The 10 Best Sports Movies of All Time

You don’t have to love sports to love sports movies. Sure, it might help if you’re watching Eight Men Out from the perspective of someone who adores baseball history, and Miracle probably means more to people who remember watching the U.S. best Russia at hockey. But movies are their own thing, with their own storylines and structures, and definitely their own pleasures. So while it may seem like Den of Geek is taking a break from that whole “geek” thing for this list—rest assured that we can rank sports movies while still being a bunch of nerds.

As a bunch of nerds, we do need to make some qualifications before we go further. This list won’t deal with any fictional sports, so no movies about rollerball or Quidditch will show up. That said, we aren’t dealing with true stories either, so the lauded documentaries When We Were Kings or Hoop Dreams won’t show up. Finally, we’re going to stick to sports that most people agree are sports, leaving aside marginal cases like billiards (The Hustler) or bowling (The Big Lebowski).

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get on our gear, hit the field, and battle it out to get to number one!

10. Whip It (2009)

Before you cry foul and say that we’re already violating our own rule about fictional sports, keep in mind that roller derby may sometimes mirror the pageantry of professional wrestling, it is very much a real sport. Those are real bruises and breaks those skaters sustain, and they’re really fighting for real points. Whip It works because it never shies away from that pomp and circumstance, while still telling a compelling story about real people.

Working from a screenplay by Shauna Cross, who adapts her own novel Derby Girl, and directed by Drew Barrymore, Whip It stars Elliot Page as teen girl Bliss Cavendar. Sick of the beauty pageants her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) forces upon her, Bliss rebels by seeking out another form of extravagant glory. Taking the name Babe Ruthless, Bliss joins the Holy Rollers, where she finds herself at home with other oddballs, including Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig), Rosa Sparks (Eve), and Smashley Simpson (Barrymore).

9. Eephus (2024)

Baseball makes for great cinema because its leisurely pace allows for moments of character drama. But few baseball movies are as leisurely as the recent delightful indie offering, Eephus. Eephus comes from director Carson Lund, who wrote the screenplay with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, and it takes its name, fittingly, from the famously slow trick pitch.

Everything moves slowly in Eephus, and that’s exactly the point. Set some time in the 1990s, the film chronicles the last game between the red-classed Adler’s Paint team and the blue-hued Riverrats, all adults playing beer ball one last time before their field gets demolished and replaced by a school. With a huge cast of mostly unknown actors, Eephus feels no need to hurry from plot point to plot point. Instead, it takes its time to luxuriate in the humanity of the indistinct but compelling men who don’t want the game to end.

8. Slap Shot (1977)

Slap Shot begins with a French Canadian player explaining to a newscaster about the illegal moves in hockey—illustrating them, that is, by performing them on the newscaster. Thus begins easily the most raucous and irreverent film on this list. Working from a script by Nancy Dowd, director George Roy Hill and star Paul Newman exaggerate the rough and uncouth nature of 1970s minor league hockey, and turn it into a celebration of working-class resilience.

Newman dirties up (but in no way diminishes) his incredible good looks to play Reggie Dunlop, player-coach of Pennsylvania’s Charleston Chiefs. With a steel mill layoff plunging the town into a depression, and failing ticket sales about to make all of the team’s past-their-prime players unemployed, Dunlop decides to embrace chaos, turning his team into a spectacle, partially with the help of the goonish Hanson Brothers. Does Dunlop’s plan save the day, restore the town, and bring the team the championship? Not quite. But that just makes the Chief’s anger all the more resonant.

7. White Men Can’t Jump (1992)

If Slap Shot is all about the chaos of amateur sports, White Men Can’t Jump takes it one step further to look at two loudmouth hustlers in the world of pick-up basketball. Writer and director Ron Shelton, whose name will appear again on this list, plays into the comedy inherent in the title. But he also finds notes of dignity in his players, whose love of the game is always in conflict with their need for a buck.

Wesley Snipes has never been more magnetic than he is playing Sidney Deane, king of the local basketball courts. When gawky white guy Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) shows up, Deane thinks he has an easy victory, even after they put money on the game. But he soon learns that Billy, a former college basketball star, has been playing him the whole time. The partnership formed by the two generates plenty of amusing jabs at one another. But the real pleasure of White Men Can’t Jump comes from the film’s look at economic desperation and the hope of an impossible big break.

6. Creed (2015)

The winter of 2015 saw not one, but two seventh-entry legacy sequels in franchises that began in the 1970s. One of them was great and the other was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The great one was Creed, Ryan Coogler’s extension of the Rocky story, this time focusing on Apollo Creed’s son Adonis a.k.a. Donnie. Played by Michael B. Jordan, fully establishing his movie-star credentials, Donnie reframes the Rocky narrative, without undercutting the original’s scrappy spirit.

