The best sports games like Dirt Rally 2.0 are EA Sports WRC, Richard Burns Rally and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to sports costs you.
Filtering to sports means you want the shape of a real game without necessarily wanting the rulebook. Most of the memorable ones throw the rules out entirely.
What you get: Something anybody can join. Arcade sports games are the easiest genre to hand to someone who does not play games.
What made Dirt Rally 2.0 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the sports part of that answer, and only the sports part.
By the same studio, with the official licence and far more stages.
Twenty years old and still the benchmark for rally physics.
The same seriousness applied to circuit racing.
Surface-change handling from the arcade, and still a joy.
If you want the simulation with a collection attached.
For competition — the most serious online racing there is.
Depth, in the arcade ones, and accessibility in the simulations. Very few sports games manage both.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Dirt Rally 2.0 that are not sports games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Dirt Rally 2.0 — 9 picks, no genre filter.
EA Sports WRC. By the same studio, with the official licence and far more stages.
No. Dirt Rally 2.0 released on the PlayStation 4, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
For the arcade picks, no — they do not use the real rules anyway. For the simulations, it helps a lot.
Usually not. The on-pitch changes between years are small and last year's version is a fraction of the price, unless you play the online team modes where the population moves across.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Dirt Rally 2.0 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is sports — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the sports guide for where to start in the genre generally.