In his famous essay, Le Match de football (1995), French anthropologist Christian Bromberger relates an anecdote of a French legislator complaining about funded research on this trivial and uninteresting topic. A quarter of a century later the situation in France stay mostly unchanged. Despite the increase in quality work in this field, the anthropology of sports remains marginal and weakly represented, even discredited by a large part of institutions and their members. The French context here differs deeply from that of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Sports are not seeing as a legitimate intellectual topic. For a long time it was not perceived as a fundamental issue in social history or in national construction. The predominance of sociology on anthropology and the existence of a powerful pluridisciplinary physical education in higher education and research in France have minimized the contribution of anthropology in this area. In one word, it is an epistemological problematic, with all its implications. Beyond to find some explanations to this situation, the goal of this communication is to think about the necessity or not for anthropology of sport to become an autonomous area inside the discipline, not only in France but in general, and how it can improve itself by discussing with other disciplines (sociology, history, physical education, biology, geography, etc.). From this point of view, the integration of related researches in international institutions, as the IUAES’s Anthropology of Sports Commission, can be seen as a way to solve some internal contradictions specific to national intellectual traditions.