Chuck Klosterman Has So Much to Say About Football

Summary

The Book Review Podcast

Episode: "Chuck Klosterman Has So Much to Say About Football"
Date: January 23, 2026
Host: Gilbert Cruz (Editor, New York Times Book Review)
Guest: Chuck Klosterman (Author of "Football")

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Overview

This episode dives into the sweeping cultural phenomenon of American football through the eyes of Chuck Klosterman, noted pop culture critic and essayist, author of the new book Football. Host Gilbert Cruz, who admits little personal interest in football, leads a nuanced discussion about why the sport looms so large in American life, what it reveals about society, and how its peculiarities translate into universal experiences.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Why Write "Football," and Who Is It For?

• Klosterman discusses how he chose football as a subject over other sports due to its cultural gravity in the U.S. ([02:59]).
• He wanted to create a book not just for sports obsessives, but also for those with "aesthetic distance," likening the accessibility challenge to writing a book about trees—“You don’t have to be a lumberjack to enjoy it.” ([01:23])
• His "target market" is future generations, unsure if present readers will relate but aiming to document the sport at its apex for posterity:

  "My target market is the unborn, 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." ([01:58])

2. Football as Cultural Monolith

• Football’s unrivaled status: Klosterman cites that in 2020, 93 of the 100 most-watched U.S. television broadcasts were NFL games. ([04:40])
• Not just a sport—football is a form of monoculture, alongside only a handful of other phenomena (e.g., Taylor Swift), exerting pressure even on those who don't engage with it. ([04:40], [08:43])
• Cruz describes a sense of exclusion—football as a national fraternity from which non-fans can feel alienated:

  "I actually do not know how to interact with a large number of people in this country for whom football and sports is a lingua franca." ([10:43])

3. The Social Function of Football

• Klosterman remarks on how sports—or football especially—serve as universal conversation starters, surpassing even film or music in terms of shared expertise among strangers ([13:06]):

  “I can sit in an Airport Chili’s… and the likelihood that we start talking about sports, football in specific, and this guy will have enough knowledge to basically be on television… There’s not a lot of subjects like that.” ([12:49])

• The “fraternity” metaphor: even those with nothing else in common can converse about football, transcending personality or even personal affinity.

4. Football as a Mirror of American Society

• Klosterman reflects on how football “imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control.” ([13:36])
• Football’s fundamental contradiction: highly regimented and corporate on one hand, yet masquerading as pure physical expression and freedom on the other ([13:36], [24:14]):

  "Football is by far the most controlled team sport imaginable… it is like a, like a bizarrely over systemized corporate situation. Now when I describe it like that, it seems like that should be terrible. Nobody should want to watch a sport with that, with those conditions. And yet football’s the most popular because of this." ([15:00])

5. Football, TV, and the Structure of Spectatorship

• The rise of football paralleled the rise of television—they "were made for each other." ([16:06])
• Klosterman argues the TV product often surpasses the live stadium experience, with all analysis and enjoyment filtered through the mediated lens of broadcast ([16:37]).

6. The Peculiar Appeal of Only 11 Minutes of Play ([17:44])

• Football games usually feature just 11 minutes of real action over 3 hours—Klosterman thinks this is "almost perfect":

  "If someone was pitching a new sport… Now, there’s one kind of twist though. It takes three hours on television and there’s only 11 minutes of action, People would be like, this is not going to work. … But football provides the visual experience of entertainment that we want, not what we would describe." ([18:15])

7. Contrasts With Other Sports

• Football offers cerebral gaps amid action, while other sports are either "perpetual, hypnotic" (basketball, soccer), or intensely cerebral (golf, baseball). Football uniquely hybridizes both, and that’s why it dominates U.S. culture ([20:27]).

8. Football’s Conservative Coding & Anti-individualism

• The sport's structure and culture mirror certain conservative, collectivist tendencies:

  "The NFL will find guys for wearing the wrong socks. They do not want individualism. They're openly against it. The whole idea of what a football coach tells you is sublimate yourself." ([27:26])

• Star quarterbacks are outliers; facelessness is the rule. Paradoxically, the sport’s socialism (revenue-sharing, the team over self) is part of its appeal and “contradictions make things interesting.” ([28:50])
• Klosterman:

  "Football is like the most pro football, at least like the most successful extension of socialism there is in the United States with revenue sharing… It’s just one of the many sort of paradoxes…" ([27:50])

9. Should You Join the Football Culture?

• Cruz confesses wanting connection with his countrymen through football talk, but Klosterman is hesitant about conversion:

  "I don't think you should want to be converted. I don't think that is something that you should feel like I am compelled to do." ([29:47])

• Fantasy football and gambling are easy entry points, and can make even non-fans “feel something”, but Klosterman frames these as optional, even faintly melancholic.

10. Nonfiction Publishing Today

• Discussion broadens to nonfiction’s shifting place in literary culture. Klosterman notes that, despite a supposed “nonfiction era,” aggregate reading may be higher now due to pervasive digital content—though the nature of reading and book sales has changed ([32:59]).
• Readers are now constantly consuming snippets, and the act of reading for deep pleasure has waned; TV dramas partially fill this cultural space, offering "the experience of reading a novel… except it’s passive." ([33:43])
• Discoverability is now the main authorial challenge—letting people know a book even exists is harder than selling them on quality or relevance ([38:43]).

