The Power of Sports to Unite and Divide

For nearly fifty years, South Africa was a nation bitterly divided by apartheid, a system of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. The regime extended to the rugby pitch—the sport had long stood as a symbol of separation, scarred by racial division. President Nelson Mandela urged South Africans of all backgrounds to stand behind the Springboks—the all-white team—by wearing their green jersey to the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The move was an attempt on Mandela's part to show how a sport once used to mark boundaries between people can be transformed into a shared passion that bridges those divides. It was, of course, a mostly symbolic gesture. But the world was watching.

Many would agree with Nelson Mandela’s assertion that “(s)port has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” People routinely use sports to overcome social barriers to celebrate excellence, reward merit, and affirm identity. At the same time, sports can inadvertently become a platform where social and political disagreements are played out, with polarizing effects.

Sociologist Richard Giulianotti argues that sports clubs are extensions of communities that hold certain values and beliefs. The stadium becomes a public forum to express values such as solidarity and compassion that define that community.  The recent support that the fans of Nigerian football player Victor Osimhen—who plays for the Turkish Galatasaray club—expressed when his mother died demonstrates the ways in which clubs and their fans express affinities that transcend sport. Osimhen represented more than just a team member; he was first and foremost a human with a family, who had suffered a great loss. Public gestures toward players during moments of grief are therefore not just acts of sympathy; they are communal performances.

A similar type of public engagement and community building was also present after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. The Boston Red Sox helped popularize the slogan “Boston Strong,” which provided civic identity across the city and the region. Fenway Park became a place where people could express unity and collectively grieve. The Red Sox also engaged in fundraising efforts to help the victims’ families, and during the celebratory parade after winning the World Series later in the year, they stopped at the finish line to honor the dead and the injured. The team became the embodiment of leadership in a community so desperately in need at a time of crisis and grief.

Sociologist Michael Messner argues that sports serve as a foundation for cultural beliefs about authority, allowing the general public to express ideals that can be mapped on to politics and to other ideas about what constitutes leadership. Given that sports has clear guidelines about what constitutes a top player and a key team leader, using sports terms to characterize politicians’ leadership qualities creates an idealized narrative. Winning an election can be equated with winning a game or winning a championship. While a trophy for an athlete is the culmination of a long season, an electoral victory for a politician is the beginning of a long series of political battles, negotiations, and compromises; thus, according to Messner, turning an election into an athletic competition has the benefit of de-emphasizing these complexities.

Community values also appear in banter about players who demonstrate traits of leadership. Fans of the English soccer club Liverpool believed that Steven Gerrard almost singlehandedly carried the club to victory. He was the “captain, leader, legend.” Manchester United supporters believed that club legend Roy Keane dragged the team to victory. New England Patriots fans felt that Tom Brady was never rattled, and cool under pressure. For Kansas City Chiefs fans, Patrick Mahomes refused to lose. These leadership qualities are what a team—and correspondingly, a community—needs to succeed in the face of fierce competition.

While sports can represent a source of good and social cohesion, it can also provoke an “us and them” mindset that contributes to the type of polarization that we see in contemporary politics. Undoubtedly, sports can bring people together—but it can also divide fans into antagonistic groups that seek vindication and moral validation. Grievances in sports also tend to be articulated in very stark terms that reflect an us-versus-them mindset also present in politics. Think about the uproar related to controversial officiating decisions that appear to break the rules.

In the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal against England, Argentinian superstar Diego Maradona was allowed to score a goal by punching the ball with his left hand into the net. Referred to as “the hand of God” goal, the incident was thought of as one of the greatest failures in football history, as ultimately Argentina won the game 2-1 and then became World Cup champions by beating Germany a week later. The English football community felt that rather than the referee making a mistake that they had been cheated.

