Editorial Content for Football
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Reviewer (text)
Author and life observer Chuck Klosterman is a Renaissance Man. No other term might be appropriate for the author of nine nonfiction books --- including THE NINETIES and SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS; two novels; and the short story collection RAISED IN CAPTIVITY. In addition, Klosterman has written extensively for notable newspapers and magazines and served for three years as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine. Beyond his writing career, he and Bill Simmons were original founders of the website Grantland.
Klosterman is also an avid sports fan. By his own calculations, he has been daydreaming and wanting to write a book about football for 40 years. While FOOTBALL is that book, it is more than a “Why I Love Football”-style presentation. Please do not be fooled; there is a great deal of material here for football fans. For someone like me, growing up in the era when football imprinted its culture upon my life, there are countless references to and recollections of sports history.
"As I complete this review, it is only the beginning of the third week of 2026. I will not be compiling a list of this year’s best books for another 11 months. But I can say with great confidence that FOOTBALL will be on there at the end of the year."
In the concluding portion of the book’s introduction, Klosterman observes, “I’m not claiming football is good for everyone because it was good for me, nor is this some attempt at justifying my truth.” FOOTBALL is a tribute to the game, published before it becomes further unrecognizable to its millions of fans and presented by a writer who hopes to explain why the sport matters so much to so many people.
Football as an athletic event is exclusionary. The game itself is so complicated and rigidly structured that it cannot be replicated recreationally. Tackle football is played by a million people in high school, 80,000 in college and 2,700 at the professional level. While there has been some international expansion, the total amount of organized participation in the US is .002 percent of the population.
Still, football has become ingrained in America’s culture. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched television shows in the US were NFL games, and three of the remaining seven were college games. Annually the numbers fluctuate, but the reality of American media is that football is on the air basically every day. As Klosterman observes, it is the one sport that is better on TV than in person. Television broadcasting has become its own industry. Games that were once aired using two or three cameras now boast nearly a hundred cameras, along with drones and countless other pieces of technology.
Klosterman’s ode to the game he loves includes plenty of musings. Along the way, he covers his own memories of a personal football career of insignificance, some recollections of the greatest games in history, and a long chapter discussing football’s GOATs and why such an exercise is difficult and probably unanswerable. There are many sections that are intellectually stimulating, covering Texas football, video games devoted to football, and football coaching. As the parent of a football coach, Klosterman’s observations are thoughtful and perceptive, and they hit close to home.
The book ends with a remarkable explanation of how football got its name. Here Klosterman incorporates the acknowledgement that, for the rest of the world, football is what Americans refer to as soccer.
As I complete this review, it is only the beginning of the third week of 2026. I will not be compiling a list of this year’s best books for another 11 months. But I can say with great confidence that FOOTBALL will be on there at the end of the year.
Teaser
Chuck Klosterman did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of football. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past. Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects --- phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is ingrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it.
Promo
Chuck Klosterman did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of football. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past. Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects --- phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is ingrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it.
About the Book
A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers --- those who know it’s football and those who are about to find out.
Chuck Klosterman --- New York Times bestselling critic, journalist and, yes, football psychotic --- did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of the game. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). FOOTBALL does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past, and never in a way any normal person would expect.
Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects --- phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is ingrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention.
Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it. He takes us to a metaphorical projection of Texas, where the religion of six-man football merges with America’s Team [sic] and makes an inexplicable impact on a boy in North Dakota. He dissects the question of natural greatness, the paradox of gambling and war, and the timeless caricature of the uncompromising head coach. He interrogates the perfection of football’s marriage with television and the morality of acceptable risk. He even conjures an extinction-level event. If Žižek liked the SEC more than he liked cinema, if Stephen Jay Gould cared about linebackers more than he cared about dinosaurs, if Steve Martin played quarterback instead of the banjo...it would still be nothing like this.
A century ago, Yale’s legendary coach Walter Camp wrote his unified theory of the game. He called it FOOTBALL. Chuck Klosterman has given us a new Camp for the new age, rooted in a personal history he cannot escape.
Audiobook available, read by Chuck Klosterman