11. On Naming the Book "Football"

• Klosterman explains the calculated audacity of such a generic title (and its tribute to game history):

  "I called it Football because that’s what it’s about. ... I just want this to—I, I just, even the, let’s feel the subtitle in nonfiction is often much more important than the title. … I was like, I’m going to take that away… What it really is, is the title. That’s what it is." ([44:08])

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On writing for posterity:
  “My target market is the unborn…” – Chuck Klosterman [01:58]
• On football as monoculture:
  "Like that and Taylor Swift are it." – Chuck Klosterman [04:40]
• On cultural exclusion:
  "I have the anxiety of negative influence…" – Gilbert Cruz [10:43]
• On sports as language:
  “There is just no subject with a higher percentage of people who have an expert-level knowledge of something.” – Chuck Klosterman [12:49]
• On illusion of freedom:
  "Football imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control." – Chuck Klosterman [13:36]
• On TV’s importance:
  "Football is always better on tv. … Even if you're seeing it live, you are thinking in your mind how it would appear on television in order to understand it.” – Chuck Klosterman [16:37]
• On football action:
  "What football is structured, those 11 minutes are ideal..." – Chuck Klosterman [18:15]
• On collectivism:
  “Football is like the most successful extension of socialism there is in the United States…” – Chuck Klosterman [27:50]
• On book titling:
  "I called it Football because that's what it's about." – Chuck Klosterman [44:08]

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Memorable Moments and Exchanges

• Klosterman’s Ball of Yarn Analogy:
  His writing process involves "straightening out" the accumulated tangle of thoughts about football ([04:40]).
• Gilbert’s Reluctant Curiosity:
  Expressing a wish to not be "left out" because he can't partake in football chatter at, say, an airport Chili's ([29:23]).
• Klosterman’s Rush Analogy:

  “People into heavy metal don’t think Rush is a metal band. … It is interesting with this book…” ([31:08])

• On Discoverability:
  The greatest challenge is not to sell the book, but to make people aware it exists ([38:43]).
• Title as Statement:
  Comparison to Marriage Story and Girls—using a generic title as an act of boldness, saying “this is its own thing” ([45:30]).

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Episode Takeaways

• Klosterman’s Football is not merely a sports book; it is a book about culture, social cohesion, the contradictions of American life, and the mysterious ways mass phenomena both connect and exclude.
• Even as an outsider to the sport, host Gilbert Cruz—and by extension, the listener—discovers the strange gravitational power football wields in the national psyche, and the potential for paradoxical understanding, without the necessity of fandom.
• Discussion moves fluidly from the mechanics of football and spectatorship, to storytelling and the changing landscape of nonfiction, underscoring how sports are never "just games," but vessels for much broader narratives.

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For Further Listening:

• Not a football fan? Start here—this episode is as much about belonging and cultural wiring as it is about the game itself.
• For fans and skeptics alike, Football provides both a reflective lens and a self-contained explainer of American obsession.

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Gilbert Cruz]

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[Chuck Klosterman]

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[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review podcast. It's the middle of January, which means there is some major football happening this week was the NCAA National Championship game. The weekend this episode is publishing, the NFL Conference championship games are going to be taking place and the big one, Super Bowl 60, is happening on February 8th. And like many members of my Puerto Rican family, I'm going to be watching almost entirely for Bad Bunny's halftime show. And that's because I don't really watch football, which is going to make this week's interview a very fun challenge. I'm speaking with Chuck Klosterman, author, critic, the man behind a dozen books of nonfiction and fiction, and author of the newly released and very directly titled Football. Chuck, I don't care much about football or really any sport, but I do care about you and your books and the way you think, which is why I'm excited to have you on this week, which is why I read this book. Welcome to the Book Review podcast.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you reading this book. Without having much interest in football, I do find that I am trying to thread sort of a strange, very specific needle. Yeah, I think when you write a book about a sport there is this idea that, well, is this for people who are obsessed with it or is it for a person who has some aesthetic distance from this or just knows that it's going on? Like if I wrote a book about trees, no one would be like, well, you gotta be a lumberjack to enjoy this. That doesn't really happen. So I'm trying to do both of those things and I recognize the complexity in that.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So my initial idea for this conversation was we're going to have an entire episode in which Chuck tries to convince me to care about sports, but I realized one can only be so self involved, so we're not going to do that. I have to imagine, however, that many of the interviews that you are going to do about this book are going to be with people who are invested in football, given that it literally is the biggest thing in America. And yet, as you write at the beginning of your new book, quote, my target market is the unborn, 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. That's me. Your book is essentially a series of essays. You have an argument for the greatest player of all time. You have a look at the oddities of Canadian football, which I knew nothing about. An argument for how football might eventually die out in popularity. You've cared about football for a very long time. How did you know or decide that this was the moment to devote an entire book to it?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I think I've unconsciously been thinking about football for most of my life, 40 some years or whatever. It was probably 20 years ago or 15 years ago, where I decided at some point I do want to write a book about sports. You know, I've always mentioned sports here and there and the culture writing I had done or the kind of conventional pop culture writing I'd done. But I wanted to do like a real sports book. And I think initially my idea was it would be about basketball. But over time it became very clear to me it has to be about football for a variety of reasons. One, its meaning to the culture at large. And my realization that even though I may love basketball as a game more, the role football plays in my life is completely outsized and completely dwarfs everything else in terms of my interest in sports and watching and consuming it. So it seemed as though if you're going to do a sports book, particularly as it relates to society, there is only one choice in the United States.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And when you say you have been a sports fan for much of your life, as you write in this book, you, from the time you were a child, were football pilled. You love the Dallas Cowboys. You played football in high school. The way that you got into journalism, as I understand it, is you started to write about sports in college. That is something that has been in your mind this entire time. Yet you are most well known for being a culture writer, a wonderful culture writer who loves to think through the knotty ways in which we consume culture and think about culture. Football is culture. What did you want to do with this book? It's a series of essays. Were there problems that you were trying to solve?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I don't know if I work in that way. The kind of. The analogy I always use about this is I feel like in my mind, everything I've ever thought or felt, felt or believed or considered about football is like a ball of yarn. And then the process of writing is just pulling the string and straightening it all out. So I knew I wanted to write a book about football. The meaning of it, the strange combination of how it is imposed on culture and culture's desire to steer into it, what makes it so different from other sports. And particularly since I do envision a time in. In a distant future when football maybe doesn't disappear entirely, but definitely recedes from the culture. And then there's going to be this attempt by people of that time to explain what happened, what it was, and what went wrong. Because this is always the way it works that, you know, you look back on something that was once dominant and is no longer dominant. So the assessment has to be like, well, what made it fail? And I think those attempts are usually wrong. It doesn't really matter what we're talking about. Like, why. What did jazz mean? And why is jazz no longer the center of musical culture? I think people working now trying to make those kind of judgments would not really be in lockstep with what really did happen or how it really did feel. I think they would be projecting the present onto the past. So I thought, I'm gonna write a book when football is at its apex, where it is, and, like, stats in the book are like, in 2020, three of the hundred most watched by broadcast on television in the United States, 93 were NFL games, and then three or four more were college games. Like, it couldn't be really any more popular than it is. It is the end of the monoculture. Like that and Taylor Swift are it. And I thought, I'm gonna write this book now. It's a strange conceit because obviously I'm doing this podcast, I'm promoting this book. I'm trying to sell it to people who are alive. But in my mind, I'm imagining someone reading this book 75 years from now and being like, oh, this was this thing that was happening, and here's someone trying to explain what it mean while it was going on.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Was there a moment in the long arc of your relationship to football when you just realized, this is. This is it. This is the thing that everyone that I know, that most people, many people in America care about as much as anything. Was there a game? Was there a moment? Was there a pivot point?

