America is football

Summary

Podcast Summary: America is Football

The Gray Area with Sean Illing (Vox)
Guest: Chuck Klosterman
Date: January 26, 2026

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Overview:

This episode of The Gray Area explores the cultural dominance of football in America. Host Sean Illing is joined by essayist and culture critic Chuck Klosterman, author of the book Football, to dissect why the sport is not just America’s most popular pastime, but its last great shared ritual—and what that says about the country’s values, identity, and future. The conversation examines football from philosophical, sociological, and existential angles, probing its mediated nature, the anxieties surrounding its dangers, and its role as a quasi-religious, communal art form.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Purpose of Klosterman’s Book — Not a Love Letter

• Obituary for a Living Thing:
  • Klosterman clarifies the book isn't a "love letter" to football, but a critical, retrospective consideration written at the sport’s cultural apex, “like an obituary for someone who is still alive” (03:07).
• Writing for the Future:
  • The book is in part for “people who aren’t even born yet,” to help them retrospectively understand football’s role—“it's kind of one of the last idioms of art where that really is the idea…” (04:49).

2. Football as America’s Monoculture

• Football is the only remaining “shred of monoculture,” alongside Taylor Swift, that unites Americans in a moment when shared cultural touchstones are vanishing. (05:28)

3. Why is Football So Dominant?

• Historical Happenstance and Cultural Fit:
  • Football emerged post-Civil War as a simulation of war, at a time when society craved adversity and ritualized struggle. (06:45)
  • Its ideal fit for television transformed it, making it central to the American experience from 1950 to 2000. (06:45)
• Metaphorical Significance:
  • “Football is as popular as virtually every other sport combined.” (06:27)

4. The Ritual Power and Emotional Hold

• Formative Experiences:
  • Illing recounts football as being “practically a religion” in the South, with early, vivid memories tied to going to games with his father. (09:03)
• Emotional Normalization:
  • Klosterman is fascinated by how these deep feelings become normalized and woven into identity, even beyond our conscious rationale. (09:49)

5. Football’s Structure: Controlled Chaos

• Quote: “Football imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control.” (13:22)
• Klosterman’s Analysis: The sport offers “predictable chaos” through layers of hierarchy, planning, and short bursts of spontaneous action, reflecting America’s love for controlled risk and spectacle. (13:43)

6. Violence, Danger, and the Meaning of Risk

• Does Football Require the Threat of Injury?
  • The sport’s meaning depends on inherent risk—even if fans abhor actual injuries, their possibility underpins football’s drama. (15:26; see also 17:06)
  • Quote: “For the game to have meaning, there has to be risk involved, even though they don’t want to see anyone get seriously hurt.” — Klosterman (15:26)
• Why Rule Changes Meet Resistance:
  • Even “caveman” fans who oppose safety reforms intuit that removing danger lessens the sport’s value. (17:06)

7. Football as a Purely Mediated Experience

• Most Fans Experience Football Only Through Media:
  • Unlike soccer or basketball, few fans ever play “real” football; their connection is entirely spectator-based. (18:27)
• The TV Show Analogy:
  • “It’s not a love letter. … The meaning of the game is a mediated experience for anyone outside of a handful of players and coaches.” (21:11; see also 18:27)
  • Even in the stadium, fans subconsciously transpose what they see onto televised imagery; “most of our experience in life is more unconscious than conscious.” (21:03; 22:56)

8. The Value of Liveness and Unscripted Drama

• Spontaneity is Key:
  • Sports are unique among entertainments in their true unpredictability—“anything can truly happen and no one knows.” (24:36)
• Communal Experience:
  • Attending games is less about seeing the action clearly (television is better for that), and more about ritual, physical presence, and collective emotion. (23:12, 24:18)

9. Moral and Existential Questions

• Should Society Permit Dangerous Spectacles?
  • The popularity of football complicates questions of agency: “Because football is so popular, there is this idea that perhaps we are also complicit in this. … Is the reward so massive that it’s almost unrealistic to say they have a real choice?” (31:09)
  • Many ex-players with brain damage say they’d do it all again; football provokes moral and existential questions uniquely. (31:09)

10. Social Good vs. Trouble: The 53/47 Split

• Klosterman’s Verdict:
  • Football is “probably 53% good, 47% troubling, with maybe a 2% range of error. But I wouldn’t have written the book if I didn’t think football, on balance, was socially positive.” (34:56)

11. Football as Art and Surrogate Religion

• Shared Ritual and Aesthetic Appreciation:
  • Football, like church, is a “container” for meaning, ritual, and even artistic beauty—the choreography, colors, and strategies resemble communal art more than just athletic contest. (36:16, 38:26)
  • Quote: “There is an enrichment to football that we almost try not to talk about… It’s a form of human excellence.” (40:47)

12. Is Football Doomed?

• Peak and Decline:
  • Klosterman predicts football will become even more popular for 15–20 years then collapse quickly, not because of its dangers but because of the economics: the unsustainable escalation of TV contracts and declining efficacy of advertising. (46:28)
  • He draws an analogy to horse racing, once a pillar of American life but now barely niche. (47:54)
• Future Generations Will Misunderstand:
  • Like how we misread gladiatorial combat, future Americans will misunderstand football, judging it with different cultural standards. (51:03)
  • Quote: “If football recedes … it will be described in, I think, hyper-amplified pejorative ways… they’ll look at the thing and see the most obvious aspects and perceive them as failures.” (51:28)

