Twenty-Five Great Sports Movies [in Chronological Order]

A ball bat is a wondrous weapon.

- Ty Cobb

Quinn remembered the gentlemen, the women too, stopping in their green sportsman's kingdom to consider a series of rhetorical questions put to them by the boozy couple. The strange fact was that because Stanton at seventeen stayed sober, the deteriorated pair felt he was trying to be superior, to be condescending. And until the time they threw him out of the house to go to college, they skulked around and drank on the sly.
- Thomas McGuane, The Sporting Club

The Calgary Stampede (Herbert Blaché, 1925)

College (Buster Keaton, 1927) 

Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932)

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Pit Stop (Jack Hill, 1969)

The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich, 1974)

The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976)

Slap Shot (George Roy Hill, 1977)

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (Seijun Suzuki, 1977)

Youngblood (Peter Markle, 1986)

Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988)

Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)

The Cyclist (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1989)

A Scene at the Sea (Takeshi Kitano, 1991)

The Cutting Edge (Paul Michael Glaser, 1992)

Up and Down (Luc Moullet, 1993)

Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)

Tokyo Fist (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1995)

Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 2001)

Throw Down (Johnnie To, 2004)

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut, 2021)

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024)

The Fall, "Theme from Sparta F.C."