[Chuck Klosterman]

No, because I do think in some ways it was gradual. And one of those things that is invisible until it's obvious. In the 1970s, football was already the most popular sport in America. There was. There really wasn't any way to view it as anything but the kind of the dominant sport. But it wasn't discussed that way. It was still seen as, well. Baseball's the national pastime, and it was almost that. That we are still going to perceive this other sport as the thing that defines the country. And this football is just popular. But as time has moved on, it's now very palpable that baseball is, in many ways just a huge niche interest. Every sport in the United States, except football, to some level, is a niche interest now. The NBA is huge, and NBA players are incredibly high profile. But as a sport, it's almost completely out of balance in a way that doesn't make sense, to be honest, in Europe and in South America, in many countries, it's like soccer is, like, the only sport that is universally beloved, and yet it doesn't have the dominance, the psychological dominance that football has on American society. It doesn't imbue sort of everything, even for people in the United States. It is even, I think, a factor in the lives of people who actively dislike it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. So tell me how football rules my life. Even though I make it a point not to engage with football at all, Is it because I've invested some emotion into saying I am not a football guy or I'm not someone who cares about football?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I guess the obvious answer is, we're doing this podcast, right?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Like, you are.

[Chuck Klosterman]

You're. This is a subject that, within your mind, it's not really central to how you live. But yet there's almost an unconscious understanding, like, well, I know this is big, though. I know this is bigger than almost anything. I. Sometimes it's a very small part, but I often think of this. There's a couple paragraphs in Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, where he walks into a bar and there's some sporting event on television. I don't even think it's football. I think it might be hockey in the book. I can't remember that. But he asks a question about what quarter is it or what period is it? And the guy at the bar, he has it wrong. And he mentions how he just feels like I'll live my whole life cut out of the world's biggest fraternity or whatever. And I remember thinking about that because I read that book when I was relatively young, and it had never occurred to me that people could have an anxiety and a strong feeling, something that they think really is unimportant, but their understanding that it matters to other people makes them. It's like they're a little bit awkward. The language of football has just the idea of a political football, like the way we use it as part of the lexicon, and many terms from sports do that. But with football, it is different. The fact that there is a Universal understanding that football is fundamentally conservative coded. And that the idea, if you're trying to picture the abstract football fan or the abstract football coach, it has a meaning even without personality. That the sort of the. That term alone in what is assumed to be the ancillary ideas that go with that, I just think are really galvanized and concrete. I, as someone who loves football and watches football all the time, there was this temptation to just think about just what's on the field. And then there's some in this book where I talk about things that happen specifically on the field. But then there's a lot of ideas that are about. Well, this is really about the audience and almost the caricature of what football is and how that is involved with other people.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I know exactly what you're talking about when you reference that brief passage in Jake McInerney's book. The idea that there is this giant fraternity that you just are being left out of. I have the anxiety of negative influence, which is the idea that, yes, I, as a result of my lack of investment in football or maybe sports in general, I actually do not know how to interact with a large number of people in this country for whom football and sports is a lingua franca. Is something that no matter who you meet, you can just talk about a team. A recent thing that happened, you have this funny story saying when your wife says, we're gonna go out to dinner with this couple that you don't really know, you're saying in your mind, God damn it, I just hope this guy is a sports fan. Because if not, I do not know what I'm going to talk to him about.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, it's not that I do not know. I don't know I'm going to talk to him about. It might be a ton of things. There could be a ton of things that we have in common. But if he likes sports, it almost transcends what his personality is. He can be a jerk, but he's really interested in SEC football, so we can talk about that. And there's. There's a part of me that's almost a little bit ashamed of that, that I feel as though I can't immediately be comfortable with a guy unless he has these interests. But if he has these interests, I don't care what he's like at all. Everything is fine. It is. It is bizarre. Like this fraternity thing, like, it is interesting to me. There is just no subject with a higher percentage of people who have an expert level knowledge of something. I can sit in an Airport Chili's, and they're showing ESPN or whatever on the screen there with the sound down. And there'll be a guy sitting next to me and the likelihood that we start talking about sports, football in specific, and this guy will have enough knowledge to basically be on television. He might not be a broadcaster, but his knowledge is almost identical. And that happens a lot. There's not a lot of subjects like that. I can't sit down in that Chili's and start talking to somebody, say, about what's going on in film right now. There's a sliver of chance that the person might be like, oh, yeah, I'm interested in Marty supreme and all this. But there's also a chance they're like. There would be a weird thing almost, to enter the conversation with. It's never weird to start talking about sports with someone who likes sports. They think it's the normal way to talk. I certainly do.