13. Football and American Culture

• Fundamental:
  • Illing concludes: “You can love football, you can hate football, you can be indifferent… you can’t understand American culture… or modern life without understanding how football fits in.” (53:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is like an obituary for someone who is still alive.” — Chuck Klosterman (03:07)
• “Football in the United States is as popular as virtually every other sport combined.” — Klosterman (06:27)
• “Football imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control.” — Klosterman, quoted by Illing (13:22)
• “For the game to have meaning, there has to be risk involved, even though they don’t want to see anyone get seriously hurt.” — Klosterman (15:26)
• “It’s a container for the experience of the thrill of war without the, as you say, inconvenience of death.” — Illing (39:41)
• “There is an enrichment to football that we almost try not to talk about… It’s a form of human excellence.” — Klosterman (40:47)
• “I hope when I die people complain about my funeral because they’re missing a football game.” — Klosterman (50:45)
• “If football recedes… it will be described in, I think, hyperamplified pejorative ways that they’ll look at the thing and see the most obvious aspects of it and perceive them as failures.” — Klosterman (51:28)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:07 – Klosterman: The Book as Critical “Obituary”
• 05:28 – Football as the Last Monoculture
• 06:45 – Football’s Rise: War Simulation & TV’s Perfect Sport
• 13:22 – Controlled Chaos—Football as a Metaphor for American Life
• 15:26 / 17:06 – Danger, Risk, and the Meaning of Football
• 18:27 – Football as a Purely Mediated, Spectator Experience
• 21:11 – TV Show vs. “Real” Sport
• 24:36 – Unpredictable Drama—Liveness as Value
• 31:09 – Complicity and Moral Complexity in Football’s Popularity
• 34:56 – Is Football Good? The 53/47 Split
• 36:16 / 38:26 – Football as Art and Ritual; Religious Analogy
• 46:28 – Is Football Doomed? Economic Fragility and Decline
• 50:45 – Funeral Overlap and Future Misunderstanding
• 53:18 – The Place of Football in Understanding America

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Tone and Language

• Conversational, intellectual, curious; both Illing and Klosterman blend accessible insights with philosophical detours. Humor and personal anecdotes punctuate the discussion, grounding big questions in relatable experience.

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This episode offers a nuanced, provocative look at football as much more than a sport: it’s a window into the American psyche, our rituals, anxieties, and sense of community—an artful, dangerous, and ultimately fragile piece of the culture. Whether you’re a hardcore fan or a critic, the conversation challenges you to reconsider what football means, and what it reveals about us.

Transcript

[Sean Rameswaram]

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[Sean Rameswaram]

Football is the greatest thing human beings have ever invented. All right, I overdid that. What I meant to say is that football is the most popular TV show in the country. Nothing else comes even remotely close. Football, for better or worse, seems to be our last shared ritual. It's the only remaining shred, or certainly one of the only remaining shreds of monoculture left. So what does that say about American culture? What does it say about us as Americans? I'm sean elling, and this is the gray area. My guest today is Chuck Klosterman. In addition to being one of our best and funniest writers, Schuck has also spent decades thinking about how football became America's dominant cultural language and why its popularity feels both earned and weirdly unsettling. He discusses all of this in his book called Football. It's fun and clever, as so much of his stuff is, and better than anything I've ever read. It explains why Americans love football so much and what that says about our culture, our country, and our future.

[Sean Illing]

Shock. Klosterman. Welcome to the show.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It's great to be here.

[Sean Illing]

I'm glad to have you here. A lot of people who listen to the show don't realize how much of a sports nut I am. I very rarely get a chance to, like, weave in that part of my life into this show, which is like, decidedly not really a sports show. This book of yours, it's about football, obviously, but it's not a. It's not a love letter, as you say. But how do you describe it? Like, what are you trying to do with this thing?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, the reason I say it's not a love letter is because I feel like sometimes when people write about an idea that, you know, they're passionate about or it's been A lifelong relationship with or whatever. What they're really trying to do is sort of validate their own love for something and sort of persuade people to view the world in the same kind of romantic way that they view this thing. And this is not what that is like. It doesn't really matter if I'm writing about sports or music or film, whatever the case may be. I kind of do it in the same way, which is all just sort of a form of criticism. And I've been thinking about football sort of unconsciously for 40 years, kind of hyper consciously for 20. And there's going to be this future when football is not going to be as meaningful as it is now. All things, especially things of this size, eventually sort of recede from the culture. And then there's going to be this period where people are going to try to explain retroactively why football was so central to American culture for so long in such a kind of all encompassing way. And I feel like those attempts are usually wrong. I think it's very difficult to look back on a period you didn't experience and then try to tell people, well, this is why it mattered. So this is like an obituary for someone who is still alive. This is like talking about the meaning of football at its absolute apex with the understanding that at some point it will no longer play this kind of significant sort of central role in how America operates and thinks.

[Sean Illing]

So is that why you're writing it, for people who aren't born yet, so that the people of the future can make sense of this crazy thing?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Yes. I mean, you know, it's funny, I put that in the book as sort of like this is a book for people who aren't even born yet. Which is a little bit disingenuous because obviously I'd go broke if that's who I wrote for. If I only wrote books for people of the future. But yeah, I mean, that's also what's kind of interesting about book writing in general, that it's kind of one of the last idioms of art where that really is the idea, or the idea that you're doing something that is intended to exist, you know, beyond yourself.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Did you play football, grow up playing?

[Sean Illing]

I mean, what is your sort of experience with the game beyond just watching it like the rest of us now?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, I did play when I was in high school. I went to a real small school where we played nine man football in North Dakota. It was kind of imbued in the small town culture, however you want to look at it. Now then, you know, I was a sports journalist early on when I was started in newspapers. Then I became more of a culture journalist, and I was just sort of consuming it as a fan. And then as I aged it, it started becoming more important in my life again. And what I mean by more important is it wasn't that I was even watching that much more. I was watching the same amount, but I was thinking about it more. And then I would kind of look at American culture just kind of through the course of what I did for a living. And it would seem as though we've kind of created a society now where really the monoculture is just football and Taylor Swift. Those are really the only things that are like that now. And I'm not being sarcastic. It really is the case.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Football in the United States is as popular as virtually every other sport combined.

