The 10 Best Sports Movies For People Who Hate Sports

Not everyone has to love every single genre in the world, but there’s something about sports movies that tends to be a turnoff. Maybe it’s an over-reliance on underdog clichés, or team statistics, or boring depictions of sporting events that people don’t enjoy watching anyway, but it can be tough to convince a friend or a date or a family member to turn on a movie about football, or baseball, or Olympic synchronized swimming.

What sports haters forget, though, is that sports movies are, at their core, about pure human drama — the drive to achieve something impossible, or the challenges of working together with people you don’t exactly vibe with, or the thrill of proving to your doubters that you can do something no one thought you could do. There’s more to these movies than just watching a bunch of dudes chase after a ball, and we’ve chosen ten of them that prove that, and then some.

These are movies where the drama (or comedy, or tragedy) is at the forefront, and the athletics come secondary. That’s not to say that the sport of these sports movies is dulled or forgotten — far from it. These films have some of the best fictionalized games, matches, and races ever put onscreen, on top of their iconic performances from great actors and poetically written scripts. From historical football dramas to pro wrestling weepies to dodgeball comedies to, yes, that movie about the ghost baseball team everyone’s dad loves, these are the sports movies for everyone who thinks they hate sports (or sports movies) .