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. I was taken by a passage from your book. So football, as we've established, the most obvious thing that's ever been said, is the most popular institution in the United States. And you write that it, quote, imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control. And that just sent my mind spinning. But I'm curious, is that how America feels to you? That's how football feels. Is that how America feels?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And this is not a new phenomenon. I feel like this is something I've sensed my entire life. When you talk to people from other countries, they're almost, I don't know, amused or whatever by, like, the American obsession with freedom. And yet, at the same time, that was always, for me, even before I thought of it in any kind of political context, it was like, that was always an important thing, the idea that I had a ton over my whole life and agency, and yet society does not really operate with the idea that we are truly free. It gives the illusion of freedom within these kind of constraints. And as long as you don't bump up against those walls, you can feel completely untethered. In that same essay that you're referencing, I talk about a different essay by the art critic David Hickey, who wrote Air Guitar, and he had this just amazing sports essay called the Heresy of Zone Defense. And it was about basketball, specifically a play by Julius irving in the 1980 NBA Finals against the Lakers. But really what he's writing about is that all rules, or even, like, bylaws or just the mindset of any game should be to maximize the freedom of the players, because we want the players. That's what we're watching for. We like the guys, so we want them to have unlimited freedom to do and express themselves. Football does the exact opposite. Football is by far the most controlled team sport imaginable. Even a single play comes in from the press box down to the sideline to a coordinator who sends the play in via a radio transmitter to the quarterback, who then looks at his wristband to unlock the code to tell the other 10 guys what they're going to do. It happens over and over again. It is in many ways like, almost like a, like a bizarrely over systemized corporate situation. Now when I describe it like that, it seems like that should be terrible. Nobody should want to watch a sport with that, with those conditions. And yet football's the most popular because of this. People want freedom for themselves. They want control for every other thing imaginable. And I think this is part of the reason why Football in some ways resonates with people in an unconscious way. And if they're trying to describe it, they're just like, oh, I just kind of like to space out and watch these games. I'm a big fan of the Bills or I'm a big fan of the Giants or whatever. They almost try to reduce it to this simple connection they're having. And I don't think it is simple. I think it's actually pretty profound. I think the way football is transmitted on television is kind of a incredibly complicated semiotic experience that if you were, if you described it, would seem like a real contradiction. It shouldn't work, but it works better than anything.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You also write that the rise of football and the rise of television happened in parallel. And these two things encountered each other. They were really made for each other. Football and television and football success could not have happened without the rise of television. Television success maybe could not have happened without the rise of sports, without the rise of football. And the way that we experience it now is arguably, when you step back and think about it, incredibly bizarre, but actually is perfectly designed for the sport that we are experiencing.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It is, and this is a hard thing to describe briefly, it's many pages on this in some ways, but football is a mediated experience even when there is no media involved, that even if someone is at a high school game with no cameras, standing on the sideline in the corner of the end zone watching 15 year old guys, 16 year old guys play football, they are transposing that experience into the mediated experience. Because football's marriage to television is unlike the relationship between any other sport, typically in sports, what the attempt of the televised experience is to transfer the live experience into a two dimensional thing to watch. Okay, Hockey is one exception because it's always better live. Every other sport you can really make an argument it's better live if the conditions are perfect or it's better on television because football is always better on tv. There are many reasons to go to a football game live, but none of them can be, I want to see the game better. To really see the game, it has to be televised. And even if you're seeing it live, you are thinking in your mind how it would appear on television in order to understand it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