[Sean Illing]

Well, why is that, Chuck? Why do we love this thing so much? Why is it so clearly the biggest sport slash TV show in the country by several country miles?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, you know, that's a lot of what the book is about. I mean, but, like, I think in some ways, like, if I had to really boil it down to a paragraph, it was kind of just sort of a really interesting kind of happenstance. Okay? So football is created in the 19th century, and it happens right after the Civil War. And though it's impossible to verify this, there's always been this sort of understanding that after the Civil War, there was some fear among guys that it was like, well, these young men who are coming up, they'll never fight in a war. How will they understand the reality of adversity and all these things? We need to create this kind of simulation. So football, in some ways, is this simulation of war, okay? So it has this fairly kind of deep metaphorical meaning to begin with. Then it evolves for, you know, 70 or 80 years. And then it intersects with the rise of television. And by chance, football is the ideal vessel for television. And television is able to sort of make football into something different, something unintended. And I would argue that particularly over the last half of the 20th century, probably the best way to understand American culture in American society, or at least a good way to, is sort of the way it is kind of reflected and projected and reinterpreted through football now moving forward. I'm not sure that will be the case, but I feel if you're trying to think about life, you know, from 1950 to 2000 or whatever, this is a really good way to understand it. And that, to me, is Part of the reason why it's important. I mean, like, not important necessarily for what it is, but sort of like how it functions.

[Sean Illing]

It's weird. I mean, I. I grew up in the south in Mississippi, and I went to lsu. I went to college at lsu, which is what year as you know, it was. I was there from 2005 to. Well, hell, I got a. I got my doctorate there, too. So I was there for the better part of a decade. So I was there for.

[Sean Rameswaram]

For a very. Title?

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, Yo. No, it was like the golden age.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And for people who have not, like, lived in that. I mean, it is. It's cliche to say, but it is.

[Sean Illing]

Absolutely, like, functionally a religion down there. I mean, one of my earliest memories as a kid was, like, my dad dragging me to Tiger Stadium, you know, when I was, like, 6 or 7 years old. It's like, stamped in my memory forever. And it, like. It was really formative.

[Sean Rameswaram]

I think it was, like, practically.

[Sean Illing]

That was the moment where I was.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Like, you know what? I think I'm gonna go here.

[Sean Illing]

You know, I mean, it's just the hold it has on people who. Who grow up in.

[Sean Rameswaram]

That is. It's weird, man. It's really weird.

[Sean Illing]

But it's. It's powerful.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, and.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And.

[Chuck Klosterman]

But what you're describing is something that's slightly different in the sense that you were sort of raised into this and, like, those feelings were present.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Right.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Your dad didn't have to tell you that. That this was meaningful or this was significant. You could just sense it to the point where it probably seemed normal and probably only now, maybe as an adult, you might look back and it was like a strange sort of how. How, like, seemingly injected into my existence. This was. What I'm very fascinated by is sort of the underpinnings of that. Like, when people love things or when people hate things. I'm always very fascinated by the sort of. The meaning outside of themselves that sort of allows them to sort of move into this kind of emotional state and sort of accept it as just like, you know, normal. Like, there's nothing strange about it.

[Sean Illing]

Do you think there's just something particular about the game of football that just appeals to the American sensibility?

[Chuck Klosterman]

A lot of the things I think, that give football meaning, if described in a vacuum, would make it seem like you're making an argument against the sport? I mean, there's. I note this. You know, this. This kind of famous Wall Street Journal article that came out, I think, 2011, where they kind of researched an NFL game and it lasts three hours and they're like, well, there's only like 11 minutes of action in this game. In this three hour window, there's only 11 minutes of actual like football being played. Now if you're focus grouping football, if it was the new thing you were trying to pitch to someone, that would seem like a massive detriment. And yet in a sense that really is the key, the way it is delivered. Even though it seems antithetical to what we would think, we would think we would want wall to wall action, it is actually sort of that incremental experience that allows us to sort of have thoughts about other things. And the thing we're watching in between the moments of activity. There's also the idea that we think of sports in a way as like, you know, we watch sports not for the coaches, we watch it for the players. And we want the players to have this ability to express themselves. You know, one thing people like about the NBA is you can see the guys faces. You know, one thing they often talk about in Major League Baseball is like, well, you know, it'd be we would have a greater fan base if people had more of a relationship to the individual stars. You know, if they, if they were more personalities or whatever. The idea always seems to be that we must want to see the individual. And yet that's not actually how it works for people. Like one of the values to football is that because they're almost like faceless automatons on the field, you can't see their face, you just see these colors. What you're really into is the thing itself. It is not the individual components, it's sort of the macro idea. And I think that that probably blends with a lot of the ways that people sort of understand culture. I think that we all kind of intuitively understand that something about football is making it different to people. Like the fact that in 2023 or whatever, it's like of the hundred most watched broadcasts on television, 93 of them were NFL games and then three more were college games. That just, it doesn't make sense really. I mean, yes, live events have a different meaning, but why do all the other live events take sort of a backseat?

[Sean Rameswaram]

It's very perplexing that that number is wild.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It is. I mean, that's kind of the question of the book. In some ways it's like trying to explain how it could be so imbalanced.

[Sean Illing]

We had an interesting line in the book. You say that football imitates American society by generating a sensation of chaotic freedom within an environment of near total control. What's going on there? I mean, we think we like chaos.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Or the feeling of chaos, but what.

