Chuck Klosterman. Football. Penguin Press, 2026.
Chuck Klosterman achieved cult star status in the early aughts by virtue of his pop-philosophical polemics on mainstream American culture. His subjects ranged from glam metal to John Cusack to Phil Jackson’s triangle offense, and his accessible eclecticism catapulted him into “the select and successful canon of reading for people who do not read,” according to Mark Greif. Klosterman started as a rock critic at Spin, later contributing to ESPN’s bloggy, irreverent offshoots Page 2 and Grantland (RIP). He became official Dorm-Room Philosopher Laureate in 2003, upon the release of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, which, at least from this ’90s-baby’s perch, seemed geared towards a certain strain of pop-culture–conversant slacker coming of age on equal parts Primus, Clerks, and early-internet porn. “Do you think a girl has ever read one of your things?” Adam Friedland asked Klosterman in a recent interview. “It’s a little bit like being in Rush,” Klosterman replied. (The answer felt personally indicting: I spent the better part of eighth-grade spring break learning the bassline to Rush’s “Limelight.”)
Later in the same interview, Klosterman clarified the scope of his demographic reach—a third of the attendees at his Cocoa Puffs book tour were, per the author, women. (“That was very surprising,” he told Friedland.) I myself discovered Cocoa Puffs over a decade later, sometime around the summer of 2015, during the twilight of my teenage years. I was an avid consumer of all things sporting and pop cultural, especially Grantland (RIP), and I was slightly perplexed but mostly enthralled by Klosterman’s already dated fixations: Real World, Pamela Anderson, Guns N’ Roses, Saved by the Bell. I recently revisited the book, hoping it would shed light on the larger Klosterman project. There’s plenty of now-hackneyed sociocultural diagnoses that probably (maybe?) felt subversive in the early days of the blogosphere, and some of his analysis reads as, let’s say, inessential: “Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I’ve ever heard.” But Klosterman was also often prescient about the rewiring of a hyper-mediatized and under-socialized society: “[Two friends] discussed their plan to ‘confront’ a third roommate about her ‘abrasive’ behavior. How did that become a normal way to talk? Who makes plans to ‘confront’ a roommate?” He deemed this the product of “Real World culture,” and, despite the antiquated moniker, his analysis strikes me as eerily prophetic of therapy speak’s present ubiquity on social media.
Cocoa Puffs is an exercise in breezy semiotics and gratuitous autobiographical flourishes. It is also, like its namesake, packed with tasty tidbits, though you don’t have to read past the preface to find young Klosterman’s raison d’être: “The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It’s certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein.” Twenty-three years later, these words remain instructive, even as Klosterman has progressed beyond the militant pseudo-populism of his youth. While the specter of the Cocoa Puffs Klosterman lingers, profane, confrontational polemics about matters of personal taste have gradually given way to something more sensitive and curious about the pop-cultural imaginary.
In 2026, Klosterman is hardly appreciated for his evolution as a writer. He might now be best known for his frequent appearances on the Bill Simmons Podcast, where he and his erstwhile boss at Grantland (RIP) wax poetic on Luka Dončić, AI, Fyre Fest, system quarterbacks, UFOs, Marriage Story, et cetera. With Simmons, Klosterman comes off as a kind of Stephen A. Smith–David Foster Wallace hybrid: He remains his usual probing, ruminative self, but the medium is, as ever, the message, and he often one-ups Simmons and spearheads the podcast’s devolution into bombastic take-artistry. Their conversations are chummy and exasperating (which isn’t to say unentertaining), though they are, first and foremost, unrelentingly Gen X. Klosterman, like Simmons, started legally drinking in the early ’90s, which means that anything and everything relates back to Reality Bites, and that Klosterman sees the world through a stonerish, self-consciously postmodern lens: “For all of the twentieth century,” he writes in his 2022 essay collection The Nineties, “the volume of manufactured consumer art had exponentially increased. The volume was now vast enough to replace the natural world in totality.”
Klosterman’s pop-cultural fixations have often dovetailed with sports, football especially. He’s devoted essays in previous collections to the gridiron, but his most recent book—titled, simply, Football—is the first to deal exclusively and unabashedly with America’s most exalted spectacle: “This will not be one of those books that’s about something other than the subject it purports to be about,” he informs us early on, taking what I can’t help but think is a jab at Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer, a book my dad was disappointed to find out was not really about Roger Federer. There is, however, still some gimmickry at hand, because Klosterman’s Football is not for us, the currently living; it’s actually written, the preface informs us, for future readers; Klosterman is convinced football’s stranglehold on American culture, even its outright existence, is doomed to dissipate by the middle of the century, and he worries those “who do not yet exist are going to misunderstand” its legacy. “This is an expository obituary,” writes Klosterman, “published before the subject [football] has died, delivered by someone who wants to explain why the victim mattered so much to so many, despite so much evidence to the contrary.” Klosterman is in effect ensuring his elegy is first in line.