In several interviews you've already done for this book, you've spoken about this fascinating article from 2010, published by the Wall Street Journal. The article measured the average amount of play over four NFL games, I believe, and it concluded that over three hours there actually were only 11 minutes of action. Now, one, do you think, 16 years later, that number is still generally right as far as you know? And number two, you think that 11 minutes of play is actually just fine for a football game?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I would say it's more than fine. I think it's almost perfect. Maybe if I really got into the research, I would be like, well, it'd be nice if it was 13 minutes, but for the most part, you know, that ratio is what you want. And of course that seems insane. If someone was pitching a new sport and they were like, I got this great idea for a game. Now, there's one kind of twist though. It takes three hours on television and there's only 11 minutes of action, People would be like, this is not going to work. We're not going to do that. In the same way that if you were trying to present an action movie and you said like, well, it's two hours, but there's really only 125 seconds of action, they'd be like, that's not what people want. And yet. But the way football is structured, those 11 minutes are ideal because there are these little snippets, you know, five to seven seconds of hyperkinetic, super violent, incredibly complex action happening, which creates the sensation, you could say the illusion, but I would say the sensation of something that is dynamic and fast moving and filled with action. And yet the gaps in football all the time when nothing is happening allows it to take on this cerebral experience where you're thinking about what happened and why that happened, what will happen next. What is the thinking on what will happen next. You can also Think about things unrelated to the game. You can think about your own life momentarily and then go back into the engagement. You can talk to someone about what you're seeing in a way that is very rich and satisfying. It is one of those things, like my whole career is like me saying, well, this is actually counterintuitive. This is the opposite of what you think. But yet this is one example where I'm pretty confident it is. It should not work the way it does. But football actually provides the visual experience of entertainment that we want, not what we would describe. What we would describe. What we want would be a very different thing. And if we actually got it, it would never succeed in this way.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And this is in contrast, as you write in the book, to basketball, other sports in which there's action constantly happening on screen. And that, as you say, if football were closer to basketball, it possibly would be overwhelming. The two games accomplish different things for the viewer, and they both succeed in their own right.

[Chuck Klosterman]

There's really three types of televised sports. And one is this perpetual, hypnotic, mesmerizing thing like basketball, soccer, boxing, auto racing, to some degree, where the action is. Doesn't stop. Okay? And of course, in the greatest moments of those sports, it's electrifying in a way that's hard to replicate. But there are also long stretches where it becomes hypnotic in a negative way that you kind of mentally check out. Even a great NBA playoff game at times will have a dull moment in the second quarter or the third quarter. Then there's also this category of totally intellectual sports or cerebral sports like baseball and golf, where the amount of action is tiny. Everyone knows it. But everything you watch is the thought process of what the meaning of this is. And it's all kind of prologue to the end. And you watch golf, particularly. You watch a guy think about a shot he's going to take. For 90 seconds, he takes the shot. Then we have two minutes of a discussion of what happened with it, and he's walking to the ball, and what will he do next? And then the third category is football, which is the second category most of the time, but imbued and injected with the most intense example of that first category. And it feels like the strengths of both of those kind of paradigms coalesce in this one thing. And I think that's a big reason why it's so different than anything else in terms of how it appeals to the consumer.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We'll be right back.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Foreign.

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[Gilbert Cruz]

Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm joined this week by Chuck Klosterman, author of Football. Chuck, earlier in the conversation you mentioned the idea that football is somewhat conservative coded. We talked a little bit about freedom versus control. Do you see a connection between the top down corporate nature of modern football and the way in which the stereotypically conservative idea we've had about the sport and about the coaches and about the way that it is run. Do those intersect in some way?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I don't know if it's so much that they intersect, but they do sort of reflect each other. And in the first example when we're talking about the world at large, these things are seen fundamentally negative. Right? The description of how this would work seems as though, you know, it is like top down power and you wouldn't describe that to someone and they'd be like, oh, what a utopian scenario that is. You wouldn't say that. But then when it actually happens in football and we can watch it like a simulation of it, a simulacrum of it, then it's, it's ideal and in that first category, we don't really have a choice about it. It's like that's how life is. We can't escape from it. I guess you can try to Ted Kaczynski and escape from it, but not really. If you're going to live in society, you're going to live by these rules and have to accept that this is how the world works. Then you can see it in football and you can actually enjoy the this. Like you can see it work in a way that is a distraction, an entertainment, and also something that can be real important to you. But it's your choice. You have the ability to watch it or not watch it, to be involved or not involved. You don't have this in life. And I think anytime a game or some other idiom of art or a book or any of these things allows someone to think about how the world actually is in a way that does not seem as though it's almost forced against their will. I think that helps people understanding their life in a way. They're able to see this thing and not put themselves in it, but know in a way that there's a reason this is happening. The reason it's happening is the same reason that whatever's happening in your life is happening.

[Gilbert Cruz]

There's also related to this something maybe you tell me if you think this is true. Again, this is very odd for something we consider to be the American sport, but the sort of the collective nature of football in a way, the anti individual nature of football as opposed to. I think you say this in your book, as opposed to other sports in which you really can get invested in individuals, in individual achievement, in names of players. When you're looking at football, particularly when just watching a game, it is. Unless you're betting on it or you have a fantasy team, it is just a clash of bodies. Two sides of bodies and colors. Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