[Sean Illing]

We really dig is control. I mean, how does football sort of walk that line?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, I think it's kind of both things. What we want is a kind of a predictable chaos, which is an oxymoron. I mean, you know, a play comes in from a football game. So there's this guy, you know, in the press box, the offensive coordinate coordinator is up there. He's looking at the field from a distance. He's watching it on a monitor. He's calling down to the sideline, presenting the play, which is then sent into the quarterback through his headset in a code. He then sort of looks at his wristband, deduce the play, gives the play to the other 10 guys. They go to the line, they run the play. The play lasts 4 seconds or 5 seconds. It's been this, like, you know, 35 seconds of basically creation of this. It's like the hierarchy is massive and very Byzantine. And the play creates a sensation of spontaneity. Right? You know, because there's all.

[Sean Illing]

There's.

[Chuck Klosterman]

There's 22 guys moving around, and there's all this contact. And it seems like, you know, you're. You're sort of kind of thrilled by these little glimmering moments of spontaneous, extemporaneous action. But it's actually more like a. It's very. It's a very kind of an ideologically corporate. And a lot of these things that we don't have to think about when we're watching the game. You don't have to watch a football game and think of this, but it sort of reflects these things that are kind of built into your life already. You know, it's like there's something you might under. A person maybe understands about the construction of football that they can't even necessarily verbalize.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Do you think football would be as.

[Sean Illing]

Entertaining if there wasn't this continual possibility that someone might get hurt? Like, not saying we enjoy it because someone will get hurt, but there's always the chance. And that adds something bizarre and compelling to the mix.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It's a tough thing because I don't see football as a blood sport. Right. There are some sports that people are drawn to purely for the possibility of, you know, of injury. Like, I think that's certainly some combat sports are kind of like that. What people want from football is, I think, something slightly different. They understand that for the game to have meaning, there has to be risk involved, even Though they don't want to see anyone get seriously hurt. It does, though, need the potential for that to happen. And that's a very strange kind of element of cognitive dissonance. It's like. Like a guy climbing Mount Everest, right? It's a meaningful thing he's doing. Could be maybe, you know, the.

[Sean Rameswaram]

The.

[Chuck Klosterman]

His lifelong goal. That guy who's climbing Everest does not want to die climbing that mountain. Like, I think, extraordinarily rare that a guy climbing Mount Everest has a death wish. However, for that to have meaning, he has to understand that this is something that could kill him. We're able, because of modernity, to sort of separate that real physical danger from most of our lives, you know, but football is a simulation where that's still true. So it's not that people are watching football, hoping someone gets hurt. It's just that if there's no possibility of that, it becomes something else. That's why every time there's a rule change about concussions or a blocking rule has changed, people always. They're, like, upset about this, right? Football fans always flag football, man.

[Sean Illing]

It's not even real football anymore.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Because what I think, what they sort of understand, and this is, even though that always sounds like an idiotic argument when it's made in public, it makes the person sound like a caveman or whatever when they're saying that in a weird way, that caveman understands something, which is that if you take football and you make. Make it less potentially dangerous, the value of the thing we actually like, the, you know, that sort of the dramatic action, the execution, the skill, and all that will be minimized. It's a weird sort of balancing act between, like, what we see, what we want, and what we just need to know is possible.

[Sean Rameswaram]

You do a really good job early.

[Sean Illing]

In the book explaining why football is sort of unique in the sense that.

[Sean Rameswaram]

You know, the vast majority of people have never played it, and it can't really be simulated by regular people.

[Sean Illing]

It's not.

[Sean Rameswaram]

You can't go to the country club.

[Sean Illing]

And play tennis or football the way you can tennis or golf or basketball at the rec or whatever football is. It's too complicated. It's too expensive, too many moving parts.

[Sean Rameswaram]

So people who obsess over it have.

[Sean Illing]

No firsthand experience of the thing over which they obsess.

[Sean Rameswaram]

I mean, how do you make sense of that gap, right? Is that, like, strangely part of the magic sauce of football's appeal?

[Chuck Klosterman]

It's another one of these things that, on the surface, makes no sense and should actually suggest the opposite, and yet seemingly is exactly what you say, like, part of the thing that gives it the ability to kind of transcend everything else. I mean, soccer is the most most popular sport in the world, okay? And one of the key explanations as to why it is the easiest game to play in terms of all you need are two sides and a kickable object. Like, in the most impoverished places in the world, they can still play soccer if they can just find something that's vaguely spherical and they have space, okay? Basketball, you can play basketball by yourself. You can play three on three, you can play five on five. And it can feel as official as a high school or a college game if the guys are real serious. Baseball is complicated, has this big, you know, big field. You got to lead a lot of guys, and yet we have recreational softball. So a guy who played baseball can still play softball into his 60s. Football is not like that at all. Football can really only be played in its most official capacity. You need all these guys, you need all this equipment, you need your hearse, or, you know, however you will in practice. There's some much, you know, hours upon hours. If you had 11 guys just show up and we're going to play a tackle football game today, it would take two hours just to fill the equipment on everybody, figure out whose shoulder pads fit, who's going to stand where, who's going to play what. You know, it's an impossible thing. Here again, this should be something that should be to the game's detriment. For the most part, the things we see on television in sports, we are able to do a vague simulation of in our life, but football isn't like that. And as a consequence, it almost kind of levels the playing field. If there are four people in a room watching a football game, their experience with that sport is almost identical. Some of them may have played, you know, I played football, what, about 35 years ago? Or, you know, it's. But even that, that. It's like a. That's like a memory. The stakes meant nothing. You know, everything has evolved since then. We're all kind of the same in this excluded world. But I mean, the exclusionary nature of football, I think probably and somewhat paradoxically does play a role in its. In sort of the magnitude of interest.

[Sean Illing]

I think you actually write at some point that football is a purely mediated experience, even when there's no media involved, which I guess could be interpreted in different ways.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Do you think the sport is really.

