The ballgame's association with human sacrifice is real and archaeologically and iconographically attested at several sites, most vividly in relief carvings at the Maya city of Chichen Itza depicting decapitation apparently connected to ballgame outcomes, but scholars caution strongly against assuming every match ended this way or that sacrifice was the game's primary purpose across its enormous span of time and geography, since the surviving evidence suggests considerable variation by period, region and occasion, from purely recreational and gambling oriented play, well attested among commoners and recorded extensively by Spanish colonial chroniclers describing Aztec practice, to highly charged ritual matches tied to warfare, political rivalry and cosmological reenactment among elites.
The game's religious dimension and its recreational, competitive dimension were not, on the evidence, mutually exclusive categories the way modern sport and modern religion are often kept separate, and reconstructing exactly which matches carried which stakes for which participants remains an active and genuinely unresolved area of Mesoamerican archaeology and iconographic scholarship rather than a settled picture, a caution the atlas records rather than resolves. The game's broader legacy persists today in ulama, a living, though now much reduced, traditional ballgame still played in parts of western Mexico, a direct if diminished continuation of the ancient practice.