And almost faceless automatons in a way. Like the quarterbacks are famous, but in many ways almost everyone else seems interchangeable. If you don't really have an understanding of their talent or anything, it's like they're just a guy comes in at offensive tackle, replaces the previous offensive tackle. It's very easy not to notice that at all. And this I think is just like. Just a. Like an important irony. The NBA is always emphasized this idea. It's like, who is the face of the league? Who are the stars? How do we get people to have a relationship with LeBron James or with Steph Curry in baseball? That's happening now, with Ohtani, these ideas, could this guy be a representation of the league that little kids will see and want to have a poster on their room and all these things? And that's very understandable, because anytime you're trying to sort of promote anything, you want to promote the human aspect of it. And yet the reason football is so dominant is because it is the opposite. What people like about it are not the individuals. It is the game. It is the game itself. It is not there. There isn't some way that it can be sold through like a. Well, we're gonna. We're gonna convince people to become invested in this guy. That happens every so often, but not that much. The reason football has been able to exist in this way over time and just continually get more popular is it's one of the few. It is devoid of need for celebrity. It is the game itself. The NFL will find guys for wearing the wrong socks. They do not want individualism. They're openly against it. The whole idea of what a football coach tells you is sublimate yourself. In the NCAA championship after the game, the quarterback for Indiana is like, I would die for my team. He said this twice, that he would die for his teammates. And now, of course, he doesn't mean that literally, but in a sense does. He's saying, this is a reflection of my commitment, that my life does not mean as much as all our lives together. And in every sport, every team sport, you have that element. But in football, it actually is there in. In the sense that we all. We all under understand this. Football is like the most pro football, at least like the most successful extension of socialism there is in the United States with revenue sharing and how it has made the league the what it is. It's just one of the many sort of paradoxes that I was just gonna.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Say it's another contradiction.

[Chuck Klosterman]

But contradictions make things interesting. Anytime you're talking about any subject, you know, it's always. You're making some point about, you know, like, what's happening with HBO Max now. Or someone says, well, that's kind of contradictory because of this.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, that's why it's interesting. Like, things that are always like, yep, that's true. And of course, that's true as well. And that extends to this thing that is a staid, boring universe. It has to be things that. That demand cognitive dissonance from people. Like, it has to be there. We need that in order to be electrified.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do I actually need to get into fantasy football or become a gambler in order to Care about football. Convert me. What do I need to do here? I feel like I'm left out of a giant part of our culture. I can't sit at an airport Chili's and talk to someone about the Percival Everett novel I just read. They're just gonna have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I want to be closer to people. I want to be closer to my fellow country people. Help me out.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, okay, I'll say three things. One is, I don't think, I don't want to convert you. And I don't think you should want to be converted. I don't think that is something that you should feel like I am compelled to do. In the same way that I don't think in other aspects of your life that you would be like, well, everybody else thinks this, so I need to think this too. Or that's not how I think you as a person operate. So I don't think you need to be converted. Second of all, if you start gambling or playing fantasy football and you will become in some ways a low level expert on this, even if you don't watch the games. Because both of those things are really perfectly set up for the casual consumer. Like you can win a fantasy football league and never watch a game. Gambling is set up to make almost every proposition a 50, 50 thing. But if you start gambling and you start watching that game, you're going to feel something. I don't know how many guys now, like, when I talk to dads, all our kids are together, we're talking about sports, and inevitably gambling starts coming. And you'll just hear a guy saying, like, oh, yeah, you know, there's kind of a dull NC State Boston College game the other night. And halftime though, I went on my phone and I made some bets just to feel something. That's what it is. So, like, I'm gonna make myself feel like. It sounds so sad when you say, but yet at the same time, I know exactly what it means. The third thing is this is like the last thing I kind of say about this book. I do feel now I recognize sort of the complexity of this. There was a quote once by Geddy Lee of Rush. And I just, I always think of this. And he was like, he said, people into heavy metal don't think Rush is a metal band. And yet people who hate heavy metal assume we are a metal band. So I don't know who our music is for. It is interesting with this book because there are aspects of this book that are very much for people who, like, have thought about football their whole life. And there are sections for people who maybe only know that football is popular now. Now, would it have been better to go more in one of the two directions? But that's not how I am. I am one kind of person who thinks a lot about that other kind of person, and I'm trying to go right down the middle and we'll see what happens. But I think if you were able to read this book and enjoy it, to me, that's a relief to me and a good thing. In the same way that if I talked to an NFL scout and they said, like, I like this book, I would feel good about that too.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, I was appreciative for some of the footnotes. It's like, what is this Lamar Jackson play that you keep referring to? Thankfully, there's a footnote here. You've written two novels, Downtown Owl and the Visible man, but you're primarily a writer of nonfiction. And we are in a moment where the nonfiction book appears just based on the numbers to be in a bit of a decline. We at the Times Book Review reported that in 2025, nonfiction sales were only down about 2% from the year prior. But that's only because of some huge titles from the past few years that have continued to sell. From the perspective of an author who has been publishing for more than two decades, but also as Chuck Klosterman, someone who thinks about media consumption, who thinks about the way in which people interact with culture, what have you observed about nonfiction publishing in particular?

