Sport (European Portuguese) and sports or sports (Brazilian Portuguese) is a physical or mental activity subject to certain regulations, which generally aim to competition among practitioners. To be considered sport has to be involvement of skills, motor skills and competitiveness of opposites; rules established by a confederation or federation conductor.
Some sports are practiced by vehicles or other machines that do not require effort, in which case it is more important than dexterity and concentration exercise. Ideally the sport fun and entertaining, and is an intense and methodical manner of a game that tends to perfection and the coordination of muscular effort with a view to improving physical and spiritual human being. The sports can be collective, double or single, with or without an opponent.
We can also define sport as a sociocultural phenomenon, which involves the voluntary practice of a physical activity competitive with predominantly recreational or professional purpose, or non-competitive physical predominantly for leisure, contributing to the formation, development and / or improve physical, intellectual and Psychic its practitioners and spectators. Besides being a way to create an identity for a sports social inclusion.
Sporting activity can also be applied in health promotion in the educational context, the application of expertise to complement the interests of a community volunteer non-specialist.
Children playing football, the most popular sport in the world [1].
A simple football field, Caldas Novas.O sport is known as today, or the modern sport, takes shape in the schools of eighteenth-century England, the cradle of capitalism.
Surrounded by capitalist ideology, which preaches order, rationalism, competition and individual initiative, students from English schools develop a new format for the games so popular, giving rise to the sport. Arise championships between schools, clubs and federations and confederations after, instruments that will gradually legitimizing the practice and game.
After the consolidation of capitalism and its spread throughout the world, sporting institution, formerly restricted to the European world, is gaining space in other continents. Following the same logic of capitalist greed, the sport is bound to crop and takes the space of popular practices, conveying the world-capitalist ideology.
Among other factors, the potential cathartic, allowing the viewer to a welfare through the process of transferring their own problems to the environment of the game, the Sport is now a large cohesive mass. Taking advantage of this potential phenomenon, businessmen take over the different areas related to sport: equipment, clubs, accessories, television channels, among others. In turn, the state also is using the sport in search of popularity and international profile.
Attached to the corporate media, more interested in space and profit for its sponsors, the sport suffers intense changes, especially as it is transmitted. Emphasis is placed on the spectacular nature of the competitions, which becomes visible through the presence of televisions in the stadiums, there are television channels specializing in the subject, increasing the practice of sports fashion and extreme exploitation and social influence of athletes are better successful. Conceptualizing this new phase of the sport, comes the term "Sports Entertainment", the current model of the phenomenon dealt with here.
For the specialist in social anthropology Arlei Damo, a sports competition is "to some extent" an illusion, because it has no impact on life or day-to-day lives, except those directly related to sport. [2]