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.