What did Camus mean by 'the less it has to mean'?

1the quote

Albert Camus once said something strange about sport: the less the world has to mean, the more beautiful the game becomes. Let's unpack that.

2Camus, goalkeeper

Camus actually played goalkeeper as a young man in Algiers — he loved football, and later he loved the theatre of the absurd too.

3the absurd

He believed the universe gives us no built-in answer to why we exist — that silence is what he called the absurd.

4the game

A game is the opposite: it hands you rules that mean nothing outside the pitch, but inside it, every pass matters completely.

5the payoff

That's the trick: strip away cosmic purpose, and what's left is pure form — clean rules, real stakes, nothing borrowed from outside. That's beauty.