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You've got a lot of other responses explaining lots of reasons why sports can be interesting, but I'll add my own. IMO, if you think it's about watching strangers "kick a ball around," you're missing the point. It's about the stories told through sports at least as much as the physical activity itself, and those stories generally transcend a single game.

Take baseball: a baseball season is a narrative as rich as movies and books, but watching one game between teams you don't know is like reading a page or two from the middle of a novel. You might get lucky and catch some enthralling action, but the real excitement comes from understanding that game in its context. The players on both teams each have their own stories, and the teams themselves have their own stories.

Take the drama between Marco Scutaro and Matt Holliday after the Holliday took out Scutaro in a dirty slide. On the surface, it's just a nasty play: http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=25415817 But it happened in a major playoff series, which is exciting not just because "it's the playoffs", but because a grueling, 6-month 162-game series is on the line. (Picture what that means, don't just skim the numbers.) For the Giants, the slide looked eerily like the catastrophic injury last year that ended the season of a highly admired young rising star. (The significance of that injury comes from his role as a rookie the previous year in bringing the first World Series Championship to San Francisco, and the resulting high expectations for 2011 that were instantly crushed by that injury.) Scutaro himself was brought on mid-season to fill an important hole in the Giants offense, one which was supposed to be filled by Melky Cabrera, whom the fans grew to love dearly, but who betrayed fans by breaking league rules around performance enhancing drugs and getting suspended. There's lots more to this, but I'll leave it there.

As another example, take the last season game of 2011: Day of: http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/leading-off-what-a-... Day after: http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/leading-off-three-m...

So yeah, on the surface, it's just a bunch of guys hitting the ball around. But if you can put aside easy dismissal ("my local sports team is superior to your local sports team") for a minute and accept the conceit of the game, you may find the experience quite unique, in that the team element, the community of fellow fans, the rightness of both sides, and the fact that it's not scripted make it very different than most modern forms of storytelling, and it comes with its own insights on the human condition (see Pete Rose, the Black Sox scandal, or Jackie Robinson).

You might check out some of the Ken Burns documentary "Baseball" or Leonard Koppett's "The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball".

> And to this day, asking all my sports-obsessed friends why they like it so much, I've never gotten an answer I can actually understand or identify with

I'll try and answer it from a european perspective (soccer fan)...

In a nutshell: a sense of identity, sense of belonging, tribalism, 'banter' among opposing fans.

One of the highlights of a fan going to an away English premier league game (esp. against your fierce rivals) is to piss off the home support by singing something insulting about their team/players/team history etc. Then the home support respond by singing their own insults, and you get the atmosphere really fking rocking.

Other people you have a go at: opposing manager, the ref, even "gently" mocking your own players as a sign of affection.

I saw this documentary about Dutch football, where there was a guy explaining that Dutch people don't go to church any more, so they pack into football stadiums (modern cathedrals) on a Sunday, which provides a sense of community/identity.

Check out this incredible video of Greek basketball fans (!) - a sport not exactly renowned for passionate fans like the European/South American soccer terraces...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0

(brace yourself if you are not familiar with the concept of "banter" among fans, and check out the english translation in the video description ;-)

Here's another cool video of really passionate Borussia Dortmund fans (they have really amazing, well-behaved, yet passionate support) marching in a tunnel in Manchester, co-ordinated chanting, the whole lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZnUlEJFPjs

Hope that helps!

If someone wanted, they could argue that "absolutely nothing whatsoever" hinges on music or architecture either, and then apply your counter-arguments back to sports. edit: and look, cobrausn has while I was typing this.

Some people like sports because of the athleticism it. A 100 mile per hour fastball is much more impressive when you've pushed your own limits trying to throw a ball.

Some people like it because of the strategy on a macro- or micro-level. When you've played/watched the game enough, you learn more about the big picture and the small decisions that shape a game. In ice hockey, like in chess, you might not get punished for a mistake until a number of moves later. Someone who knows the game can tell you, "You see how #15 turned towards the boards instead of away there? That puts him out of position for..."

Lots of people like sports for the social aspect of watching the game. Seeing the underdog Giants take on the undefeated Patriots for the Superbowl is a lot more exciting with a group of friends than it is sitting home alone. (Even moreso with a group of Giants fans in Boston, but I digress.)

I can come up with other reasons, but these are the big 3 for me.

You imply architecture and music have meaning and affect people's lives in real ways, yet sports do not. Do I really have to point out what's wrong with this statement? Not to mention it sounds incredibly pretentious.

I say this as someone who doesn't really follow sports (maybe in the playoffs or post-season), but can recognize it's impact on culture.

I think a fair difference between music/architecture and sports is the relative permanence of the former. An individual structure will be studied 4000 years from now and tell us how an entire culture thrived. Music from the 1700s is still enjoyed today. Most sports games have no lasting effects beyond a week, and when we actually do study ancient sports, we study ancient art and architecture to learn how it was played; individual games within that sport usually have little relevance unless they involve royalty or politics.

