A Materialist Analysis of Chuck Klosterman’s “Football”
The Socialism & Sports Reading Series Returns!
Last month, Chuck Klosterman put out his latest book, simply called Football: a collection of essays about (you’re not going to believe this) football. I’m not going to offer a traditional review of the book — I enjoyed it, but I’ve read everything Klosterman has written for decades now, so I’m not sure I can make a persuasive case to those not already converted.
What I’m interested in doing here, though, is looking at some of his arguments through a socialist lens, because I think he misses the mark on some important things thanks, in part, to a disrespect of historical materialism. Specifically, Klosterman is interested in the cultural primacy of football in the United States today, and the heart of his book is trying to make sense of just why football is so popular, what its popularity means, and what might cause it to stop being popular:
As a social force, [football] has succeeded on the highest possible level, far beyond what anyone could have projected in the 1970s, a decade when football was merely the country’s favorite sport. It has sociologically “won” with a dominance that defies logic, expanding its sovereignty throughout an era when the rest of the monoculture was burned to the ground. It thrives in the face of constant criticism, immune to all ideological progressions that emphatically stand against it. It appears that football is indestructible, and I wish it were…. But it is not.
These are grand claims, and while Klosterman is characteristically bombastic here, I don’t think that many people would disagree with his overall point. Football is incredibly popular, and it feels like that popularity ought to be meaningful… but I’m not so sure.
When discussing football’s popularity, it’s important to keep things in perspective. Football is popular, certainly, but it’s easy to exaggerate how much. Klosterman throws around words like “dominance” and “monoculture” in a way that makes it sound like football is unlike anything else in the country. He’s not alone in making claims like this, but I think we have to get a grip here. Football is obviously popular, but its importance is highly regional and there are millions of Americans who basically never watch it.
Klosterman makes a big deal of the fact that, “Of the the hundred most watched U.S. television television telecasts in 2023, ninety-three involved NFL football, and three of the remaining seven were college games.” This seems like a shocking fact, but it is primarily explained by the changing nature of how people watch television.
Nobody watches TV at the same time anymore. If you look at that list of most watched events (or this newer version from 2025), you see that it’s basically all live events: sporting events and awards shows and live news coverage. But does that mean regular TV shows like Stranger Things and The Pitt and Heated Rivalry aren’t popular, or have significantly less cultural impact than NFL football? Of course not. Millions of people watch those shows, but at different times, meaning they have no shot of making Klosterman’s list.1
In his promotional interviews for the book, Klosterman has repeated a line you’ve probably heard: that the last examples of “monoculture” are the NFL and Taylor Swift. The implied joke here is that these two things were fused when Swift started dating a football player back in 2023 — but that example is actually quite instructive. When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, it revealed that there actually wasn’t a lot of overlap between the two fanbases. Many football fans famously resented coverage of Swift at the games. But more significantly, it revealed how many Swift fans had even heard of Patrick Mahomes, let alone Travis Kelce.2 In other words, the supposed monoculture didn’t seem so “mono” after all — it seemed like they were appealing to two very distinct groups, with less overlap than you might expect.
I don’t want to overdo it here: Football IS very, very popular, and we shouldn’t downplay that. It is more popular than any other major American sport, and it is certainly important to the culture and the economy. But so are Marvel movies and stadium country and evangelical Christianity, and all those things are fucking garbage. Popularity is neither proof of value nor any great mystery. The American economy is very good at producing slop for the masses.
But football isn’t slop – it’s awesome! So its popularity feels meaningful somehow.
This is where a materialist analysis is important. Because when people discuss the popularity of football, they always look to cultural explanations. It must be something about the violence, or the connection with the frontier, or the nature of rural America. Klosterman — whose whole thing is cultural explanations — makes much of the tension between American culture’s stated preference for freedom and individuality and its revealed preference for structure and hierarchy. There are certainly interesting ideas to be mined from all these things, but as a way of actually EXPLAINING football’s popularity, they all fail.
As any materialist worth his salt knows, culture is always downstream of the economic modes of production. The kind of cultural “dominance” that Klosterman is talking about does not emerge purely from stated ideals of a population — ideals and culture are instead shaped by the economic forces governing society.
This can all sound very academic, but when it comes to explaining football’s popularity it’s actually very simple: Football is the most popular sport because there are fewer games. An NFL team plays only 17 regular season games per year — that’s ~20% of what hockey and basketball teams play, and ~10% of what baseball plays. This probably seems like a disappointing explanation but it’s true: There are way fewer NFL games than any other major pro sport, which makes it much easier for fans to follow pro football, which means it attracts more casual fans.3
Klosterman doesn’t mention this fact at all, which is particularly infuriating because it’s connected to a fact that he IS very perceptive about: the way football pairs perfectly with television. He writes at great length about how well-suited the game is to TV:
The way football is broadcast manages to obliterate any difference between an informal consumer and a face-painting fanatic. This is due to many factors, but the most critical being that football is always, always, always better on television than it is in person. The televised experience is so superior to the in-person experience that most people watching a football game live are mentally converting what they’re seeing into its TV equivalent, without even trying.
