When Serena Williams accepted the trophy for the Australian open last week, the first person she thanked was "God / Jehovah"...I guess it's better than thanking a long list of sponsors...but as an athiest that kind of stuff always grates on me.

Often in soccer, players who score goals cross themselves and point upwards.

a big part of it with the cardinals is that kurt warner is like super jesus-ful. football as a whole is more filled with religion than many sports because of the violence, threat of injury and in pro football, lack of guaranteed money.

In those huddles they usually pray for God to keep them safe and to excel with the talents they were given. Not a big deal.

Not surprisingly, the amount of religiousity in different sports is very tied to the groups who play them. So its not so much soccer, for instance, but whether it is a player/team from, say, a heavily Catholic South American country or a less religious Western European country. As far as the US goes, basketball and baseball are also very religious and again it has a lot to do who plays them. Basketball, for instance, is dominated by African-Americans, who are the most religiously active group in America. While the particular phenomenon of the group prayer-huddle is one rather specific to football, baseball and basketball teams are full of Bible study groups and the like. What sports have the particular manifestation of prayer huddles and what sports have high levels of religiousity in their cultures are very different questions. Trying to link all this to the level of violence in football I just find odd.

From a comment on the source page:

"I believe that the lack of faith-based comments and expressions seen in professional hockey is strongly correlated with the lack of players who are Americans of the Evangelical or other fundamental Christian denominations.

"It might also be true that Americans who are of these persuasions tend to live in parts of the U.S. that are not hockey hotbeds (ie. the bible belt) and are not socialized into hockey - probably because they don't experience cold winters as part of their climate.

"Conversely, Canadians and Europeans, who dominate professional hockey, live in more secular societies that experience cold winters.

"But I could be wrong.

I suspect they're probably at least partially right. There might also be a class dimension (as always, among other things).

On a more amusing note, the evidence it provides might also be used to argue that secular societies are punished for their lack of faith with cold winters. As a resident of sin city extraordinaire, Montreal, I can attest to first hand experience of this correlation. On the other hand, maybe it is the relentless cold that causes us to loose faith ;)

Oh, and jenawesome, Hockey is an incredibly violent.

Although, it would be interesting to know which sport has higher rates of injury.

FWIW, I've never seen people collectively praying at any sport in Spain, only the kind of individual thank-you-Lord gestures that (S)wine mentions, but the guys who are famed for being super-religious are the bullfighters (and no wonder, given the frequency with which they get gored). Still, no public team prayer or anything like that.

Hockey is not so much "incredably" violent as given to specific moments of sensational violence. In reality the majority of players never fight, and each team only has a couple of players who really check hard. Every team has its enforcers, however, who exist, like nuclear weapons, because every other team also has enforcers.

Having grown up in a small town in northern Canada where every kid dreams of playing in the NHL and a few even made it I can say from my experience that I've never known any of them to be religiously oriented, at least about hockey. If anything its nationalism that pervades the sport.

That is not a picture of Arizona at the Superbowl. That is the University of Miami Logo in the end zone.

Gamzu, you're right - that is the U of Miami logo in the end zone so it clearly wasn't from last nights Super Bowl. Interesting, still, that I generally recall seeing groups of players and coaches gather for some form of public group prayer after football games, when players are injured, etc.

I have seen the occassional Australian cricketer (Catholic I assume) crossing himself when he has scored a century or the like. Never the whole team indulging in any religious activity though (I am talking state and national teams here). I have never seen an AFL footballer carry out any religious action. This is not to say they don't ever do it, I just haven't seen it.

Just found your blog via sungold and I'm glad to be here.

I'm the Canadian mother of two male sports nuts and I've been to more games of more kinds than I care to remember. I've never seen them get together to pray - I see it as an American phenomenon - rightly or wrongly.

I played volleyball in high school at a mostly African-American school. We always said the Lord's prayer before games. I always had a mix of feelings because, while a religious person, even at 16 I knew we weren't supposed to be praying because it conflicted with the separation of Church and State. But in the end I see it as an expression of my school's culture. Religion is such a part of culture for many people still. The girls on my team expected that we would pray before every game (most of my other team mates also played basketball and I assume they prayed before those games too). If there had been a girl made uncomfortable by it...well, I guess that would have been a different story. But that just wasn't the case.

Who's to say they are praying? They could very well be saying, "let's beat the crap out of those guys and leave their bloody stumps on the field."

I don't think it is a religious thing as much as it is a "cover-all-our-bases" thing. (Sorry about the sports metaphor.)

What is most interesting to me is that we are made to believe that they are praying, asking God (who apparently has nothing better to do) to make them strong and beat the other team.

They might be praying, I suppose, but where did that assumption come from? I've seen plenty of football movies where the coach tells the players to "take a knee."

The only way you'd see Australian cricketers huddled together like that is if they'd dropped the last bottle of Carlton Draught beer on the pitch.

Likewise, I've never seen it in England. Even when English players score a goal, few of them make any religious gestures. As an aside, I live about 8 degrees north of Montreal on this side of the pond, and we've so far had about 6 inches of snow this winter. And that's a lot! But there again, York is said (locally) to be where Constantine converted to Christianity, so... :P