It's certainly an important aspect of our culture, but it has a much smaller role than music and architecture. Everybody knows the Empire State Building and Beethoven, but most people don't know who won last week's football game and by what margin.

You're comparing apples and oranges. People know who Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan are, the same way they know the Empire State Building and Beethoven.

Besides, I'd be shocked if fewer people know who played the Monday Night Football game this week than who was nominated for best album at the 2013 Grammy awards, 5 days earlier.

An individual game will typically have no permanence to it, but the nature of the game can last a lot longer. In many cases, the games we are playing today originate from older versions that pre-date the 1700s, so if 'permanence' is your qualification for cultural relevance, then sports seem to have as much (if not more) relevance than music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball#Origins_of_baseball

Not to mention the Olympics =)

Music and architecture bring joy to people who like them. Even in musical competitions, most of the audience enjoys most of the performance. Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.

(Interestingly I'm far more able to appreciate professional wrestling, since (at least some of) the fandom for that is more interested in seeing a good performance than which side wins (and indeed often it's the "loser" who has the most important and hardest job))

Music and architecture bring joy to people who like them.

So do sports.

Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.

This couldn't be more wrong. Sports fans absolutely do enjoy good games, independently of which team happens to be their favorite.

I can certainly understand the psychological basis for enjoying sports. You get to cheer on people who associate as being part of your group, and watch them compete against people who are "other". This lets you vicariously share the thrill of victory and the despair of defeat. You're also able to form strong emotional bonds with those around you because you're all sharing the same emotional highs and lows. There's also some intellectual satisfaction to be had if you have a good understanding of the mechanics and tactics of the sport; you can analyze what the teams are doing, make predictions, and feel smart when you're right.

Personally, I have no interest in letting myself become involved because I think there are many more enjoyable and productive things to become immersed in. I also really dislike being a permanent spectator.

I got interested in sports mostly coming from a gambling background (and then fantasy, which hits most of the same psychological buttons as gambling), a hobby I think nerds tend to be slightly more likely to care about. Betting money on a game certainly gives you a reason to care.

Even without the money, people watch sports for the narratives. If it really is just two teams of people you know nothing about, then for most people, it's going to be boring. Most sports fan watching a league they're not familiar with will be bored, even if it's the same sport. How many American football fans enjoy Canadian football?

Once you get to know some of the players, their successes or struggles, it makes more sense why people enjoy it. It's basically a soap opera with testosterone. And while many nerds might not be interested in sports of soap operas, the majority of time you can find some activity they enjoy that does follow the basic tenets of enjoying narratives about other people that are essentially meaningless to your life. I would say that in many ways Hacker News has it's own players and teams that it follows (Google, Apple, Zuckerberg, Stallman, etc). While the stories of these people and companies probably does impact a lot of people here in some big ways, I think a non-neglible amount of interest is derived from the same storytelling aspect that sports provides.

And of course there is the tribal aspect of it, and being able to share something with other people, that glaugh touches upon, as well as the appreciation of athletic talent and strategy.

Fwiw, the joy I get from watching sports is sort of similar to the joy I get from music (I love both). They're both fine to do alone, but in significant part they're excuses to get together with people and feel together.

Sort of similarly, if you buy the thesis of The Mating Mind, a book about the role of sexual selection in human evolution, then to some extent we're just sort of programmed (to differing degrees?) to find music and sports engaging because they're good indicators of the fitness of their participants.

To me this sounds like you haven't really taken the time to understand how any sport works. Usually there's a lot more going on than "kicking a ball around", and these subtleties of planning and strategy are really what make them fun.

I can see how you would assume that, but it's not actually the case. I watched every single game of the last world cup (even the simultaneous ones! -- I worked at a TV station), have been to huge, emotional live soccer matches 20+ times, and the most interesting part of it all was the strategy, skill, etc.

But at the end of the day, it really is just kicking a ball into a net.

The military has planning and strategy too, but there the goal is replacing a government, or saving lives, or changing a society (or less noble causes) -- things that can change millions of people's lives in huge ways. So I can get into military planning and strategy, for example.

But if it's just to kick a ball into a net... after the game, and after the world cup, I find myself asking, "why do I even care?"

Too true.

Saying that sports is just "kicking a ball around" is like saying software development is just "banging away on keyboards", in that it is easy to dismiss something as trivial when you choose to ignore a lot of details.

I am the same way. I also graduated from the University of Michigan which has a great sports program, so this is usually the ice breaker in interviews, meeting with clients etc.. when they see my resume. I usually bow out and change the subject quickly.

I enjoy talking politics as well, but in many ways is just as pointless and arbitrary..."my side of the aisle is better than yours". When your presidential candidate makes a goof he is an idiot, when mine does it he is misunderstood.

Discussing politics is not the same as discussing politicians. I enjoy the former, but the latter bores me to tears.

I agree. I'm fascinated by politics in a structural way -- ideologies, movements, narratives, red states vs blue states, liberalism vs conservatism, states' rights and federalism, etc.

But there are lot of people who don't seem to care about that at all, but rather follow politics like sports or soap operas -- which politician said what, how that affects their polling, etc.

There are two very different ways of being "into" politics.