Consider any sport. In this article, I’ll talk about the best sport: soccer.

My motivation for writing this article arose from an apparent conflict or contradiction that I noticed around soccer. The apparent contradiction is this: soccer is arbitrary, while also being meaningful.

Arbitrary: In soccer, the players strive hard to put the ball into the other team’s net, but any idiot could simply pick up the ball and place it into the goal. The rules of soccer seem to have a highly arbitrary aspect to them. Many specific rules appear pretty arcane; had the history of soccer progressed differently, the rules could have ended up very different. A goal is defined as getting the ball into a certain position on the pitch, but the goal could have been defined to consist of a different size or shape or position. The pitch is some number of metres long, rather than some other length. An offside offense is defined in a certain way, rather than in some other way. All of these details are very important for influencing on-field play and strategy, but there is no escaping the fact that the details appear arbitrary.
Meaningful: I love soccer. I love playing it every week, I love being part of a team, and I love working with my team to improve our skills. I love watching other people play soccer, and I love supporting particular teams (e.g. Arsenal, Adelaide United, the Australian national team, and so on). Clearly, playing and watching soccer forms an important and meaningful part of my life. My life would be poorer without these activities.

How can this sport, which appears to be arbitrary in its design and rules, nevertheless form such an important part of my life (and many other people’s lives)? How can something be both arbitrary and meaningful?

This bothers me philosophically. The problem is not that I cannot find meaning in soccer. I find plenty of meaning in it. However, I do not have a philosophical or theoretical explanation for finding meaning in this arbitrary activity. When a theory fails to account for an explanation, this indicates that the theory needs to be refined or corrected. Clearly, my philosophical understanding of soccer is incorrect.

In this blog article, I identify and correct this mistaken view. It works in practice, but can it work in theory? (I experienced something similar with religion; see chapter 6 of my book.)

The solution to this apparent conflict has a few parts.

Sport has meaning because it is arbitrary.

A famous definition of games is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Suits 1978). For sport, we can narrow the definition to something like “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles through specific physical skills or tasks”. This definition has been criticised by philosophers, but I like it, and it seems sufficient for our purposes.
Soccer, as the most popular and classic sport, is likewise an unnecessary contest. Soccer is staged for the enjoyment of both the participants and the spectators (Borge 2019). Soccer is “entertainment derived from competition” (O’Connor and Dasgupta 2012).
The fact that games and sports are staged for people’s enjoyment mean that they have intrinsic value (Suits 1978). Sports are not like chopping wood for money (instrumental value); they are like a pleasant walk in the forest (intrinsic value).
It is unusual that the outcome of a soccer match does not matter, but we care about the outcome anyway. We deliberately pretend that the outcome of a soccer match matters. In this way, soccer is both unnecessary and extra-ordinary; it is something added onto out ordinary, everyday existence (Borge 2019).
It is precisely because soccer is artificial (and therefore inconsequential) that you can really lose yourself in it. In instrumental, day-to-day activities, it is often prudent to keep your emotions under control. Having a space where you can let your emotions run wild serves an important function in our lives (Borge 2019). In the same way, people enjoy horror movies because they are a safe space in which emotions can run wild.

Soccers rules are not fully arbitrary

The rules are not completely arbitrary. Games are not random in form and content - they fulfill specific human needs that are consistent with life outside of the game (e.g. physical contest and excitement) (Borge 2019).
The game must be not too easy and not too hard (Suits 1978). Furthermore, the specific rules are often adjusted to preserve the desired aspects of the game (Borge 2019). The offside rule works in a certain way, rather than in some other way, because this is what the governing body deems best for providing physical contest and excitement.
If something is a social convention (like the rules of a sport), it means that a different convention could have been chosen instead. However, it does not mean that the choice of convention is arbitrary. Replacing the rules of soccer with a randomly chosen set of rules would usually result in a less exciting game. The randomly chosen game would meet a different set of human needs to what soccer currently meets. If there were no soccer, there would likely be something else in its place, but that something else would not be random or fully arbitrary (Borge 2019).
There are many analogies. Consider money. The coins and bank notes that we use might be partially arbitrary, but they are not totally arbitrary. A well-designed money system does a good job of meeting the need to represent and exchange resources. There might exist better alternatives. But a randomly chosen alternative—say, representing wealth by counting the number of freckles on one’s foot—would be less successful at meeting this need.

There are other things that are both meaningful and (partially) arbitrary

Sport is a “socio-historical thing”. It is socially made up, in a way that an apple or a mountain is not (Borge 2019). It is historically grounded in that it has an origin and a continuous history.
There are many other “socio-historical things”. Examples include marriage, elections, fashion, and cocktail parties (Borge 2019). The rules of my country’s electoral system might appear arbitrary and historically contingent—they could have turned out differently. But somebody can find immense value in engaging with the electoral system (e.g. running a website that forecasts election results) or engaging with the marriage system (e.g. planning and enjoying their wedding). To deny this value on the basis that the phenomenon is made up (which it is) or partially arbitrary (which it is) would seem mean-spirited.
Another analogy is language. As any student of English knows, spoken and written languages have many arbitrary components. But empirical research shows that a language, taken as a full, functional system, is generally a highly efficient way to communicate information in its social and historical context—a randomly generated (invented) language would usually be worse at serving this social function than the world’s actual languages are. Moreover, it is obvious that spending one’s time, say, savouring classic English literature or writing lyrics for German hip-hop songs, is highly worthwhile and meaningful. These activities are not less worthy because languages are partially arbitrary and historically contingent. (I’m serious about German hip-hop—it’s seriously excellent.)

Soccer is not that weird

This is the solution to my philosophical conundrum. Soccer is partially arbitrary (though not fully arbitrary), and soccer is historically contingent. However, many meaningful human endeavours share these characteristics, and there is no reason why a made-up and partially arbitrary phenomenon cannot be valued as a central activity of one’s life.

Enjoying the cameraderie of your soccer team is not that different from enjoying the cameraderie of your Shakespearean acting troupe or your string quartet—these are all activities that, while arbitrary and historically contingent, provide pleasure to you and your friends while also providing entertainment to others (O’Connor and Dasgupta 2012).
Enjoying the development of your soccer skills (or appreciating other players’ mastery of the game) is not that different from deriving enjoyment from participation in the electoral system (or appreciating another party’s well-executed election campaign). These are both activities that, while arbitrary and historically contingent, serve an important purpose in society.

Perhaps the fact that I need to read multiple works of philosophy in order to arrive at the conclusion “soccer is fun” should have been a clear indication that I’m autistic!

Lastly, here’s a neat tidbit. It is interesting to me that there is a deep parallel between sport and religion. The similarity is this: in sport and in religion, time and space is set aside where the ordinary, day-to-day activities of survival are paused. In fact, Bellah (2011) argues that play served an important purpose in the evolution of ritual and religion in humans. To be sure, there are important differences between sport and religion. But I find it very interesting that sport and religion—both deep interests of mine over the past few years, in part because I initially thought that they made little sense—share this fundamental connection.

Update 2025-05-12 My therapist recently shared with me The Neurodivergence Skills Workbook for Autism and ADHD. This has a section on stimming—self-stimulating behaviours, especially those that involve physical sensations, that can help people regulate their emotions and find calmness. Stimming is very common in autistic people. It is very interesting to me that the list of stims in this workbook includes “doing sports”!

Sources and reading list:

Borge 2019, The Philosophy of Football.
Suits 1978, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.
O’Connor & Dasgupta, 2012, “Sport is arbitrary, and that’s ok”, The American Journal of Bioethics, link.
Bellah 2011, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (especially chapters 2 and 3).