[Sean Illing]

At this stage of history, only really intelligible as a TV show?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, is it only intelligible? No, but the meaning of the game now is a mediated experience for anyone outside of a handful of players playing it actively and coaching it actively. For everyone else, it is a kind of a media, whatever, simulacrum. However you want to look at it. When someone. Someone is in the stands of a football game, right, and they're watching the game, say, from, you know, the corner of the end zone, there is occasionally moments where the play happens right in front of them, and they have this unique vantage point that no one else can see. But most of the time, what they are doing when they watch that game is seeing the action on the field from their seat and mentally transposing it with how it looks on television. Sort of the classic midfield shot, you know, from the side, you can't see depth. You can't even see the free safety and the strong safety. Usually. They're usually out of the frame. It's not the ideal way to see anything, but we have been kind of conditioned and socialized to understand the sport through that. And this is tough, right? Because now. So I'm making this argument, and there's someone listening to this podcast right now that's saying, that's not what is for me. You can't get inside my mind. You don't know what I'm saying. That's true, that's true. Like, you know, there are probably people out there who are hearing this, and they're like, that's not how it is for me. But that's how it is for most people, including a lot of the people who are disagreeing. Like, there's certain elements of the way our mind deals with visual media. I think that is far beyond our conscious control. And I think that most of our experience in life is more unconscious than conscious.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Why do you think people still go to the games if you can't really see shit while you're there?

[Sean Illing]

I mean, I've been to games and I watch it on tv.

[Sean Rameswaram]

If you actually want to watch the.

[Sean Illing]

Game, consume the game, it's not even close. It's much better on television. And yet people still go, what are they getting out of that?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, I mean, there are many ancillary reasons for going to football live. You talked about going to LSU games with your dad when you were a kid, right? Sort of the pageantry of that, the emotion of that, the sense that you're in a community, all of these things. You know, the. The idea that you're doing something adult, that people can behave differently, live that you are showing support for something that you are automatically for three hours for friends with thousands of people, that because you, you're all there for the same purpose and that purpose is shared, even though you might have no relation to them, relationship to them outside of this game, you have it while it's there. These are all reasons why people like going to events. People just like going places, right? They like being out in public. But that's different than saying, I, I'm going to this game because I really want to see what happens. If you really wanted to see what was happening, you would watch it on television. There is no one in a football stadium, including the quarterback and the coach, who is seeing the game as clearly as the person on television.

[Sean Illing]

If football is like, so essentially this mediated experience, what are we actually watching when we watch it? Are we watching a sport on TV or a TV show about a sport or a sport that used to be.

[Sean Rameswaram]

A sport and then became a TV product or.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, I mean, it's a mediated experience for the consumer. It's a real experience for the people involved. Like, I mean that's, that is the thing that like, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, the idea of violence, the premise of violence, right? And how nobody want, like there's, there's a non zero chance that someone who watches a lot of football will eventually see someone die on the field. Okay. I expect that to happen in my lifetime. Like it seemed like it happened on a Monday night game between the Bills and the Bengals a few years ago and then the guy lived. But it seemed like it was going to happen, right? Nobody wants to see that, Right. There's no part of me that wants that to happen. But if it never happened or it couldn't happen, then what I'd be watching was a play. Sports are an incredibly rare example of entertainment where nobody knows what's going to happen. I mean that, you know, like you're watching the Academy Awards, right? We don't know who's going to get best picture, but someone does. The guy who wrote the card, the guy's going to open up the envelope, knows, you know, like every, you know, but like when the last game of the year when like the Steelers playing the Ravens and there's all these missed field goals, that is truly a spontaneous thing. It is a completely unwritten script. And the overlooked miracle of sports is that anything can truly happen and no one knows. And it just, it is. I just think the experience of liveness is underrated that we don't think about how meaningful and how rare that actually is.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Support for today's show comes from hungryroot. Sometimes we just don't have the time or brain space for proper grocery shopping. Sure you know what's better for you, but when you're in the grocery aisle, it's usually grab whatever looks the easiest. Thankfully, Hungryroot wants to change that. Hungryroot basically works like a personal nutrition coach and shopper in one by planning, recommending and shopping everything for you. They take care of the weekly grocery shopping, recommending healthy groceries tailored to your taste, nutrition preferences and health goals. I've actually had a chance to try Hungry Root and it's been great. I've tried a couple of these food delivery services before.

[Sean Illing]

I don't want to name names, but they weren't great.

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They sent us a huge box full of entrees. There was meat and seafood snacks, stuff for the kids, stuff for me, stuff for my wife. There wasn't a single thing in there.

[Sean Illing]

I didn't like, so I'm going to order another one.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time get 40% off your first box plus get a free item and in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com gray area and use code gray area. That's hungryroot.com gray area code gray area to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Support for the show comes from Bombas. It's the new year so you probably have a long list of resolutions to make your life happier and more you of proud, productive. Everyone has their own system. Here's mine. I take last year's resolutions and change. I resolve to. I resolve not to. This year I've resolved not to drink less wine, not to do more exercise, not to be a more patient, attentive and gracious husband and father and not to make smoother segs and ads for Bombas. If you're trying to hit the gym or get more active. The all new Bombas sport socks are engineered with sport specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding and all sport for those every day around the house resolutions. Bombas also has you covered with the super luxurious Sherpa Sunday slippers and new squishy Saturday suede slip ons for comfort on the go. You may know I've tried out Bombas myself. I've been rocking the sports socks for over a year year now. They are my favorite. I work out in them, I run in them, I use them basically every day. You can head over to bombus.com gray area and use code gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's vom bas.com gray area code gray area at checkout. Support for the gray area comes from hems. ED is more common than you think, but it can also be simpler to treat than you think, too. Through hims, you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly and on your terms. HIMSs can offer access to personalized prescription treatment options for ED if prescribed. And if prescribed, they say their options range from personalized products to trusted generics that cost 95% less than brand names. HIMSS say they bring expert care straight to you with 100% on online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first. You can think of HIMS as your digital front door you can step through to get back to your old self. It's not a one size fits all approach. They say they put your health and.

