America’s Most Popular Sport Is “Doomed.” Here’s Why

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Next, it’s the game that has transcended sport, becoming central to many American relationships, traditions, and holidays. But why does football hold such a powerful grip on the country? Our next guest has a theory, which he’s sharing in a new book appropriately titled, “Football.” Cultural critic and author Chuck Klosterman joins Michel Martin to explain why it matters so much to America, although it may now have an expiry date.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Chuck Klosterman, thank you so much for joining us.

 

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: Thanks for having me on.

 

MARTIN: You’ve written what? A dozen books now?

 

KLOSTERMAN: This is 13, I guess. 

 

MARTIN: This is 13, about like, all kinds of things. Like there’s “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” to, “But What If We’re Wrong?” About all kinds of things. So why “Football?”

 

KLOSTERMAN: Well, you know, I have been unconsciously thinking about football for about 45 years now. It’s not just that football is the most popular sport. It is really more popular than all the other sports in America.

I mean, it dominates television to really a nonsensical degree. Like in 2023, ninety-three of the hundred most-watched broadcasts in the United States were pro-football games. And then three more were college games. Like, there’s no corollary to this in other countries. Even when countries where there’s a, you know, in much of Europe soccer is, you know, dominant in a way that it would seem to mirror our relationship to American football, but not really. Not with this sort of kind of all encompassing sort of you know magnitude where, in the United States, even if you hate football, you somehow collide with it.

And I just think that the, in some ways, the irony that it is so beloved in the United States and really unplayed elsewhere is also a meaningful thing. ‘Cause I mean, when you start thinking of ideas like just the concept of American exceptionalism or whatever — regardless how you feel about it — the manifestation of this is the idea of a sport that is hyper popular in one place and unplayed in most of the world, you know?

 

MARTIN: So let’s get into the meat of your argument. You opened the book with this claim, “Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value, even — and perhaps, especially when football is something they actively dislike. The role it plays in the shaping of our contemporary reality is both outsized and underrated.”Say a little bit more.

 

KLOSTERMAN: Well, you know, on the surface, the reason I say like, it’s, it’s outsized in purpose is understood because like, nobody seems to be arguing that football isn’t the most popular sport, or even just the most popular kind of entity in the United States. Everyone accepts that. But the — what is underrated maybe is the gap of football and absolutely everything else with the possible exception, I guess, of Taylor Swift.

I mean, what you look at football being invented kind of post Civil War, and then it evolved sort of on its own, in its own way for, you know, 50, 60, 70 years. And then intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s. This is purely by happenstance. I mean, obviously the creators of football had no idea for this coming medium. The people inventing television did not have football at the front of their mind. (07:51) But that marriage was so ideal that football in so many ways is the ideal product to experience the platform of television, the medium of television. That as television became sort of the dominant sort of shaper of the last half of the 20th century football kind of just came along with that. 

And a lot of the language we use in just politics and, and, you know, everyday language comes out of football. The idea that football has this kind of militaristic base, imbues a lot of its meaning. I don’t know if this will be true for football moving through the 21st century, but if you were looking at the last half of the 20th century in the United States, and you can only use one thing to sort of describe what has happened or what the ethos was, football is probably the best choice. Yeah.

 

MARTIN: You argue that football pushes against ideas that we claim to value: democracy, creativity, individual expression. And if you kind of think about it, you’re like, yeah, you’re right. I mean, discipline, the team, you know, basically subsuming your own individual desires and interests for this, for the whole. It’s almost militaristic as you point out. Tell me about that.

 

KLOSTERMAN: The contradiction is that when you explain it like that, or if I were to explain it like that, it seems real problematic in a way, right? It seems almost what we’re saying is the qualities of football that people love are the things that they have been socialized to believe are antithetical to what you should want if you’re an enlightened person. But that is to some degree true. 

I mean, when we watch basketball, for example, you watch the NBA, it’s kind of almost a creative endeavor for the individuals. Actually seeing these guys, and you’re seeing them use the sport to sort of reflect who they are. Football shuns that. Football shuns the individual. It’s all about the collective. You know, the idea of athletes, you know, the we’re in the kind of the player empowerment age where the idea, the players should have more say on sort of how the league operates and how the revenue is shared. But again, football’s not really like that. Football has this hierarchy where a play comes from the press box down to the coach on the sideline, sent in through a radio in code. The quarterback looks at a wristband to decipher the code, tell the other 10 guys. It’s like, it is really a kind of a corporate structure in a sense. And when you — 

 

MARTIN: No, excuse me, it’s a cartel. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: Yeah. 

 

MARTIN: The fact it’s a cartel. The fact is it’s a closed universe. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: Yes. 

