Football won’t be forever

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere. 

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match. 

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life. 

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape?

I invited Klosterman onto The Gray Area to talk about all of this and why he thinks the sport may be both more powerful and more fragile than it looks. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died.

Is that why you wrote it for people who aren’t born yet?

That’s a bit of rhetorical exaggeration, but the idea behind it is real. Books force you to commit in a way other media don’t. Online writing gets overwritten constantly. Books make you stake a claim that’s supposed to endure.

When this book comes out, it’ll already be out of date in certain ways. And five or 10 years from now, it’ll feel even more distant from the moment it describes. That’s kind of the point.

What’s your experience with football?

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. We played nine-man football. Football was just part of life. If a game was on TV, it was on whether anyone was actively watching it or not.

I was a sports journalist early on, then became more of a culture writer, but football never really left my thinking. As I got older, it became more important in a different way. Not because I watched more games, but because it started to feel like one of the few remaining cultural objects that could still connect people across differences.

If someone asks me my favorite sport, I’ll say basketball. But if you ask which sport matters most to how I understand American culture, football wins easily. It’s not even close.

Why football, though? Why does it dominate culture so completely?

A lot of it comes down to historical timing and structural compatibility.

Football emerges in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War, and it carries a metaphorical relationship to organized conflict. It’s a simulation of war, without all the death and geopolitical consequences. That metaphor is baked into the game at a very deep level.

Then television arrives, and football turns out to be perfectly suited for it. The stoppages, the structure, the anticipation between plays, the way action unfolds in short bursts, all translate beautifully to broadcast.

You describe the game as generating a sensation of chaotic freedom inside an environment of total control. How does that happen?

Football is one of the most engineered experiences people routinely engage with, even if they don’t think about it that way. Every play is designed in advance. It’s encoded into a language that only a small group of people fully understands. It’s transmitted through headsets, wristbands, and signals. It’s rehearsed endlessly during practice. And it has to be executed within very strict time constraints.

Behind every snap, there’s all this hierarchy. Coaches, coordinators, analysts, trainers, medical staff, league officials, rules committees. It’s a deeply bureaucratic system. In a lot of ways, it’s almost corporate. Everything is planned, regulated, and optimized.

And then the ball is snapped, and all of that structure suddenly recedes. For a few seconds, what you see feels spontaneous. Twenty-two people collide, react, adjust, and improvise in real time. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, even though you know it’s happening inside a very rigid framework.

That contrast is where the power comes from. You get unpredictability without existential risk. You get chaos that’s bounded. The play might fail or succeed, but the system itself is stable. There’s a beginning and an end. The whistle will blow. The next play will come.

I think that mirrors how a lot of people want to experience the world more generally. Most people don’t actually want true chaos. They want the feeling of danger without real danger, the feeling of freedom without losing the structure that makes life manageable.

Would football be as entertaining if there wasn’t this continual possibility that someone will get hurt? 

I don’t think people want to see anyone get hurt. Football isn’t a blood sport in that sense. But risk matters. Meaning requires stakes.

It’s like climbing Everest. People don’t climb it because they want to die. But the fact that death is possible gives the act significance. If football eliminated serious risk entirely, it would become something else.

That’s why safety rule changes provoke such strong reactions. On the surface, those reactions sound crude. But they’re pointing at a real tension between safety and meaning.

Why do you think football is such a fundamentally mediated experience, even when we’re sitting in the stadium watching it?

I think most fans understand football through what you might call television grammar, whether they realize it or not. We’ve all been trained, over decades, to see the game from a very specific set of angles, with certain visual cues and rhythms that television provides.

So even when you’re sitting in the stands, what you’re actually doing most of the time is mentally translating what you’re seeing into that television version of the game. You’re imagining the sideline camera shot. You’re thinking about the replay you just saw or the replay you know is coming. You’re filling in information you can’t physically see from your seat because you’ve learned how the broadcast usually explains it.

There are moments when being in the stadium gives you something television can’t. If a play breaks right in front of you, or you see something develop before the cameras catch it, that can feel special. But most of the time, the stadium experience isn’t about seeing the game clearly. It’s about being part of something larger.

So what are we watching, really? Is it a sport on TV? A TV show about a sport? Or a sport that used to be a sport and then became a TV product? 

I think it’s a real event that’s experienced through mediation. The players are doing something real. The outcomes matter. The risks are real. But the way most of us encounter that reality is through a highly constructed medium that shapes how we understand what’s happening.

What makes sports different from almost every other form of entertainment is that no one knows what’s going to happen. There’s no script. No writer has decided how it ends. Even the people most invested in the outcome can’t control it once the game starts.

That kind of liveness is incredibly rare now. We’re surrounded by entertainment that’s optimized, focus-tested, and refined to minimize unpredictability. Even when we don’t know exactly how a show or movie will end, we know that someone has designed that ending with a specific effect in mind.

