Is it ethical to favour one soccer team over another?

Should gamespersonship be accepted as part of sport?

In sports (especially boxing) fans love to rank the best boxers, players or teams. So when ranking the Greatest Boxers of All-Time -- is it ethical to include boxers you or anyone else (alive) have never seen before (for no footage exists of them - e.g., Harry Greb)? (Provided that you put in as much research as possible - e.g., books, news archives, boxing historians writings.)

Is it immoral to play poker (a game that inherently involves bluffing) full time to make a living even if it is more profitable for someone than a traditional job? Even if we consider it a sport akin to tennis or golf, it does not create economic value in the sense that's it's usually not being broadcast and there are no spectators or advertising. Players do not contribute to the tax base and social insurance; money is just being passed around from person to person.

When playing games, be they sports, board games, video games or what have you, there are almost always fixed rules, and violating these rules is usually accepted to be illegal within the game. However, there are also often informal rules of good sportsmanship and fair play which would prohibit certain kinds of behavior. However, such informal rules aren't explicitly a part of the game, and it seems that violating them is still within the rules of the game. If a person participates in a game, expecting good sportsmanship of some kind or another, but is instead treated to a game where their opponents demonstrate poor sportsmanship, is it within the player's rights to complain about that poor sportsmanship? Has the player been wronged? It seems that on the one hand, in consensually participating in a game without explicit rules of conduct punishing poor sportsmanship, the player has set themselves up for a situation in which they have no right to complain. On the other hand, it seems entirely...

I am a soccer fanatic. I watch as much soccer as possible. So it was no question that I saw the Women's World Cup Final. But as I watched the US play Japan in the Women's World Cup Final, I became aware later in the game that I was rooting for Japan just out of compassion because of their recent natural disaster. Also, it looked like Japan needed the win more than the US. As someone who is born in the US, is it wrong to root for the opposing team out of empathy?

Dear Philosophers, My question is about the morality of actions in games. Can our behaviors in a game - however friendly or cruel if they are inside the borders of the game's rules - be regarded as immoral acts? For example, is hitting a person during a game a sort of immoral act? (in this case I know that it might be punished by the referee but is the act in itself immoral?) What about deceiving your rival in a game? Is it lie and thus an immoral behavior? and killing (suppose there is a game in which two people agree on a fight which would end in one side's death)? Thanks.

Does there exist objective truths about what football (soccer) team is the best? My friends keep telling me that it's possible, on the basis of statistics, to say that Spain objectively is the best national team in the world. I say there are no objective truths about these things. It would be extremely interesting to have a philosophers perspective on this!

How can we precisely define cheating in sports? It does not appear sufficient to say that any instance of willful rule-breaking in sports counts as cheating. For instance, no one would say that one basketball player who fouls another is "cheating," even though there is an obvious sense in which that player is breaking the rules. The difficulty seems to consist in the fact that practically all sports infractions have corresponding penalties (such as opponent free throws) built into the rules of the game. It isn't obvious how we're to distinguish banal infractions, such as fouling a player in basketball, from obvious cases of cheating, such as blood doping in competitive cycling. If a cyclist has his title revoked after being caught doping (or if he is fined, or is banned from future races, or whatever), what would prevent us from saying that his infraction was accounted for by the rules of cycling in the same way as fouls are accounted for in basketball, and that it therefore did not constitute cheating?

Any thoughts on being for or against bullfighting?