In the abstract, they are totally fine but in practice sports has hundreds (thousands?) of years of tradition and culture imprinting into the fabric of society

In the abstract, they are totally fine but in practice sports has hundreds (thousands?) of years of tradition and culture imprinting into the fabric of society making it "normal". In the UK football is so deeply engrained they talk of doing public holidays for when the England team finally wins a major international cup IIRC. The Olympics had/has some special subtext in international relations. So following sports has been deeply normalised in ways that probably polarises other similar practices (but for other interests) into seeming very fringe