Sports are the new age Wars

Let's look at the origins of world's Top 10 most popular sports:

Football - 1863
Cricket - 1877
Hockey - 1875
Tennis - 1873
Volleyball - 1895
Table Tennis - end of 1800s
Basketball - 1891
Baseball - 1845
Rugby - 1823
Golf - 1764

Homosapiens have inhabited this planet since 200,000 years. Wonder what kind of evolution did the Human race go through between 1850 to 1900, a measly 50 years, when the Top 8 most popular games were invented? Even the modern Olympics commenced from 1894 coincidentally during the same 50 years.

There are basically Three different types of sports viz team games (football, cricket, hockey, volleyball etc), individual games (tennis, table tennis etc) and field events (racing, swimming, gymnastics etc which predominantly take place during Olympics or similar world/continent events.

Let's now look at what exactly happens when we play these games?

In the Team games, there are two opposing teams (started off as countries) who fight over limited resource (a'la one football) which needs to be snatched from the opposing team and taken to their side or one side throws stuff at the other (a'la cricket ball) which the opposing team has to defend or hit offensively.

In the individual games, two individuals duel with each other as they try to show their supremacy over the other. There are still some sports where physical duel is involved viz boxing, wrestling, fencing, judo etc.

In the field games, humans try to break the limits of human capacity each time creating new records of fastest running or swimming, highest or longest jumps, javelin or hammer throws, gymnastics to name a few.

One can see the similarity between all these sports & games and the way humans lived before that in the permanent state of wars. While the countries fought their last big wars till 1945 but clearly we had already got fed up with the killings as we quietly but quickly replaced wars with sports created in the second half of the 19th century. Fast forward to today and you can notice that most popular computer games are around wars, fights or sports (Fortnite, Pubg, FIFA)

. We haven't changed much as just like wars in the past, sports today brings the country together as one can feel the jingoism during global sports events.

We love to fight and we love to compete. We should continue to find more ways of keeping the people engaged in competitive activities lest we get bored with the current sports and slip back to the wars.

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