Chuck Klosterman: Why Football's Dominance Will Be Its Undoing

Football currently represents the most dominant force in American culture and entertainment. The notion is so ingrained that it almost seems unworthy of mention. Yet pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman has devoted an entire book to examining its meaning and importance.

In his new work, Klosterman presents a counterintuitive argument: football's overwhelming dominance will ultimately become its undoing. The sport's current success contains the seeds of its eventual decline, driven by financial pressures that demand constant expansion.

If someone said to you, "Explain the last half of the 20th century through some idea, some metaphor," football is the thing to pick.

The legalization of sports betting represents one of the most significant recent changes in football culture. Klosterman notes that gambling is now omnipresent, particularly through mobile devices where financial transactions feel abstract and disconnected from real money.

While acknowledging that legalized gambling likely harms society, Klosterman observes a complex relationship with football. The betting industry's pitch—that it improves games by adding stakes and making them more interesting—resonates with many fans. However, this creates a troubling dependency.

I think it does bother them that suddenly the game seems meaningless if they're not gambling on it.

The financial stakes have transformed how people engage with the sport. When Indiana entered Monday's college football championship as an eight-and-a-half point favorite, the spread itself carried meaning beyond simple prediction—it reflected the gambling market's expectation of a blowout. This adds layers of analysis that fascinate observers like Klosterman, who finds the mathematical precision of betting markets more intriguing than traditional sports commentary.

Klosterman identifies a critical flaw in football's current trajectory: it is too big to stop expanding. The financial demands of the sport require constant growth, with revenue targets that must continually increase. The NFL operates from a position of perpetual expansion, seeking new markets and opportunities to swallow up other sports.

This growth imperative creates a brittle system. If football disappeared tomorrow, fans would face an identity crisis: "What am I gonna bet on? What is my life gonna be like? Who am I? What's my identity if I'm not a fan of this team?" The depth of cultural investment runs so deep that the sport's absence would create a vacuum.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed football's essential status. While schools closed and classes moved online, college football continued. The games had to be played, demonstrating how the sport operates as a non-negotiable cultural institution.

It's really brittle, right? It's a system that has to keep going.

The eventual collapse may begin with advertising economics. Klosterman predicts that at some point, the cost of buying an ad during a football game will no longer justify the investment. When networks like Fox or Amazon Prime renegotiate their NFL contracts, the numbers might not increase for the first time—or could even decrease.

This scenario would trigger a cascade of problems. Players would refuse pay cuts, potentially leading to strikes or lockouts. The NFL would find itself in an unprecedented position, forced to take its best offer while managing player demands.

Unlike previous labor disputes, future conflicts would occur with a diminished personal relationship between fans and the sport. The emotional investment that once made football indispensable would erode, leaving it as merely an entertaining distraction that could be replaced.

When it collapses, something that size collapses hard. It kind of implodes on itself.

Klosterman draws a revealing parallel to horse racing, which in the 1920s stood alongside boxing and baseball as America's biggest sports. The average person had a direct relationship with horses through labor or family farms, making the sport culturally relevant.

Today, horse racing serves only horse owners and gamblers. Its cultural significance has evaporated because the average person no longer encounters horses in daily life. Klosterman fears football could follow a similar trajectory.

The sport's tentacles reach too far into American life, creating a system that becomes unsustainable. When society shifts, large institutions lack the nimbleness to adapt. The financial model of professional and college football appears increasingly precarious as money operates in exponential ways that mirror broader capitalist problems.

Football's current dominance represents a simulation of society's larger economic structures. The same forces that create instability in capitalism manifest through sports leagues, where the biggest entities face the greatest risk when change arrives.

Klosterman's analysis suggests that football's cultural supremacy contains the mechanisms of its own decline. The sport's financial demands require constant growth, while its size makes it vulnerable to collapse when market conditions change.

The legalization of sports betting has added new layers of engagement but also created dependencies that could prove fragile. As advertising economics shift and fan relationships evolve, football may find itself unable to maintain its current scale.

The comparison to horse racing serves as a cautionary tale: cultural dominance is not permanent. Sports that once defined American identity can fade when their practical relevance diminishes. Football's future depends on whether it can adapt to changing economic and cultural conditions without losing the essence that made it essential.

For now, football remains the most powerful force in American entertainment. But Klosterman's argument reminds us that the biggest things often have the farthest to fall.