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[Sean Illing]

Football really poses this question. Should strangers be allowed to do very dangerous, very popular things? Yes, and I think your answer is sort of uneasily. Yeah, and I think mine is too. But also, man, it's a little, it's a little uneasy.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It is the popularity of the thing that makes this question so complex. Earlier I mentioned people climbing Everest. Nobody seems to be arguing that we shouldn't allow people to climb Mount Everest unless they're doing it from an environmental perspective. But very rarely do you hear someone saying, we shouldn't let people try to climb these, you know, K2 or whatever because it's too dangerous for them. You rarely hear people saying that we shouldn't allow, say, bull riding unless they're from a position that, like, it's unfair to the animal, like a PETA position. It's never that the guy's taking too much risk riding this bull. Skateboarding, there's tons, tons and tons of concussions every year, most of which are completely unreported. What's different about all of these things, though, is that we see these people doing those dangerous activities as having complete agency on their own, that these are things they're doing. It's their choice. It's separate from us. But because football is so popular, there is this idea that perhaps we are Also complicit in this, that this dangerous thing is happening, not because it's the decision of the guys on the field, but of a society that has made this so valuable that these guys can't say no. Is the relationship so out of balance that it's impossible to expect any 20 year old person to play the game if they can? Is the reward from this so massive that it's almost unrealistic to say, like, well, they have a real choice in this manner without sort of being just like, you know, they can't create a life on their own that would be better than the life football would perhaps provide them. There's also the weirdness of these people who have, you know, the early signs of dementia. It seems to come from playing football, and yet for the most part, not across the board, but generally they will say, I would do it again. It was worth it. It's who I am, it's my identity. This is why I feel like I can write a book called Football in a way I couldn't about a lot of other sports. It's just football demands interesting kind of moral questions that are both completely tied to the game and also completely outside of it. They're questions that we are able to, in fact often ignore until we see it in a football context. As the world changes, a lot of the ideas built into the game of football are increasingly seen as toxic extensions of society. That a lot of the things that are built into the game of football are not really acceptable in life now. Like, it is completely unacceptable to have your boss scream at you from three feet away every day. That would be seen as very abusive. If your boss, for your, for this podcast, whoever your editor is, if they would consistently scream in your face, people would be like, that guy should be fired. And football still happens, you know, in football, that's still part of it, less than it used to, but it's still there. Like, there's so many things that we've been able to change about the world to make it sort of a safer place where the hard rules of reality don't apply. And then when you see a thing like football on television, even though you're having a mediate experience, you know that the guys on the field are having that bygone experience where a lot of the things that we're able to remove from our life are still central to their three hours on the field.

[Sean Illing]

I think we've reached the stage of our journey here where I can just straight up ask you whether football is ultimately a good or bad Thing, and you hedge your bets a little bit in the book with the whole 53, 47 thing. So how is that hedging?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I said that on. I think. I think that if I mathematically work it out, it's probably 53% good, 47% troubling, with maybe a 2% know, range of error. But even so, I wouldn't have written this book if I didn't think football, on balance, was socially positive.

[Sean Illing]

Having grown up in the South, I. I spent a lot of time, you know, in small towns, and I. I.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Have seen how high school football in.

[Sean Illing]

Particular functions as this, like, social glue. It brings people together, it creates this shared ritual. And I'm not saying football is the.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Only thing that could do this. I'm just saying it is basically the only thing that actually does it.

[Sean Illing]

Right now in college football, as I was saying earlier, is sort of on a whole other level. And there's.

[Sean Rameswaram]

To your point about monoculture, right. Like, there's nothing else left. Right. Like, I think it's good to have.

[Sean Illing]

Some kind of shared ritual in that way.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And if it's not football, what the hell else could it even be?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Okay, so this is maybe an odd question, but you. So you were raised in the south, right? Yeah. Did you have a. Were you religious growing up?

[Sean Illing]

Not particularly. I mean, I grew up. I was raised Catholic, but it never.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Okay, me too.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Right?

[Chuck Klosterman]

This is perfect. Okay, so I was raised Catholic. Right. You go to a Catholic mass, you're watching this experience.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Right.

[Chuck Klosterman]

In some ways, it is art, is it not? Yes, it is. You know, they're doing these things that are spiritual and trying to connect you with God and sort of giving you the rules for living. But there is, you know, as you're watching, you know, you know, the priest and like, the Eucharist and all of these things, you're watching and hearing the music and all of these things. It is also, like, an artful construct. And I think a lot of the things that we want to get from religion, for example, actually come from this. This is why, you know, it's hard for some people to sort of relate to the person who goes, like, well, I have no, I'm spiritual, but I don't go to church or whatever. It's like, for a lot of people, the going to the church is the thing that routine, the structure of it sort of the way it sort of unspools, that really is the path to the sort of the. Of whatever the feeling you're trying to get. Football is that same way is football Art. Okay, now, if I'm. I suppose it isn't right, because art has all these, you know, semantic qualities. It's got to have, like, you know, intentionality, and it's sort of like the purpose. But football operates as art, and for a lot of people, it's kind of the only art they experience. I mean, there are people who. They do not invest much time into a lot of the other kind of traditional forms of art, but during the weekend, they watch these things on television, which has a real kind of artful expression. I mean, the schematic way plays run, the colors of the uniforms and the way that they sort of mesh, and the experience, the visual experience you get. I mean, like, I think I. Like, I mentioned, like, to me, when LSU is playing Ole Miss, at Ole Miss, that color combination on the field is beautiful to me. Like, I like looking at it. Like, I like looking at North Carolina's uniforms, just looking at them. Like, they just, you know, like they're all these things. If you say fashion is art, well, then there's no. In a football, that is fashion. That is art. Intellectual debate or whatever, that's like, in a weird way, happening between football coaches.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Like, it's. It's a kind of debate where they're not talking, they're moving chits around, and those chips are human beings. But, yes, so there is an enrichment to football that we almost try not to talk about. Right. Like, there's somebody. I guarantee you that there's someone who might be listening to this podcast right now who loves football, and they're thinking to themselves, just the way this guy is talking makes me not like it, because that's not how football is. Like, that's. Now, those are all the things. All these things he's talking about have no relationship to the thing I like. But the fact of the matter is, is everything is semiotics. Everything in life that we think about, our understanding of reality is semiotic. It's like, it's the way things are presented to us and how we sort of understand them. And I think football does that in a way that needs to be considered more, and that when people talk about football, they should be talking about that with a little more sort of emphasis, as opposed to only seeing it as an economic thing or a violence thing or a toxic thing that separates a certain kind of person from the rest of society.