This is both interesting and frustrating. It’s interesting because Klosterman is definitely correct that football is a great TV product. But it’s frustrating because he comes so close to seeing the crucial part of the story and still ultimately gets lost in an aesthetic analysis of how football looks on television.
The really important reason football is such a great TV sport is that there are few enough games that all of them are ON TV in a way that both “an informal consumer and a face-painting fanatic” can access. It’s true that pretty much every basketball or baseball or hockey game is technically on television as well, but the vast majority of those games still air on regional sports networks that are not really available outside of the local metro area. You can buy things like NBA League Pass or MLB TV that give you access to more games, but these are often exorbitantly priced (and the blackout rules are incredibly confusing), meaning they only really appeal to hardcore fans — those “face-painting fanatics.”
Plus, there are so damn many of those games, airing at different times of day on different days of the week, that even the most hardcore fan cannot really watch all of them. But all a football fan has to do is turn on CBS, Fox, or NBC on Sundays — you don’t even need cable unless you really want to watch Monday or Thursday Night Football. Even fanatics only really need to devote one day of the week to the NFL.
Crucially, this means that the NFL operates on a slightly different business model than the other pro sports leagues. Pro football has never really gotten involved in the RSN business, and so has not been as negatively affected as other sports by the recent downturn in the cable business. More importantly, it means that football is a national game with national fans in a way that other sports are not.
In other words, all that stuff about “cultural dominance” and “monoculture” is really just a consequence of the NFL’s business model. Football seems more dominant because its games still air on networks our parents grew up with, and at times when most people are awake and not at work. It’s really no more complicated than that…
Of course, you might see some economic risks for the NFL buried in that explanation of its success. That brings us to the other contestable question in Klosterman’s book: the hypothetical decline of football.
The world is changing in many ways, some of which are good, some of which are bad, and all of which undermine what football was, is, and always must be. Its hyperpopularity in the present tense won’t matter, because past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The game will never completely disappear, in the same way you can still hear jazz on NPR and you can still smoke Lucky Strikes inside a casino. It is, however, destined to recede from the epicenter of American life.
The broad outline Klosterman presents about football’s hypothetical decline will be familiar to most football fans: Concerns related to the health/safety/ethics of football will gradually change fans’ relationship to the game, and at some point that will trigger a crisis that causes the game to lose popularity, just as boxing and horse racing did years ago. That’s the story most people who believe in the Death of Football narrative believe, and it’s what I told myself until a few years ago.
What Klosterman mainly adds to this story are some speculative comments about the future of television advertising4 and a heavy focus on the tensions between football’s values and modern values:
Football is violent, and its violence is sometimes praised. This is not what we want. Football is an exclusionary activity, exclusively played by men. This is not what we want. Football does not reject “toxic masculinity.” This is not what we want. Football celebrates the ability to ignore and accept pain. This is not what we want… Nothing about the culture of football is what we want, or what we are told to want, or what we are supposed to want.
There is obviously some conservative ideology in that passage, not just the references to “toxic masculinity” but also the sort of resentful invocations of unnatural values we are “told to want.” It’s annoying that Klosterman rarely deals directly with the politics of football, because passages like this, and comments he’s made in the promo tour, suggest it is what he REALLY wants to talk about.
But what bothers me about it is that it’s so obviously an anxiety of a specific but extremely narrow demographic. There is a certain type of person — usually a highly educated man over the age of 30, who lives in a major city and sometimes reads books — for whom football fandom is vaguely embarrassing. It is possibly the only “conservative coded” thing they are a fan of, and they might avoid telling people they meet that they actually watch football. I should be clear that I’m not criticizing these people; I’m ONE of them, as is almost every man I know (and I suspect a good portion of Klosterman’s peers and readers). But it’s important to realize that, at least statistically speaking, these people barely exist.
The average football fan, I am willing to bet, does not think about “toxic masculinity” at all, let alone think “this is not what we want.” The average person probably has never even considered football “an exclusionary activity,” let alone thought it was some tragic problem that women cannot play in the NFL. And I have a hard time imagining the person who thinks “the ability to ignore or accept pain” is some kind of controversial virtue, instead of the heart of every banal story about overcoming adversity.
In other words, the tensions that Klosterman highlights as the central contradiction of football’s current cultural dominance are really just an anxiety of the literary class he occupies. They present absolutely no threat to football’s popularity.