 

MARTIN: Where the people who are already in it decide who else gets to be in it. I mean, they literally kind of vote the ownership in and can decide, for example, that there will never be another team like the Green Bay Packers, which is owned by the community. That’s a cartel. Sorry. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: I mean it is, but, and we’re accustomed to using a word like cartel to associate with like drug lords, right? Or when we say something is undemocratic that football has in some ways, like, you know, I, it’s always dangerous using the word like fascist, right? Because there’s different people have different ways of getting that word’s talking. 

 

MARTIN: Well, that’s not for today’s argument. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: But what I’m, but I’m saying like the literal definition of fascism, which is like an authoritarian situation where violence is part of it and all of these things. That is what football in many ways reflects. But it works in football. And this is sort of one of the ironies is this, these things that we’re kind of told that we’re supposed to see as problems — and we would see them as problems in almost every other walk of life — can be accessed through this simulation, through this game. And I think it allows people sort of to somehow, in a weird way, deal with reality by having this unreal world.

 

MARTIN: You describe football as a socially sanctioned space where pain, domination, and physical sacrifice aren’t just tolerated, but celebrated. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: No sports sort of adopts forward thinking modernity as much as football. The idea of sending in plays through radios, that was a radical idea. Any technical or ideological innovation is immediately adopted by football. And yet, in so many ways, it is a sport mired in the past, at least from a value perspective. The way a football coach can act, for example, would not be acceptable in almost any other line of work, screaming at guys. Shoulder grabbing, — you know, these things that are kind of accepted that we assume will happen. You know, the idea that like that, well, you know, it’s a real application of physicality and to some degree violence, which for the most part, people are able to separate themselves in life — not everybody, but most people are able to live a life where physicality does not really confront them. And football says like, Well, those things are still real. Like, these things that we have managed to socially move away from, the idea of sometimes the power relationship in sports. Where, where it is simply a matter of mass and speed against something else, technique, and all of these things come into play. But what I’m saying is a lot of these ideas, which are, which used to be part of just day-to-day life, for many, many Americans. The, the idea that physicality being part of their life and sort of the consequences of all this that has been removed. So we have to, but we still hunger for this.

 

MARTIN: Let’s talk a little bit more about television. The role that television plays. You say, “There’s something psychologically mysterious about the way football is presented on television. Everything about it contradicts the normal definition of entertainment…What it suggests is that televised football combines a host of qualities we’re conditioned to consider undesirable, even though we instinctively prefer how those qualities inform the experience. In other words, we are wrong about ourselves — I’m sorry for laughing…but I just thought that was so funny. But what we want from television and what we think we want from television are not the same.” So what do you mean by that? 

 

KLOSTERMAN: I’m always very interested in the difference between what we consciously say we want in the unconscious desire. Right? 

 

MARTIN: Right. 

 

KLOSTERMAN: So when you look about a sport like football in particular. Now, in 2011, the Wall Street Journal did this big research project where they looked at NFL football games and realized, or came to the analysis that in a three and a half hour telecast, there’s generally 11 minutes of action. Of actual football being played. Now, if football was a new sport, if we were inventing it and we were pitching it, and one of the pitches was it lasts three hours, but here’s the deal, there’s only 11 minutes of action. People would be like, no, this is not a good idea. We’re not, we’re not going, that’s a terrible plan. You know, and you say like, also, we’re gonna mostly see the game from the same vantage point, midfield downward, where the players are moving horizontal across the field. (19:46) It won’t be the best way to see it, but it’s gonna become so ingrained with people that they’re gonna understand everything about the game in this way. All of these things seem as though they would be mistakes. There would be things we would not want. 

And yet, as it turns out, 11 minutes of action in three hours is the perfect amount. Because there’s five seconds of kinetic, hyper-violent action. So intense. With 22 people moving independently. Things happening that we can hear, but we can’t see. A real complexity to what has been rehearsed and what’s being manifested. It feels like this super dynamic thing. But then there’s this gap where we think about what we saw and what the next play might be, and how this fits into the context of the larger game. Or I can look at my phone, I can talk to my friend about this game or something else. I can drink a beer, I can disengage, think about my life. And then get right back in for the next five or six seconds. It actually is how our mind wants to process entertainment, which is why I argue that football is probably — I feel pretty confident about this — the best product ever made for television. And no one could have expected that. Even at the other sports as we described them, you would think that those would fit better. Those should be what we want. But what we want and what we actually say we want are often very different.

