Consider a statistic that marvels some and chafes others: In 2023, 93 of the top 100 most-watched American television shows were National Football League games.
Upon learning this, and then hearing that the perennially bestselling cultural essayist Chuck Klosterman has a history of playing and loving the game, wouldn’t you expect him to produce a book-length take on all matters pigskin?
The simple title “Football” is the first clue that the author wants his take to be as all-encompassing as the game itself. Consider not just how many gladly let watching it consume their entire weekends (except for the commercial breaks to sell Budweiser and Doritos).
Look at how it seems to be the most permanent obsession of the population of Texas: not bad for a pastime initially thrown together by some 19th-century college boys in central New Jersey. And look at how video gamesters clamber over new football titles in record-setting numbers, and how fantasy leagues and legalized sports bettors quickly grew into movers of humongous sums of money.
Klosterman covers all of the complex relationship between America and the game. Here are matters as mundane as why Canadian football stays a peculiar outlier; as serious as racial respect and the expendability of players’ bodies; and as out-there as imagining how time travel might decide whether Tom Brady was a better player than Jim Thorpe.
Klosterman’s style of presentation—as might be expected by the author of “The Nineties; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”—pinballs with restless energy. It’s reinforced with Jeopardy Champions–level asides, often hilarious. The author’s desire to entertain while informing can seem exhaustingly scattershot—but the collective heft of his assertions and arguments lays a somewhat firm hand down to calm the impression that self-indulgence is the endgame.
Speaking of endgames, Klosterman offers a conjecture that the public will turn away from football within a timeframe that might be surprising. Perhaps even within a handful of decades, a decline in the popularity of the game will take hold.
Baseball, boxing, and horse racing have all gone from peaks to niches in terms of public adoration—and some combination of multiple societal changes (perhaps abetted by economic factors already appearing on the horizon) will confirm that “the evolution of American culture is in direct opposition to the culture of American football.”
LEO recently had the opportunity to ask the author a couple of questions via email in advance of his event in town.
LEO: The relationship between football and television is given a thorough and powerful review in this book, with assertion that there has been nothing like the way they have united. Have you written elsewhere about future media? Could you see media alternatives or innovations evolving in symbiosis with a future game or pastime?
Chuck Klosterman: [T]he first football game happens in 1869. Television becomes important in the 1950s. This means the sport was able to exist and evolve for 80 years before suddenly intersecting with a new medium that had been unknowingly engineered as the ideal vessel for this synergy. It was a total accident. It could never have been achieved on purpose. So what could be another theoretical example of this, coming in the future? It would have to be something like this: A new, super-popular, previously unforeseen form of media comes into existence, and this specific media is (somehow) best experienced through the process of broadcasting pickleball games. The semiotics of pickleball mesh perfectly with however this dominant new media operates…[I]f that (somehow) happened, pickleball would obviously take on a much different role in society.
LEO: You discuss a demise of football with the decline of horse racing pointing the way, akin to the canary in the coalmine. How do you think this will go over when the book tour comes to the home of the Kentucky Derby?
CK: Totally fine, I would assume. I’d think people in Louisville would understand my horse-related analogy better than people in other places, no? Although maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I’ll walk out of my hotel and a horse will punch me in the face.
Chuck Klosterman will be appearing at Highlands Community Ministries (1228 E. Breckinridge) at 6:30 pm on Thursday, January 29. Joining him will be Sports Illustrated senior writer Pat Forde. Tickets are $40 (which includes a copy of “Football”) and are available through the Events page at carmichaelsbookstore.com or at eventbrite.com.
This article appears in Jan 1-31, 2026.