The article deals with cases of using sports metaphors in different discourse types in the Russian (linguistic) worldview. Metaphor is considered to be the main mechanism to conceptualize the reality and the culture code, which helps to identify peculiarities in the view of the world by various nationalities. The sports met-
 aphor is defined as a basic cognitive model built in the collective linguistic consciousness; it helps to comprehend phenomena from the sphere of politics, economics, education, medicine, and many other conceptual spheres of our life. Being a source domain, sport supports interdiscursive links, and sports metaphors perform nominat-
 ing, cognitive, decorative, declaratory, evaluative and other functions depending on
 the pragmatic intension of the author of the utterance.
 In addition to Russian sports metaphors, other examples are included in illustrating the usage of sports terms in non-sports discourses of other languages (German, English, Polish, Italian). Thus, it demonstrates their universal nature. A conclusion can be made about a global tendency in the development of many languages – their sportization, a specific role and function of sports vocabulary
 in (intercultural) communication. As a perspective for further research, the author suggests studying this issue in the quantitative aspect – determining the frequency of using football, baseball, chess and other types of sports metaphors to identify their linguistic and culturological potential.