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America Without the NFL

Chuck Klosterman’s Football is a eulogy for the sport on the eve of its decline.

Performing the national anthem before a game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on September 20, 2009.

Chuck Klosterman begins Football, his personal history of the game, by admitting that his ideal reader has not yet been born. “My target market is the unborn,” he tells us, “closely followed by the recently born, closely followed by a handful of ­present-day adults who likely have no interest in what I’m writing about.”

This is a strange strategy, and Klosterman acknowledges it as such. To further ground expectations, he immediately declares all the things that his book will not be about: the pleasures of escapism, or fandom, tribalism, and community, or a love letter to the game.

Then, after more disclaimers about his own personal relationship to football, in which he acknowledges that his ideas may be dismissed because he is merely a fan rather than an ex-player, Klosterman declares his mission statement: “This is an expository obituary, published before the subject has died, delivered by someone who wants to explain why the victim mattered so much to so many, despite so much evidence to the contrary.”

Klosterman truly believes that the most popular and profitable sport in America is actually very fragile and will eventually collapse. This may come as a surprise to those of us in the present, but football’s demise, he explains, won’t happen for generations. Klosterman’s future reader, then, belongs to an imagined audience, the historians of a game that has long ceased to be.

The collapse, Klosterman thinks, will begin with college football. Recent changes, like the transfer portal and college players monetizing their name, image, and likeness (NIL), will push the college sport further into professionalization. This will lead to teams separating from college institutions altogether, and the strongest teams divorcing themselves from the NCAA, which would only hinder their profits at that point. College football without the veneer of amateurism will become just another league, a less interesting version of the NFL. Combined with the dwindling participation in youth football, the landscape will adopt a radical asymmetry by 2040 in Klosterman’s vision of the future: The NFL will still be immensely popular, but the sport’s foundations will look shakier and shakier.

Then, by the middle of the century, there will come a fatal realization that TV advertising has ceased to function as a profit generator, Klosterman argues. The NFL, like many other sports leagues, depends on the money from advertising. But “at some point between 2040 and 2060, the money required for the production and distribution of televised advertising [will become] too expensive to justify the continuance of a never-proven strategy.” Once the TV deals have to be renegotiated and the lucre they bring in shrinks, the league’s overall value will take a hit. The NFL, which has never had to downsize, will struggle to do so and face labor strife as the owners attempt to cut costs.

As this happens, the Americans of the future, who will not be as attached to the game as we are, will be fine with football going away. It’s hard to imagine what would cause such a shift—will football die or just get less popular?—but Klosterman thinks that football will unravel at the institutional level because it will first have unraveled at the cultural level:

I see football doomed by its own unreasonable success. It’s a sport so commercial and expansive that it can no longer function any other way, trapped by its own necessity for autocatalytic growth. That success was built off its ability to reflect twentieth-century America, an accidental synchronicity that became profound. But because that synchronicity was unintentional, it can’t resynchronize on command. As generations change, football fundamentally stays the same, turning it into a $25 billion simulacrum—a disconnected metaphor for a society that no longer exists, rocketing on autopilot, oblivious to the growing distance between itself and the future.

I see football doomed by its own unreasonable success. It’s a sport so commercial and expansive that it can no longer function any other way, trapped by its own necessity for autocatalytic growth. That success was built off its ability to reflect twentieth-century America, an accidental synchronicity that became profound. But because that synchronicity was unintentional, it can’t resynchronize on command. As generations change, football fundamentally stays the same, turning it into a $25 billion simulacrum—a disconnected metaphor for a society that no longer exists, rocketing on autopilot, oblivious to the growing distance between itself and the future.

As one of his contemporary readers, someone who has watched his fair share of football and manages........

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