The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words associated with games in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Play the game

Summer's here and for a major part of the UK population, at least, this is the season for bashing or hurling balls at one another. I'm not a great sports fan myself, but it looks like a lot of people are - and this paper seems to do its best to give them even-handed updates on their favourite events. However, looking through the Guardian Weekly archive, it seems that some sports are more equal than others - and some games aren't even sports.

Actual mentiosn of individual sports shows thatr the beautiful game gets a lot more space than all the others. Football received 4,032 mentions, followed by cricket (1,869) and rugby (1,695). Other sports received much less comment, ranging from gold (925), tennis (881) and swimming (504) down to athletics (308), cycling (258), basketball (211) and hockey (95).

Racing forms its own little set, with motor racing (278) wau ahead of the rest, with horse (36) at number two and some oddities such as camel (9) and pigeon (3) coming in at the rear.

How about the people who are involved in these events? Interestingly, there seems to have been a revolution in gender neutral naming in sports reporting, so that we find 3,952 instances of player and players, and 630 athletes in the archive, but only nine sportswomen and five sportsmen.

But not everyone is in competition. Most key or major players seem to be involved in terrorism, politics or business, rather than in sports. Rather more worryingly, although athletes are associated with medals, coaches and Olympic, when it comes to being in the news, they are also strongly associated with steroids, tested, positive, banned, tests and drugs.

It's not only the athletes who suffer from negative press. Considering the people who attend sporting events, while all sports have crowds (2,892), fans (1,471) and spectators (498), only football has hooligans (130).

We've seen that the "beautiful game" gets the most mentions in the GUardian Weekly, but are all games sports? It seems not. The words that go most frequently with game are video and computer. The beautiful game is only 25th on the collocates of game - coming below war, numbers and zero-sum.