[Sean Illing]

I did like the analogy with religion in that way.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Right.

[Sean Illing]

I mean, I, like, I went through my face like everyone else, where, you know, I, like, you know, became that, like, Militant atheist guy. But then I sort of grew out of that and came to sort of appreciate church and religion. And the way you were talking about is a sort of, like. It's a container where you can go and it directs your attention in certain ways. And it's this container for like, practicing certain, like, you know, spiritual traditions or whatever and communal and all that kind of stuff. And football is also a container for all this shit, too, right? It's a container for the experience of, like, the thrill of war without the, as you say, inconvenience of death. You know, you get to experience that vicariously. It's a container for physical beauty, physical poetry.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And you watch Mahomes on some crazy.

[Sean Illing]

Scramble or, you know, Bijan Robinson catch a little flare pass out of the backfield and, you know, like, juke eight dudes on his way to the end zone. I mean, it's beautiful. It's actually beautiful. And, yeah, that's art. I mean, it's not a portrait on a canvas, but it's art.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It's a form of human excellence, okay? And it's a form of human excellence that is not divorced from ideas and thought. It's not like watching track, where it's just the fastest person is going to win. It's applied track. It's the idea of speed, strength and power sort of put together in a way that's almost mechanical. And yet when we watch it, all of these things you're allowed not to think about while you're having that experience. That's another. I mean, that in another way is like, what I'm hoping this book does is I'm hoping this book says, like, okay, so you don't have to think about any of the things I'm talking about while you're actually watching the NFC championship. None of these have to be in the front of your mind. But the reason you're having this experience is for all these things underneath that, you know, are fun to think about but not required to enjoy the thing. It would be like. Like, you don't. You don't need to read a cookbook in order to enjoy pancakes, but there are reasons that you might love pancakes that are built into that cookbook, if you know what I mean.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Support for the gray area comes from Deleteme. If you're looking for a New Year's resolution, you might want to consider making sure your online data is protected. Deleteme can make it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough. To make everyone vulnerable. All you need to do is register and tell Deleteme what personal information you'd like removed, and their expert team takes it from there. Our colleague Claire White has used Deleteme.

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And here's what she thinks I find.

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[Sean Rameswaram]

See why Wirecutter named Deleteme their top pick for data removal services. You can take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount account for Our listener get 20% off your delete Me plan when you go to join deleteme.com Vox and use promo code vox at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com Vox and enter code Vox at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com Vox code Vox. Support for this show comes from Shopify with the new year comes fresh motivation to finally tackle all those projects you've had kicking around your head. Maybe it's time to finally clean the garage out or clean out the stove. And if you're looking to start something that doesn't have to do with cleaning, maybe you should start that business you've always dreamed of. Shopify says they can give you everything you need to sell online and in person so you can finally become the entrepreneur you were always meant to be. Shopify lets you choose from hundreds of beautifully designed templates that you can customize to match your brand and get set up fast with Shopify's built in AI tools that write product descriptions, headlines and can even help you edit product photos. If marketing isn't your thing, Shopify has marketing tools built directly into the platform so you can create email and social campaigns that reach customers wherever they're scrolling. And as your business grows, Shopify grows with you, letting you manage more orders and do it all from one easy to use place. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling. With Shopify, you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com Vox go to shopify.com Vox that's shopify.com Vox hear your first this new year with Shopify by your side. Support for the gray area comes from wix. When you're in a creative flow, it feels great. You're spitballing a growing list of ideas and thinking big picture next steps. But then reality hits. Okay, how do I actually make this happen? It can happen in any creative endeavor, even one like building a website. But you don't need to get stuck there. The right tool like wix can help you get unstuck. Wix can help you make a great looking website and you can do it your way. Wix is packed with actually useful AI features and agents built specifically for SMB so you can grow your business without burning out. You can get a custom ready to use website in minutes with wix's AI website builder or choose from designer made templates. They offer lots of built in solutions tailored to your business from e comm to services. And you can rest easy knowing that your Wix site is backed by 99.99% uptime in enterprise grade security. Their data shows 280 million businesses around the world rely on Wix for their websites. Ready to create your website? Go to wix.com that's wix.com.

[Sean Illing]

You sort of alluded to it earlier and you say it kind of casually in the book pretty early on that.

[Sean Rameswaram]

You think football is doomed.

[Sean Illing]

How confident are you in that? Do you really think it's doomed? What's the timeline for extinction?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, what I think is that football is going to continue to become more popular for the next 15 or 20 years. So I think there's going to be this period where football actually grows more popular even then, more than it even is now. But I think what is going to happen is that when something is as large, particularly as the NFL is and as the NBA and Major League Baseball is, it becomes more fragile as it gets larger and larger. The NFL can't have a year that's similar to the year it was before. It has to generate more revenue, it has to expand. We have to move games to Spain and England. We got to do all of these things. Play in Mexico City, add franchise, do all these things. Salary cap has to go up, all these things have to increase. I think there's going to be a point when we reach this nexus where there's a realization about advertising. Right now the reason sport like the NFL is still valuable, it's because they know that people are going to sit through these games and watch the commercials as well. Because it's a live thing, right? It is really the only option that they have to really reach this Mass number of people. It's the best option.

