What Is the Difference Between a Game and a Sport?
A sport is an athletic discipline with a defined set of rules in which athletes train and occasionally compete, while a game is a competition between two or more teams with a well-defined objective and a set of rules that apply to reaching the objective. In a nutshell, sports are the large discipline, and fames are the competitions that take place within sports.
Soccer, for instance, is a sport. A soccer match is a game played within the sport of soccer. Players train in a sport and compete in a game. Games are also not necessarily athletically oriented. Board games and card games are a prime examples of this. Since players compete for a common objective in accordance to a pre-defined set of rules, they are classified as games. However, people do not train in board or card games, so they are not classified as sports. In recent years, the popularity of athletic activities that do not involve any sort of game playing, such as cheerleading, has sparked much debate about what constitutes a sport and whether games are a necessary element of sports. The dissent is in the interpretation of the competition. Although some people consider them synonymous, others argue that if head-to-head matches or meets are not involved, than an activity, regardless of the level of athleticism required to do it, is not technically a sport.
