team, Manchester United. At the same time as North American team sports are being exported to the rest of the world, American fans still show their longtime resistance to the importation of the world's most popular sport, soccer, despite recent success by the men's and women's U.S. national soccer teams at the world level. Many of the best American soccer players play[Page 458] professionally in other countries to enhance their skills and achieve higher pay and professional status.

However, the intersection of sports and geography goes well beyond that of the recruitment of players. The importance of sports is seen in its high-profile role in nationalism and geopolitics, including the rise of pride in patriotism following important national sporting success (as hockey victories by Canada's all-star team over the Soviet Union in the 1972 Summit series and by the U.S. Olympic team over the Soviet Union in 1980 demonstrated) and sports' role in geopolitics both in helping to reduce tensions among enemies (as in U.S.–China “ping pong” diplomacy in 1971 and recent cricket test matches between India and Pakistan) and in using sports as a geopolitical weapon (as in the cold war boycotts by the United States at the 1980 Moscow Winter Olympics and by the Soviet Union at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics). In modern Western society, sports also play a role in identity formation and forging attachments between people and the places they live, from the role of high school football in west Texas, to stock car racing in parts of the American South, to hockey in Canada.

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