LeBron James or Michael Jordan? College football or NFL? Summer or Winter Olympics? Tarheels or the Wolf Pack? Spirited debate topics like these are just as integral to sports fandom as tailgating on a Saturday or filling out a March Madness bracket. Yet, though widely revered as a fun topic of idle chatter, sports are viewed as a less intellectual subject for truly stimulating conversation than politics, science, philosophy, or any other academic discipline. However, in my experience, sports talk is underrated as an effective model for constructive deliberation.
Before I delve into the substance of what makes sports a valuable domain for deliberation, it’s important to understand that sports are inherently valuable because they provide a space where disagreement is not only acceptable, but welcomed because of its lower stakes nature that features less villainization of opposing viewpoints. It can be scary to challenge someone’s staunchly held view on a hot button issue like abortion due to the inherent vitriol that surrounds such a topic. On the other hand, when talking about sports, disagreement easily elicits laughs, kinship, and new ways of approaching sports analysis, which can serve as a valuable “appetizer” to test out deliberation before diving into more contentious themes. While I’ve never felt comfortable walking up to a stranger and starting an immigration debate, I’ve made many random friendships simply by asking who’s their greatest baseball player of all time.
Sports don’t just allow us to deliberate more – they also help us deliberate better. In politics, deliberation can be so challenging when both sides come in with very different conceptualizations of the facts, and thus different conclusions. For example, someone who watches MSNBC coverage of Hurricane Helene relief efforts will have a different understanding of their efficacy than a Fox News viewer. In sports, a level of universal objectivity exists: everyone who watched the Super Bowl saw the exact same game. Everyone agrees that Michael Phelps has won 23 gold medals.
Working from an agreed-upon set of facts makes deliberation easier. Instead of having to get bogged down in how many gold medals Michael Phelps has won, people can cut straight to debating its implications for his legacy or how it compares with Usain Bolt’s achievements. Meanwhile, political deliberators often must spend far more time establishing their agreement on factual details than delving into the implications of those details. More time on meaning equals more time achieving goals of deliberation like mutual understanding.
Sports also provide a crucial source of unity that invites future deliberation. Democrats and Republicans are more hesitant than ever to engage with one another; however, sports provide a universal topic to discuss. After establishing a shared interest in a particular sports league (If no common sports interest exists, other points of cultural overlap like music and television can be an effective substitute as well), I can easily befriend someone, even amidst differing political beliefs. Once we’ve formed that trust and kinship, it becomes far easier to engage on a more controversial topic. With these norms of civility, respect, and thoughtfulness that we initially establish through sports talk, we can apply this model to a hot-button issue.
Nonetheless, there exists no easy answer for the question of how to apply the lessons of sports talk to more contentious deliberations. We can’t snap our fingers and make immigration comfortable to talk about or the economy easy to summarize objectively. Still, by applying some practices that we subconsciously practice during our sports conversations—searching for a set of facts to agree upon, recognizing the humanity of the other deliberators, and not being afraid to disagree—we can move towards stronger conversations in the sphere of political deliberation.