 

MARTIN: There’s been in recent years…I’d say maybe the last decade, sort of along the rise of like the Me Too movement and other sort of scientific advances that allowed people to understand the cost, the toll of this on people. As we’re understanding more about how the brain works, the impact on the brain, we’re seeing more about, you know, stories about players in their personal lives behaving in a way that is unacceptable, like the violence that we see on the field, sometimes translating into interpersonal violence in the way that we find unacceptable. I’m just curious if you feel that this sort of movement to acknowledge these things is affecting the way people are receiving this? 

 

KLOSTERMAN: Well, I mean, this is part of the reason why I sort of have this argument that I think probably in two generations from now. So I’m looking at the year, say 2060, 2070. I do think that football will probably recede, it won’t disappear entirely, but it will recede from the center of the culture. The idea of it still being the monoculture will be over. Because I do think that as we have moved into this century, that the personal relationship that used to be part of football in a more sort of tangible way, more people would’ve, you know, either played in high school or knew people who played, or their father or all these things. I think that that relationship is sort of being almost kind of severed and to some degree politicized in that now…saying that you love football now has a meaning in this country, that maybe you didn’t have in the past, where it was almost saying that some of the things you were talking about, someone is saying like, Well, yeah, I mean, I’ll acknowledge those things are real, or whatever, but I missed the world where that wasn’t the conversation. You know, what, what, you know what I’m saying? 

Like, you know, the thing you said, like this new development, I remember when I was very young, they would, there was this urban myth that like that domestic violence sort of like decreased dramatically during the Super Bowl. That during the four hours of the Super Bowl domestic violence, you know, just fell to the floor. That it turned to not be true at all. But it was already this idea that I, that was actually kind of a forward-thinking idea that somehow that football was a way for people to sort of exercise their violent tendencies by — as a consumer, you know? And no one really knows if that’s true. There’s certainly a higher rate of domestic violence among football players than the average public, but that’s also a little bit understandable. You reward someone for being violent for most of their life, the idea that that can carry over to the rest of their lives, not unthinkable. 

 

MARTIN: So let me go to something that has actually gotten quite a lot of attention since your book has come out. And that is your prediction that football is doomed. Not tomorrow, but eventually. Why is that?

 

KLOSTERMAN: Well, you know, that’s a — I mentioned at the beginning of the book, it’s a big chunk at the end of the book. And it’s the thing most people are, ’cause it’s just, it’s, it’s so paradoxical to people <laugh> that I’m saying that this thing that is clearly the most popular thing in the country is doomed. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, I think it’s two things. I think one is gonna be an economic issue. I think another is going to be sort of the lack of personal relationship people are gonna have with the game forward. That’s gonna only be a mediated TV event. So when something catastrophic happens economically, the fan base won’t care the way that we would care now. 

But you know, there many people read that section and they point to all the things like, well, I don’t think this is true. I don’t think advertising’s gonna change that much. I don’t think it’s gonna tease you. There’s a million arguments you can make against what I said. I guess my central argument is how many times in the history of the world has the most popular thing remained popular in perpetuity. The answer is none. That has never happened. That has never happened. There hasn’t been an art form, there hasn’t been a sport. There hasn’t been anything that has been that dominant, that just exists forever. So something’s gonna happen to football. It’s gonna happen because of its size alone. As society changes, and obviously society will, big objects have a harder time changing than small objects. They’re less flexible, they’re more brittle. So I don’t think it is, in any way, outrageous to argue that 50 years from now or 60 years from now, the way the world is will be different. But it just that it, in a way, it proves how popular football is. That just you idea of telling people that the thing you love won’t be popular after you’re dead. They’re like, no way. I don’t accept that, you know? 

 

MARTIN: Okay. Well, before we let you go, you end the book by writing “Some insanities are acceptable. This one is mine. It’s normal for Americans to have an abnormal relationship to football. And I’m too normal to confront my simplicities. I want to be controlled. I like it. I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. That’s the best part.”

 

KLOSTERMAN: Well, I just, I mean, it just, you know there are parts of me sometimes I feel like, would I be better off if I didn’t care about football? If I had never played football? You know, all these, I sometimes think I would be, I would be. You know, it is, it, it consumes so much of my time and my thinking, so much effort I place into trying to see specific football games, which I then forget about in 48 hours or whatever. But like, the next one’s coming, so I gotta figure that out. And yet this is who I am. I, you know, I, I am someone who loves football and I think there’s gonna be a time in the future when it won’t be this way and people are gonna come up with explanations as to why it collapsed and those are gonna be wrong. So I’m like, I’m gonna do a book now so that they can read this book in the future and be like, this is why they cared.

 

MARTIN: Okay. Chuck Klosterman, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

KLOSTERMAN: Thanks for having me on.