Football is ‘doomed’ for this surprising reason

On Feb. 8, the nation will come to a standstill as the New England Patriots face the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. 

An estimated 140 million people in the United States — over a third of the population — will watch.

“The language and symbolism of American football have infiltrated every dimension of American life,” Chuck Klosterman writes in his new book “Football” (Penguin Press), “an immersion amplified by the fact that North America is the only continent where the game is played with real seriousness.”

A self-confessed football psychotic, Klosterman examines why the game is so popular — but he also asserts that it’s ultimately doomed. 

“Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value,” he writes, “even (and perhaps especially) when football is something they actively dislike.”

Klosterman believes football matters not because it is important but because it feels as though it should be important. 

It is, he says, a game rooted in an ever-changing but never-changing narrative. “The way the ball is carried and the way the runner moves is both unique and familiar, and if one could remove the logos from the helmets and the colors from the uniforms and the numbers from every player’s back, it could be happening in 1920,” he writes.

“It is eternal.”

Yet the difficulty lies in really uncovering its real, long-lasting popularity. “Football is difficult to understand if you haven’t played and difficult to explain if you have,” he writes.

Part of the appeal is surely the fact that it allows fans to enjoys some socially acceptable violence. “The way football is covered by media is maniacally focused on any possibility for real conflict, physical or otherwise,” he told The Post. 

In other words, football is war. There’s an “ingrained understanding that football is a simulation of warfare and that football is a way to experience war without the inconvenience of death and destruction,” he writes. 

“But football is a metaphor for the way war used to be, allowing people to feel nostalgia for an experience they never had and would never want.”

At present, the sport’s popularity currently shows no signs of waning.

In 2023, Klosterman notes that 93 of the 100 most-watched TV shows (not counting streaming) involved NFL football, be that live games, highlights or analysis shows. 

The other seven were college football games.

The author goes further, citing the 2023 Academy Awards as the sixtieth most popular broadcast of the year whereas a comparatively meaningless game between two average teams, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Titans, was the fifty-ninth.

“The popularity of football on television doesn’t prove football is objectively good, but it does present an objective reflection of what Americans desire,” he writes.

But, despite its huge appeal, Klosterman believes the sport will fade, due in part to the issue of repeated head trauma and potential long-term brain damage for players.

“It’s crazy that so many men play a brutal game, end up with incurable dementia and still insists they’d do it all over again in the exact same way, despite the awareness that they’ll eventually be unable to remember the very thing they fell in love with,” he writes.

Injuries will become more of an issue not in the NFL, where the riches tend to justify it, but at lower levels. Parents will become less likely to sign their kids up to play. High school football and Friday night lights culture will become less dominate, creating fewer new fans with each generation.

Still, Klosterman can’t imagine the sport ever being banned outright.

“It will never happen,” he writes. “The likelihood of football being banned outright is akin to the likelihood of the Second Amendment being eliminated.”

As with most sports, football’s biggest threat isn’t safety or culture — although they play a part — it’s money. 

“The real issue is that pro and college football are exclusively designed for economic expansion, and that reality can never relent,” Klosterman said. “So if the public relationship to football gradually changes over the next two generations, the sport becomes paradoxically fragile.”

For now, though, football can weather economic ups and downs because people love it so much, he believes.

But, “will [that] be true in 2070?” Klosterman asks. “I increasingly don’t think so.”