Crises in sport can mirror broader societal frustrations about systemic dysfunction. The referee match-fixing scandal in 2006 involving the most influential clubs in Italy, known as calciopoli, led fans to feel that results had been predetermined and that the system was “fixed.” Italian football was widely described as being “sick” or in crisis, and fans wondered how they could trust the league. The Houston Astros baseball team’s sign-stealing scandal, exposed in 2019, triggered a similar outrage. The Astros used a camera in the outfield to capture the opposing catcher’s signs to the pitcher. The video was sent to a monitor near the dugout where players analyzed the signs and informed their teammates of upcoming pitches by banging on a trash can. This gave hitters a huge advantage over the pitchers. Fans called the Astros cheaters, and told them to vacate the World Series title.

These types of scandals are seen as corrupting the integrity of competition and as evidence that winning comes through deception rather than fair competition and merit. If the integrity of public sporting events is believed to be related to strategy, organization, and hard work, these types of transgressions are extremely detrimental to legitimate competition and to public credibility. Fans of sport are well aware that the games and fairness in society in general are reliant on transparency, and if this is compromised, fans feel that they have been cheated.

This sense of dissatisfaction seems to parallel contemporary political life. Citizens increasingly believe that politics is dishonest and that electoral results reflect attempts to favor certain interests. Just as in sport—where fans ask “how can we trust the league?”—voters wonder what is happening to the integrity of our political institutions. The language referenced in sports—corruption, cheating, robbery—aligns with political sentiments because both discourses represent a loss in trust and a loss in honest governance. A study of 85,000 posts from politicians on political discourse shows that sports metaphors significantly shape public engagement and interpretation, with familiar domains such as sport providing emotionally resonant frameworks that encourage audiences to understand politics in terms of competition, victory, and fairness. In sport, a diminished trust in fair competition leads to fan disengagement; in politics, it can create disillusionment, polarization, and challenges to those in power. In both cases, the perception of an unfair system undermines participation.

Economic inequality also represents a grievance that frequently crops up in sports conversations and in political discussions. Referring to Middle Eastern state-owned football clubs in Europe—such as Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Newcastle United—that dominate the market and reflect broader geopolitical concerns, former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp remarked: “It is just clear—there are three clubs who can do what they want financially.”

Perceptions of an unequal playing field also exist within a national context. On the dominance of German team Bayern Munich, which has won most of the recent league titles, one fan complained, “Most non-Bayern fans are however not too happy seeing Bayern win the league all the time and kind of hope they fail.” Another stated, “I would say, every male top league in Europe has this problem. A few clubs that get the title every year.” Inequality impacts many sports, and fans from small market baseball teams in the US commonly feel that their teams cannot compete with the Yankees and the Dodgers. South American fans also constantly express the concern that European clubs take most of their best players.

These concerns demonstrate fans’ strong feelings that favoritism and an imbalance in political power represent barriers for under-resourced teams. Much of this sentiment also aligns with the frustration that fans feel toward the corporate takeover of sports by large financial firms who have the resources to buy the best players and to develop superior facilities. These feelings also correspond with the affordability crisis where working- and middle-class people, not unlike smaller and mid-sized market fans, feel that they are being priced out of tickets to games.

Questions about how privileged athletes can speak about the politics of pressing contemporary issues are often contentious. When Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice, reactions were split: Did he desert his team or bring to light a problem that needed attention? Should he have been honored or should he have been suspended? Similarly, the French had strong opinions when members of the French national football team encouraged people to vote against far-right parties in 2024. Those in favor of the athletes’ actions argued that players had the right to speak like any other citizen. Those opposed complained that millionaires were lecturing the people, not politicians.

The intensity of these responses reveals how deeply people invest athletes with moral authority—and how sharply they disagree about how that authority should be used. While sports can unite people across class, community, and geography, they can also create deep divisions. The qualities sport most admirably cultivates—leadership, commitment, and loyalty—are worth encouraging, but its darker impulse toward emphasizing winners and losers risks being mapped on to other parts of society where the stakes are much higher. Clearly, we want to feel that sports offer us a reprieve, but we must also be careful to differentiate between what we can truly enjoy and what represents more complex social issues.

Contributor Bio

Stephen Ortega is an Associate with the Global Sports Initiative at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. He is Emeritus Professor of History at Simmons University. His research focuses on Mediterranean and world history; the history of emotions; collective memory; and digital humanities.