Unlike the Italian Stallion who started the whole thing, Donnie begins the movie running from his life as a financial services executive to participate in illegal Mexican fights. When he realizes he can no longer avoid the complicated legacy left by the father he never met, Donnie relocates to Philadelphia, where he convinces Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to train him as a proper fighter. Likewise, Coogler and his co-writer Aaron Covington never avoid the shadow cast by the original movies. But also like Donnie, Creed finds its own way, thanks to strong choices, including a bravado oner early in the film.

5. Hoosiers (1986)

“My team is on the floor.” In lesser hands, that declaration, made by a high school basketball coach about his underestimated group of players, would read as sappy and obvious. But in Hoosiers, directed by David Anspaugh and written by Angelo Pizzo, it has weight and resilience, and not just because it comes from the mouth of the legendary Gene Hackman.

Yes, Hackman brings the full weight of his serious screen presence to Norman Dale, who comes to a small Indiana town in the 1950s to teach civics and coach the school’s failing basketball team. And, yes, Hackman has plenty of opportunities to play Dale as a demanding coach who ejects the best player for rudeness, and who defends his choice of former college great and current alcoholic Wilbur “Shooter” Flatch (Dennis Hopper) as assistant coach. But Anspaugh surrounds the film with such wholesome, rural tones, that Coach Dale’s declaration feels at once aspirational and completely grounded.

4. Challengers (2024)

In any other sports movie, a closing shot of a player’s wife bending over to shout “Come on!” would read as triumphant. But Challengers isn’t about celebrating the winners, even though it’s about tennis players at the top of their game. Instead director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes portray the destructive nature of the lust for victory, without diminishing the lust shared between the three central characters.

Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig, two tennis stars who grew up together. Their friendship both turned intimate and eventually fell apart with the arrival of Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a would-be star whose career ends after an irreparable injury. When Tashi leaves Patrick for Art, she puts her energy into his career, driving him to be the best—regardless of what he wants. The tensions come together in a match between Patrick and Art that unfolds over the course of the movie, the tensions heightened by Guadagnino’s audacious shot choices and a driving synth score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

3. Rocky (1976)

As with Sylvester Stallone’s other great franchise, Rambo, it’s easy to forget where Rocky started. The Rocky sequels become little more than flashy montages and ridiculous fight scenes, culminating with Rocky winning the Cold War by beating the Russian champ. But the first Rocky has none of that flash and excess, telling the story of a man who will always be a loser.

Working from a script that he wrote for himself, Stallone uses his soulful eyes almost as much as he does his biceps. Rocky spends his nights losing fights in the ring, and his days working dead-end jobs, sometimes breaking fingers for a local bookie. But when the grandiose champ Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) agrees to fight a Philly amateur for a publicity stunt, Rocky gets his chance at the title, and even convinces the crusty Mickey (Burgess Meredith) to manage him and wins the heart of shy pet store clerk Adrian (Talia Shire). Despite the victories he does achieve, and despite the propulsive sounds of the Bill Conti score, director John G. Avildsen follows the lead of Stallone’s script, and keeps the stakes small and human.

2. Bull Durham (1988)

Anyone reading the plot synopsis for Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham would be forgiven for dismissing it as a crass ’80s comedy. Set in Durham, North Carolina, the movie follows the losing single-A team the Durham Bulls, whose season may turn around if “baseball groupie” Annie (Susan Sarandon) can inspire/seduce one of the players. The two players in contention are well-past-his-prime catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) and empty-headed rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), whose rocket arm could send him to the big leagues if he could only aim.

Whatever unsavoriness may be in a premise involving two men fighting for the right to bed a groupie, Bull Durham never feels anything less than human. Certainly, the movie gets broad at times, especially when Robbins channels The Hudsucker Proxy‘s Norville Barnes. But Shelton keeps a steady hand on the tone, keeping the character motivations real, which makes the baseball—and the steamy chemistry between the leads—constantly captivating.

1. Raging Bull (1980)

Raging Bull is the anti-Rocky. Where Stallone plays a basically good-hearted palooka who just needs a chance, Robert De Niro plays his real-life fighter Jake LaMotta as a truly despicable human being, someone who only knows how to batter the people in his life, whether or not he’s in the ring. But Martin Scorcese, working off a script by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, never let LaMotta be anything less than human, even though the movie knows we don’t want to root for him.

Raging Bull does this work partially by following the relationship between Jake and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci), the one person who can truly love the brutal fighter. It also does it with the film’s incredible, visceral fight scenes. To this day, no boxing movie has matched the power and the loneliness of Raging Bull‘s boxing sequences—not because they’re realistic; rather, because they capture the psyche of a man who only knows how to punch and be punched.