Meanings
- uncountableThe elevation of sport to a role of primary importance in the functions of a society.
For quotations using this term, see Citations:sportocracy.
- uncountableThe reduction of all or most major questions in a society to the competition between two or more competing sides.
1 more example
As recent events suggest, we are living today in what I call a ‘sportocracy’. […] Moreover, each of us is interpellated, or hailed, by the sportocracy as fitting into certain categories, depending on our location in the social structure. […] In relation to sport, Barthes reminds us once again that the dominant representations of sport, and by extension the ‘sportocracy’, operate to offer truth-claims about the worlds we live in far beyond the world of sport.
2007, Gamal Abdel-Shehid, “Welcome to the ‘sportocracy’: ‘Race’ and sport after innocence”, in Jennifer Hargreaves, Patricia Vertinsky, editors, Physical Culture, Power, and the Body (Routledge Critical Studies in Sport), London: Routledge, →ISBN, pages 195–197
Cite this entry
sportocracy. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sportocracy
“sportocracy.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sportocracy. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “sportocracy,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sportocracy.
Source: sportocracy on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.