[Chuck Klosterman]

When I got into this, when I first started publishing books in like 2001, kind of what the anecdotal thing people were saying is, we're in a nonfiction era now. It's like fiction is really hard to even get published. This is a non fictional world. Now, statistically, it seems the complete opposite. It seems like, like a lot of publishing houses are carried by especially books that are geared toward female audiences that they really, they call all the water for everyone. And then the, the assessment then people make is men just don't read books anymore. Men used to read nonfiction and now they don't. What is interesting is it's possible that men are not reading books the way they used to, but they're not reading less, I think. And this is real key. We're reading all day now.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Sure, sure.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Constantly. Like I probably the number of minutes in a day that I read something I suspect is higher than it's ever been in my life. A ton of it is entirely shallow, concise, a Limited two sentence thing. But if you read all day, the aggregate of that sort of takes away like the desire to read for pleasure. It. There are people who say things like, I hate writing, but I love having written. In some ways I'm not like that at all. I like writing. Publishing is the part that I don't like in some way, but I like having read in a way more than reading. I don't. I've. When I was a young person though, I loved that experience so much. I would like escape from the world to read a book. It doesn't feel that way to me now. And I assume it is because I am sort of forced out of the way the world works to just read constantly. So then at the end of the day before I go to sleep a time that maybe in the 1970s, that's when I read Jonathan Livingston Segal or something. Would I ever be reading then? You know, now there are things on television that fulfill that role. Like the. And this really changed like with the Sopranos and Mad Men and those shows. And we don't really have shows actually that good anymore. Like Pluribus is the only one that's in that class where. But if you're watching Pluribus now, it is very similar to the experience of reading a novel in a lot of ways, except it's a passive experience. So I don't have to read about the character and imagine what she looks like. I don't have to do that. They're giving me that and I can just think about the content in a way that is not like a. It doesn't really drain my mind in any way. It just. And I think for a lot of people, they're like, this is the reading I'm doing. This is. It's not a book, but I'm reading this thing on television and I don't know if I'm that different than it. Plus, as somebody who, like, who likes sports now, okay, always has like sports. But what I'm saying is there was a time when there was a limited amount of sports you could consume. When I was. This is so crazy now, but like in the 1980s, there was often one college football game on a week for everyone. That was the only game. There would be like a game on abc, maybe there'd be two games on Saturday, but there wasn't like wall to wall games on espn. Now there's football on every day of the week. So if you're a person who in the past was really looked forward to that one college game and like maybe the three NFL games you could watch. Now you have 30 games you can watch. When I was a kid, I wanted to see every game. I'm an adult, I want to see every game. But now there are 30. That's like, how much time do I have? Like, it is, I am so embarrassed about the amount of machinations I go through in order to see football games that I have to see that I will forget in 48 hours I have. I'll make up all these weird excuses or I'll plan my life around things. I record so many games and then when my wife falls asleep, I'm watching these college football games at midnight or whatever that, that if you asked me about why I wanted to watch it or what happened later, I'd be like, I vaguely remember, but they all blur together. I don't know what it is. It is like an addictive thing. Although I guess it's not really a horrific addiction because it just means I watch something that doesn't necessarily change my life.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You're not harming anyone else. Hypothetically, you're not harming yourself. So how do you consume information now? Like nonfiction? Do you find that? Are you still reading nonfiction books? Are you listening to more nonfiction podcasts? How are you learning about things now?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I don't feel like I'm under informed compared to how I was in the past. And yet it's very hard for me to explain how that process is going on. There's this book, Blank Space now by this guy named Marks. I'm reading this book now, you know, so I read those books still for what I do as a writer. I am constantly reading non fiction books. In a weird way though, I'm not reading them cover to cover. I'm reading the parts I need. So it's. I feel it's like a utilitarian thing. I suppose what is happening is the algorithms that dictate social media of course respond to the other things that we read. And during the day I look at news, I look at news and I look at sports. So I'm just getting it fed constantly. And anytime that you see something interesting, you then of course now have the process of what is this real? Like what element of this is real? Is this journalism or is this activism? So you have to basically investigate the thing that you absorbed and through that investigation you become informed also. This really started, I think even before social media, but now is very true. This is even true for people who aren't on social media. It seems as though every person I know who's Smart has become a special interest newspaper that every time I talk to someone, they want to break news to me. It is crazy how something's gonna happen with Greenland. How fast I find out about that, even if I'm not trying.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's just.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It is crazy. And I think I'm the same way. You learn something interesting. Oh, I'm gonna text these two friends, and they'll be interested, too. It is almost as though we're just flooded with a ton of bad information with some good information inside of that. And having to drill down and find it is how you become informed. It is a mystery in a way. Like, sometimes I will know a new book is coming out, or I'll know a new record is about to be released, and I'll be like, how did I know this? I remember reading Entertainment Weekly in the 90s, and one of the things about that was that, like, you go to the book page and Here are the 14 big books coming out this week. And you go to the music section. Here are all the new records here. All them. And it was. Wasn't even. I didn't. It was almost. It had less to do with what they were saying about these things, but just the fact that. Here's the list. Okay, here's the list of all these things. And now there's. That doesn't. That's not how it is. This book, for example, the biggest obstacle, as far as I can tell, is having people know that it exists at all. It's not that I can't convince them that it's good or that it's worth the price or that. That they're enough of a football fan to enjoy or. It doesn't really matter. All these things, they seem secondary to just somehow convincing them or not convincing them, explaining to them that it's something that can be purchased, and the only way to do it, apparently, is to just flood the zone and do all of these podcasts and do every interview I'm asked about and do. I mean, the only way. It feels real weird. It feels completely detached from being a writer. In 2001, when I started, it was like the. It was like the publishing house told you, like, what media you would do. They would come to you and be like, oh, the Chicago Tribune wants to talk to you, and I think you should do it, or whatever. And then you'd wait. And now the expectation is, you better do this yourself. I know it helps to be an entertaining podcast guest. I understand that, like, it's. It doesn't mean the. Doesn't Change the book at all. What's between the covers is what it is. But, like, going. And I do wonder what it must be like for the true genius writer who just can't talk to people.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely. How many people knew that there was a new Thomas Pynchon novel last fall? Maybe he's a bad example. He's one of the.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Okay, it's a great example. I did. How did I know that? I'm not exactly even sure how that happened. Who was the person who told me that? Because I think even just say, five years ago or six years ago, like, Twitter was different. And you would say, okay, I'm gonna follow these people, and these are the people who are gonna be served as the people who tell me. But now that's not the way it works. It' a lot of people who were unfriendly, like, they aren't anymore. They've gone to a different. And because there's all these different sort of silos, like Blue sky and Mastodon and Threads and all these things. Things can be happening huge in one and completely unknown in the other.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely. When you talk about going to the book pages and ew, which is where I started my career in New York City publishing, working as a books assistant at Entertainment Weekly, one of the best jobs I still have ever had. Or when I was younger, reading Spin magazine, seeing who's on the COVID going to the review pages, it was an active thing. I feel like what you're talking about is almost. There's just. There's information in the air and it's passive. I'm just receiving it through alerts in my phone, and I see it mentioned on Instagram, and I'm looking at headlines, and I'm not searching anything out, but it's coming to me in some ways. And some of that stuff is very. It's great to know that everyone is into Geese. In the past, I would have. There would have been a place where I specifically read a profile or a review of that band, and then I would have been into it.