The comparisons to boxing and horse racing are instructive, but not in the ways that they are usually invoked. In reality, it wasn’t really safety or ethical concerns that killed those sports at all. By some measures, they are as popular as ever: Floyd Mayweather Jr. was the most highly paid athlete of the 2010s, and more money is bet on major horse races every year. The 2024 stunt between Paul and Mike Tyson reportedly had 38 million domestic viewers — more than every football game except the Super Bowl and the two conference championship games; the 2025 Kentucky Derby saw its highest TV ratings since 1989.
It is probably true that these sports have lost cultural relevance — most people cannot name an active boxer or a racehorse. But what hurt these sports culturally was corruption and a bad business model: While football is perfectly built for television, boxing and horse racing are awkward fits for the medium. A horse race lasts only a couple of minutes, meaning there’s no time for commercials or analysis. And neither has the rhythm of a regular season that allows fans to know what to expect and when to tune in.
Both of these really feel like sports designed for daily newspapers. They’re built around big events that happen sporadically, requiring the promotion and drama that independent media can provide. And they’re sports built on images and narratives built by columnists and photojournalists.
As newspapers lost out to television, casual sports fans began to follow sports on TV. They didn’t turn away from boxing and horse racing because of ethical concerns, or their changing relationship to horses. They turned away because they started reading the paper less and watching television more. This helped sports that could be watched more or less the same way they watched Friends: They aired at a predictable time, on a consistent channel, with familiar characters.
Football has been the best at this, but you can see how its possible demise might be baked right into its success: If people ever change the way they watch TV, then that’s going to change how they watch football — and it’s already starting to happen. The ratings for regular season football games HAVE started to decline already, as fewer people watch traditional TV. In the short term, these changes have been good for the NFL, since its ratings have dropped much slower than the rest of television. Plus, more streaming services means more customers to bid on the rights to air NFL games; the league has pried a small fortune out of Netflix and Amazon and Peacock.
In the long run, though, this could be a real threat to football’s dominance. If football becomes just another piece of content that fills up a streaming service, it will lose the cultural position it has right now. It may still attract a lot of viewers, just as boxing and horse racing can still do numbers on TV, but it won’t be how strangers start conversations at the post office.
Gambling poses a similar threat to football’s importance, but similarly not for the reasons you might first guest. It’s not for ethical or regulatory reasons; it’s simply that gambling may fundamentally change the business model of the NFL. Right now, gambling is a nice, hefty additional revenue stream for the league, but if it eventually comes to supplant TV revenue — which seems quite likely, if you ask me — then that will represent a big shift. Instead of trying to make a product that appeals to as many TV eyeballs as possible, the NFL will be trying to extract more and more money from its most passionate (and addicted) fans. Indeed, as boxing and horse racing became gambling sports, it was simultaneously good for business and bad for the cultural legacy of the games.
Klosterman talks about gambling, but he doesn’t see how it is fundamentally changing the game. Because what he is interested in is the sport itself, and gambling is really just another element to be layered on top of that sport. But what really drives culture is the business model, the mode of production, and as gambling starts to change that, it will change the role that football fills.
It is, admittedly, less fun to talk about the business side of football, or to suggest that the only reason for its popularity is the TV schedule. Most people want cultural values to reflect social values, to reveal something about the society in which we live. But our society is downstream from the economic system we have, and if we want to change or improve or understand society, we have to start with that economic system.
For example, the night-of ratings of the recent season premiere of The Pitt was only a few million — paltry compared to most NFL games. But when you add in all the streaming views, it reportedly gets ~18 million viewers per week — which would put it ahead of all but 19 football games on that list. To be fair, streaming numbers are not broken down by country, so it’s hard to say how much of that is in the US — but The Pitt isn’t even the highest rated streaming show. Things like Stranger Things and Landman get way bigger numbers.
It’s a little tricky to talk about the gender divide here, because obviously there are tons of men who love Taylor Swift and tons of women who love football, and it’s frustrating when people forget that. But it’s also still true that football’s audience is disproportionately male and pop music’s (especially Swift’s) is disproportionately female. This actually makes it easy for both sides to get confused about the overall popularity of each phenomenon, because it’s such an important part of male or female bonding. If two men are making small talk, football is a good way to kill time. But that doesn’t prove it “dominates” the culture any more than weather dominates the culture.
One way of seeing this is by looking at that fact Klosterman loves: that 93 of the most popular TV programs were NFL games, and three more were college football games. If football’s popularity is related to the sport itself, then why is there such a crazy ratio of pro games to college games in the TV ratings? Especially when the enthusiasm for college football is, if anything, bigger than the excitement around the NFL? Well, because there are way more college football teams — and therefore way more college football GAMES — than NFL teams, so the viewership of college football is diffused over more games, much like the viewership of the NBA, college basketball, and baseball.
There is also his debatable but interesting hypothesis that horse racing’s decline was mainly because fewer people today deal with horses in their daily lives.
"Instead of trying to make a product that appeals to as many TV eyeballs as possible, the NFL will be trying to extract more and more money from its most passionate (and addicted) fans." Is this not true of every major sport?