If ever there was a perfect marriage, one would be hard pressed to find a more compatible couple than sport and politics. State intervention in sport has been evidenced in many countries throughout history. Today, sport and politics are still inextricably intertwined and often work to demonstrate social, economic, or political supremacy over another nation. The aim of this paper is therefore to articulate rationales for state intervention in sport as a way of providing a background for analyzing the relationship between sport and state-politics. The last section of this paper identifies a more sophisticated body of theoretical concepts including hegemony theory, which gives substantial weight to cultural practices in analyzing political-economic and non-economic activities such as sport which play a vital role in the articulation and consolidation of power relations.