Big-time football — like this month’s college football championship — is the most dominant force in American culture. It won’t always be that way, writer Chuck Klosterman argues in his new book. Set Number: X164821 TK1
2026-01-22T10:06:01.267Z
- Are you ready for some football?
- Trick question: America is always ready for more football. It’s an appetite without end.
- But writer Chuck Klosterman, who just devoted a book to the sport, says football’s dominance will ultimately be its undoing.
The notion that [football is the bigge…
Big-time football — like this month’s college football championship — is the most dominant force in American culture. It won’t always be that way, writer Chuck Klosterman argues in his new book. Set Number: X164821 TK1
2026-01-22T10:06:01.267Z
- Are you ready for some football?
- Trick question: America is always ready for more football. It’s an appetite without end.
- But writer Chuck Klosterman, who just devoted a book to the sport, says football’s dominance will ultimately be its undoing.
The notion that football is the biggest force in American culture and entertainment is so ingrained and obvious that it almost seems like something not worth mentioning.
Chuck Klosterman feels otherwise: The pop culture writer just devoted an entire book to the sport, and its meaning and importance.
But Klosterman also argues that football won’t always be the main thing — and that its overwhelming size and scale will be the thing that eventually undermines it.
I talked to Klosterman about all of that, as well as topics like the impact of video games on the sport, and why he thinks paying college football players is good for now, and really damaging in the long run. You can hear our entire conversation on my Channels podcast. What follows are edited excerpts from our chat.
Peter Kafka: What is the point of a book called "Football" in 2026?
**Chuck Klosterman: **I have been obsessed with sports and football my entire life. And probably 20 years ago, I made an unspoken, abstract decision — at some point, I want to do a book that’s just about sports. My initial idea was that it was going to be about basketball, but I realized that’s crazy: If you’re writing about something that’s part of the culture, football is the sport. It’s the only one.
If someone said to you, "Explain the last half of the 20th century through some idea, some metaphor," football is the thing to pick. It might not be the case for the 21st century, but it is for the end of the 20th century. And it is for the world we live in right now.
One of the big changes in sports — and definitely in football — recently is the legalization of sports betting. It’s omnipresent. You seem ambivalent-to-positive about it, which is not where I thought you’d end up.
CHUCK: Do I think that gambling in this legalized way is bad for society? I would say probably, for all of the predictable reasons — particularly because it’s on your phone and you’ve put your [financial information] in, so the money does not seem real. Even if it was just a situation where you had to feed dollar bills into it, everything would change.
You’re taking something that’s addictive for some people and marrying it to your phone, which is also addictive for some people. It seems like an obvious way to get in trouble.
CHUCK: But for football, it is good.
Because it adds a different context for conversation about it. When I have a conversation with other dads, we’ll talk about sports a lot, and then there’ll be this other conversation. About gambling. We’re still technically talking about football, but this is a whole different thing. It has a different context, a different meaning. It says more about the person.
Some could argue that it’s a weird argument for gambling being good. But if we look at football as a form of entertainment, a distraction, something to consume, to occupy yourself — I think gambling does make it more interesting.
This is the pitch from the entire sports gambling industry — it improves the game, it adds stakes, it makes it more interesting. You seem to agree.
Certainly there are people who feel that way. I think a lot of people I know who do a lot of gambling, they have a sort of mixed feelings about it — I think it does bother them that suddenly the game seems meaningless if they’re not gambling on it.
But for me, as somebody who doesn’t really put money into it, I find it a fascinating thing.
Like: Indiana was an eight-and-a-half point favorite [in Monday’s college football championship game]. They did not cover. But the meaning of eight-and-a-half points in a spread suggests that the gambling markets believe it will be a blowout. That’s different than saying, "I think Indiana’s gonna win easily." I find it to be much more intriguing than I would’ve thought.
I was definitely against the idea of sports betting. Ideologically, I thought, "This is bad." And like I say, socially it probably is. But for each individual sport …
You argue that football’s grip on America will eventually collapse. How will that happen?
Football is not just the most popular thing, or just too big to fail. It is too big to stop expanding. It has to constantly get bigger. The financial demands of it, the amount of revenue it has to make, can only go up. The NFL only operates from the position of "How can we stretch out further? Can we even swallow up all the other sports? Can we expand into Europe and all of these things?"
And right now, that’s a successful thing.
The more they make, the more people consume, the more people spend on it —most importantly, the TV networks and streamers who need it.
And the depth of caring is so deep. If football went away this fall for whatever reason, people will be like, "What am I gonna bet on? What is my life gonna be like? Who am I? What’s my identity if I’m not a fan of this team?"
You really saw this during COVID. "We’re still playing college football. No one’s in their classes, but we gotta play these games. We can’t not play them."
So it’s really brittle, right? It’s a system that has to keep going. But I think at some point there is going to be a change. Probably in advertising.
It’s not that advertising is going to disappear. It’s just that what it costs to buy an ad during a football game … it’s not going be worth the trade off.
So let’s say it gets to be a point when Fox or Amazon Prime, or whoever’s carrying these games, renegotiates their NFL contract and for the first time, the number doesn’t go up. Maybe even the number goes down.
[That puts the] NFL’s in this weird position — they have to take their best offer. Then the players will say, "There’s no way we’re going to take less money. There’s no way we’re going to start playing 22 games just because you’re not making enough money from CBS. We’re going to strike." Or the owners will be like, "We’re going to lock the players out" [because they can’t afford to pay them] — like what’s happened with baseball.
If that happened now, it would be this American calamity, where people would freak out. But as people have less and less of a personal relationship to the game when this happens in the future, they’ll be like, "Well, that’s an entertaining distraction. I can replace it with something else."
Something has to be part of your life for it to be so important that you’ll do whatever you can to keep it going.
Why will fans have less of a relationship to football?
The comparison I use is horse racing. In the 1920s, along with boxing and baseball, it was the biggest sport. And in the 1920s, the average person still had a real relationship to the culture of horses. They had a blue-collar job, and horses were still doing some of the labor. Or their dad had a horse farm. They definitely saw horses all the time. The horse was part of the world in which they lived.
That is no longer the case. Now, horse racing is just for people who own horses and people who gamble on it. That’s really all it is.
My fear is that football’s gonna put itself in a position where it’s too big. Its tentacles reach too far. And people will say, "Well, I guess we’ll choose something else." And when it collapses, something that size collapses hard. It kind of implodes on itself.
I’m not one of these people [who complain about capitalism]. But I do think some of the problems of capitalism are easiest seen through sports leagues, which are smaller simulations of society. And what’s happening with the way money operates in pro and college football, it seems precarious to me. The financial side’s changing in an exponential way.
And when society shifts, it’s the big things that can’t. They’re not nimble. The small things can.