[Chuck Klosterman]

And not just that, but it's like the thing. Like Geese, for example. It's like all the things happen at once. You hearing about the band, hearing what people react to it, and the band itself, you all kind of learn about in the same time. Like talking about Spin, man. I remember reading about the band Pavement, initially being amused that a band was called Pavement, reading about them just being rhapsodic about it and then being like, I wonder if I would be into this. I'm reading what the Guy says and the way he describes and it seems like maybe I'll love it, maybe it'll repel me going to the record store. They don't have it yet because it turns out that they spin reviewed it like six weeks before it came out because that's how it was. So then waiting for it, then finally getting it, then thinking back to what was described to me in the actual experience and how those things are similar, different or maybe hearing things because it was described to me that improve the experience that I wouldn't have even recognized if I had just played. It is very weird. A friend of mine is back home with at her parents house now and she's going through all her old stuff. And there was this book that came out in 2001 or 2002. It was like a. I think it was called or not to Be. It was a collection of suicide notes. Someone had put a book together of just various suicide notes. And when I had met this woman, we had bonded over, we both had this book and she found this book and we said haha, remember this? And then we were like, you know, how did we find that book? Did we just go into like a media play or a Barnes and Noble and walk around and come across it? Did GQ or Esquire or something write about it? We read the same article because it's such an odd. Right. Like you know now when somebody wants a book, like they gotta know the title and the author and that is part of the complexity.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Is that why you named it Just Football?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Technically that was a mistake. Right? Because they say, I guess the SEO or whatever that does, you'll never, it'll never come up.

[Gilbert Cruz]

If I'm googling the title of your book. Shoot. There's all this other stuff.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I called it Football because that's what it's about. That wasn't the original title. There was a bunch of titles and then there was a bunch of subtitles. But then at some point I was like, like I'm just gonna say what it is. Like I want this to. I, I just. Even the let's feel the subtitle in nonfiction is often much more important than the title.

[Gilbert Cruz]

They're so long because you have to fit in all that. These are three things that the book is about or what have you.

[Chuck Klosterman]

And they end up completely warping what the book is about. The perception of the book.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

If people see that subtitle, they're going to read every line in that book through the lens that this is what the intention is. And I Was like, I'm going to take that away. I'm. Because I'm going to take away. I don't want people to be like, oh, it's a book about football, but it's really about this. What it really is is the title. That's what it is. And also, I just. I also thought, okay, so Walter Camp, the godfather of football or whatever, he wrote a book called Football in the late 19th century. And it's as close to a bible of football. There is. It's all the rules of football, what they should be, all the strategies. Also stuff about Napoleon and, like, football's relationship to warfare and all these things. It's kind of interesting, this book that came out, just Football. And then I was like, I wonder who else has writt a book just called football in the 20th century? And there was really nothing.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So I was like, it's mine.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Yeah, I'm gonna. Not just mine, but, like, this is. In some ways, it is a way to pay homage. I'm interested in the history of sport. This is like a connecting back to it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

And also it's. It is a little bit. It is a little bit audacious, maybe, to just do it. I always think that there was that movie, that Noah Baumbach movie, Marriage Story. That's a different movie if it's called a marriage story. But by calling it Marriage Story, it means that this is what happens in marriages. When Lena Dunham made Girls, okay, if that show had been called Hannah and it was like, oh, it's about this character that's very different. By calling it Girls, it did take on a deeper meaning and was a bolder move. And now you don't want to be bold just for the sake of boldness. But I'm attracted to that gamble.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Like, this isn't one of many books about football. This is its own thing, I hope.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, Chuck, to the dismay of some in my life, I may actually start watching a tiny bit more football as a result reading this book as a result of our conversation.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Oh, Roger Goodell, thanks you.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's been a delight to have you on. Thanks for coming on the Book Review podcast.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Oh, my pleasure.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That was my conversation with Chuck Klosterman about his book Football. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Football. Curious is how I would describe myself. Thank you for listening.

[Chuck Klosterman]

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