[Sean Illing]

At least. At least.

[Chuck Klosterman]

But I suspect there's going to be a realization that the cost of advertising does not reflect its value. In other words, we're already kind of guessing about advertising. We have no real evidence that advertising even works outside of being able to introduce products to people for the first time. Like, if you've never heard of Snickers and you see a Snickers commercial, that's meaningful, the next 3,000 Snickers commercials you see aren't going to kind of make you hungry for them. It doesn't seem to work that way. Right. It's really just a way to introduce ideas. And the cost of advertising keeps going up. The cost of a Super bowl commercial is insane or whatever, you know. And what's going to happen is there's going to be a point, I think, when these networks and these streaming platforms and all these places are suddenly going to be like, boy, I don't think that we can pay the same amount that we currently do for the NFL. But the NFL's cost keeps going up. Advertisers seem to be losing interest in this experience. What are we going to do? And there's going to be this massive work stoppage, like a real serious work stoppage, much more than the strikes of the 1980s. And the response will not be the way it would be now. People will care much less. It will be seen as just a form of. Of kind of entertaining distraction, and that can be replaced. I can't explain this easily in 30 seconds. I mean, it's like a kind of a large chunk of this book. But like I. The analogy I use sort of is with horse racing, which, you know, a hundred years ago, the three biggest sports in America were boxing, baseball, and horse racing. Now what has happened with boxing and baseball, Kind of specific. And it kind of. It's hard. A lot of factors are going on there. But horse racing is the huge sport in 1920 and now it's just kind of something for degenerate gamblers and, you know, a few millionaires who own horses. And what happened with that is that for a very long time, every American was a horse person by default. Like, even if they didn't own a horse, they knew someone who did or they had a blue collar job and, you know, and horses did the labor or, you know, they, they grew up in a rural area, you know, where there's horses everywhere, even in Chicago. So people saw horse racing as something that was like kind of the, like the apex of something that they inherently understood, like, you know, they understood the culture of horses. And as that disappeared, horse racing kind of disappeared too. At least it's probably now not one of the 10 most popular sports in the country. I think a similar thing is going to happen with football, which is that is the.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Football is such a better TV show though, Chuck. Right? It is such a better TV show.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, although, yeah, you know, it's, it's, I, I, I hope I'm wrong about this. I mean, my hope is that when I die, you know, people complain about my funeral because they're missing a football game. I hope that happens. You know, like, I hope it's still left that central of the world. But I mean, for a whole bunch of reasons, I don't think it will.

[Sean Illing]

I mean, you talk about this in the book, about how they're writing it for these, like it's imaginary person in the future that, that future generations are very likely to misunderstand football the way we misunderstand, you know, the Roman gladiators. Do you think that's the way it'll be? That, that will, that will moralize the sport the way we moralize, you know, the gladiators, like, look at these barbarians without understanding the, the actual culture around.

[Chuck Klosterman]

It, you know, even like using gladiators as the example. I just, While I am uncertain exactly what the culture around Roman gladiators was, I know, I know it was not what we sort of imagined today. Even in one's own lifetime, you can remember things from the past that are described by people who didn't live through them. And their description immediately sounds hollow because you're like, yeah, I know technically, yeah, I know technically, that's what it seemed like when MTV was new. It didn't really feel the way you're describing, describing this amplified way of how, oh, Reagan was in office and suddenly we, our attention spans were changing. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was like something happened. And for the people who were there, it felt one way. And all these retrospective stories are different. I am certain that if football recedes into like this niche thing or whatever, just becomes something that's like, like it'll be like, I don't think it'll ever be gone completely. I mean, in the same way, it's like, you know, you can find jazz on an NPR station, but like, jazz is no longer a Central American, you know, obsession. It's like something from the past. When that happens to football, it will be described in, I think, sort of kind of hyper amplified pejorative. Ways that they'll look at the thing and they'll see the most obvious aspects of it and perceive them as failures. Because if the sport failed, it must have been from kind of the weak underpinnings of its foundation. And I don't like the idea of that. I hate the idea of knowing that things that mean one thing now are going to mean something totally different later, just because those people will be different. I mean, it's like everyone uses the present to understand the past, and that's just a terrible mistake.

[Sean Illing]

Well, I'll say this. I think your book definitely makes the case that you can love football, you can hate football, you can be indifferent to football fundamentally. I don't think you can understand American culture, and I don't think you can understand really, the history of television and, like, just modern life without understanding how football fits into that, because it says something very deep and very important about, like, who we are and what we like and what appeals to us and what doesn't. And that alone makes it like. Like actually, like a fitting subject to sort of think deeply about in the way you do in the book.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Thank you. Thank you, and thanks for having me on.

[Sean Illing]

I appreciate talking about it once again. The book is called Football. It's great. Check it out. Chuck Klosterman, thanks for coming in. Thanks.

[Sean Rameswaram]

All right. Right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I had an absolute blast. Chuck is the best. And this felt like a organic opportunity for me to talk about sports and football on the show, which is not.

[Sean Illing]

Something I've done before because it's really not that kind of show.

[Sean Rameswaram]

But this felt right. And to be honest, I don't really know how it's going to change the way I think about football and the way I watch football moving forward, but I am positive that it will. To be sure, if nothing else, this book really shows that there's a whole.

[Sean Illing]

Lot more to football than football.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Anyway, I'd love to know what you think and what you thought of the conversation. You can drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please, if you have a chance, also rate review. Subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show.

[Sean Illing]

This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of vox. So support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.