Sports don’t work that way. Anything can happen, and sometimes things happen that no one would ever write because they’d seem implausible or unsatisfying on the page. That unpredictability creates a different kind of engagement.

I think we really underestimate how valuable that is, especially in a culture where so much of what we consume is engineered to be smooth, coherent, and controlled. Football gives us a mediated experience of reality that still contains genuine uncertainty. And that combination is a big part of why it holds our attention the way it does.

The Damar Hamlin incident felt like a moment when all of this snapped into focus. It wasn’t just another injury. That one felt different in real time.

I think almost everyone watching sensed that immediately. You didn’t need an official announcement or medical confirmation. You could tell from the way the players reacted, the way the broadcast suddenly changed its tone, the way the commentators started speaking more slowly and carefully. It felt like the language people use when they think someone has died.

What was striking to me was how quickly football itself seemed to recede from view. The game stopped mattering almost instantly. Nobody was talking about standings or playoff implications. All of the usual narratives that surround a Monday night game just evaporated. For a brief window, it felt like the entire apparatus around football had been suspended.

There was also this strange liminal period afterward, where nobody quite knew what to say. It suddenly felt inappropriate to even ask the obvious questions about what this meant for the sport. When someone did raise those questions too quickly, the backlash was immediate. It was as if we collectively agreed that there was a moral pause button that had to be respected.

If Hamlin had died, there would have been a reckoning. I don’t think there’s any way around that. 

The harder question is what kind of reckoning it would have been and how long it would have lasted. Football is enormous. It’s not just too big to fail; it’s almost too big to stop. The entire economic and cultural infrastructure around it is built on the assumption of continuity.

Covid showed us that. 

Even in a moment of genuine global crisis, the overriding instinct was to find a way to keep the games going. Empty stadiums, revised schedules, altered protocols, but still football. That doesn’t mean people are callous. It means the system is so large and so central that stopping it entirely feels almost unimaginable.

And in Hamlin’s case, once it became clear that he was going to survive, and once the injury could be framed as a freak convergence of circumstances rather than a direct extension of the game’s usual violence, there was a kind of collective exhale. The moral crisis didn’t disappear, but it retreated. Football resumed its normal position in people’s lives.

That moment revealed something important. It showed how close the sport always is to forcing a confrontation we’d rather avoid, and how quickly we move past that confrontation when circumstances allow us to. Football constantly brushes up against questions about risk, responsibility, and complicity, but most of the time it gives us just enough distance to keep watching.

So is football a good or bad thing for society? Ultimately you come down at 53 percent good, 47 percent troubling. That feels a little like hedging.

I don’t think of that as hedging, even though it probably sounds like it. It’s my way of being honest about the fact that once you really start pulling on the threads here, the question of whether football is “good” or “bad” is complicated.

You start asking yourself what it even means for something to be good. Is it good because it’s entertaining? Is it good because it creates meaning in people’s lives? Is it good because it brings communities together, even if it also causes real harm to a smaller number of people? Those are not easy questions to weigh against each other.

Football clearly does a lot of things that are socially positive. It creates shared rituals. It gives people a sense of belonging. It produces moments of beauty, excellence, and drama that feel meaningful to millions of people. At the same time, it exposes players to physical harm, and it reinforces certain cultural values that don’t always sit comfortably with the way we like to think about ourselves now.

So the 53–47 split is really just my way of saying that I think the balance tips slightly in favor of football being socially positive, but only slightly. I wouldn’t have written the book if I thought it was overwhelmingly negative. But I also couldn’t write it honestly if I pretended the troubling parts were marginal or incidental.

Part of what makes football interesting is that it refuses to resolve itself morally. It doesn’t let you land comfortably on one side or the other.

Given the dominance of the sport, and the TV product, it’s hard to imagine an America where football isn’t king, but you say it’s doomed. Do you really believe that?

I understand why that sounds extreme, especially when you look at the current numbers. Football is not declining right now. In the near term, I think it’s going to become even more dominant.

But size creates fragility. The bigger something gets, the more it depends on a web of conditions staying intact. Football relies on advertising economics, labor stability, broadcast deals, and cultural goodwill all lining up at once.

Right now, advertising is a huge part of why football works. It’s one of the last places where advertisers can reliably reach a massive, captive audience. But that model depends on assumptions about how advertising works that may not hold forever. The costs keep rising, and it’s not clear the value is rising at the same rate.

There’s also a generational issue. Football’s cultural power has always depended on people growing up around the game; playing it, watching it, or at least being adjacent to it. As that lived experience fades, the emotional connection changes. People may still watch, but it won’t mean the same thing.

When football eventually recedes, it won’t disappear overnight. It’ll become something more niche, more historicized. And when that happens, future generations will misunderstand what it meant to the people who lived inside it. They’ll moralize it, flatten it, and miss the texture of the experience.

That’s part of why I wanted to write the book now. Not because football is about to end, but because this moment — when it still feels unavoidable and central — is the hardest moment to capture later.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.