I was skeptical of what I thought Klosterman’s grandiloquence announced about the book to come. Conversations on the end of football invariably find their way to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head trauma found in an outlandishly high percentage of former football players across all levels of the game. First discovered in 2002 by Doctor Bennet Omalu, a 2007 New York Times report set off a decade-long deluge of CTE discourse. There were enraged parents, muckraking exposes, and a Will Smith box office flop. In 2015, a landmark settlement awarded more than $1 billion to ex–NFL players suffering from brain injuries, and the league finally officially acknowledged the link between football and CTE in 2016. Unfortunately, the eye-popping dollar amount of the NFL’s settlement belies the league’s extensive legal efforts to deny payout claims. The broader public’s appetite for CTE coverage mirrored the NFL’s evasive tactics, as, despite increasing evidence about the disease’s dangers, the spirit of the discourse progressed from public health crisis to parental concern to nuisance propagated by the same pesky wokescolds who want to rob you of your guns, your beef, and your heterosexuality. By the 2020s, the debate had broken down along predictable political lines: In 2023, 75 percent of self-identified conservatives recommended youth or high school football, compared to 44 percent of liberals. That thirty-one-point gap was just seven points as recently as 2012.
All this in mind, I found Klosterman’s choice to center his book on football’s supposedly inevitable demise amid its still-growing popularity in large swaths of the country somewhat dubious. Would his argument be anything more than an iconoclastic repackaging of what has become the near-standard liberal position on football, that the game’s intrinsic violence will inevitably bring about its abolition? And if we treat football’s extinction as a foregone conclusion, I wondered, are we just creating a (very classist and racialized) permissive structure for its violence and exploitation to continue while we wait for it to disappear?
I think the answer to the above question is a resounding “yes,” but my initial objection also misread what Football is. Because while Klosterman thinks football will end, he doesn’t necessarily think it should: “I’d place the social upside of football at 53 percent and the downside at 47 percent, with a 2 percent margin for error,” he offers, a characteristically careless Klostermanism that’s nonetheless revealing about his goals for the text. Hardly another entry in the CTE panic tradition—the disease isn’t even considered explicitly until the book’s final fifty pages—Klosterman’s latest collection instead uses its funereal premise to structure a highly conceptual, occasionally memoiristic exploration of American nostalgia and mythmaking, seen through the lens of the country’s lone remaining monocultural object. This side of The Eras Tour, that object can only be football.
Football’s singular dominance is borne out by the numbers: ninety-six of the hundred most-watched American telecasts of 2023 featured football (ninety-three NFL games and three college games). That figure dipped to seventy-six in 2024, an election year, but the Super Bowl still outpaced election night coverage, and the number bounced back to ninety-two in 2025. TV ratings are an imperfect measurement of popularity in our post-cable epoch, especially on the cord-cutting coasts, but the stats are striking nonetheless: The entirety of the NFL regular season averaged two million more viewers than Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, which featured the NBA’s highest viewership since 2019.
Football has found such astounding success on TV, Klosterman argues, because TV is the perfect medium for football: “There’s simply never been a TV product more formally successful.” It’s something of a happy accident, he concedes, since the game was developed long before television invaded the American home. He ultimately spends little time historicizing how the rise of football as televised spectacle in the 1950s forewarned the decline of baseball’s lilting, radio-friendly prominence in the following decade. Klosterman is more interested in football as a 21st-century aesthetic experience, as an “idea that exists for TV.”
This symbiosis seems counterintuitive, especially given the oft-cited figure popularized by David Biderman in 2010: The average NFL broadcast runs north of three hours and features eleven minutes of actual gameplay. Seemingly an indictment of the sport, Klosterman argues this imbalance is more advantageous feature than bug, assailing the viewer with “incremental rushes of dopamine, augmented by fleeting bursts of introspection. The intensity and the nothingness work in tandem.” Frequent lulls in the action allow you to “check your phone or drink a beer or daydream about something completely unrelated.” They also leave you plenty of time to extemporize on tactics and correct the offensive coordinator’s errors, most of which weren’t visible on first viewing because of the default camera angle’s limited perspective. On its surface also a flaw, Klosterman deems this another “essential and brilliant” component integral to the broadcast’s “antifragility”—a concept he borrows from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for whom an “antifragile” system is one that benefits from the combination of its faults. Televised football, a “host of contradictions that stimulate the semipassive mind,” epitomizes such a system.
By virtue of the broadcast’s antifragile sublimity, football is, says Klosterman, “always, always, always better on television than in person.” He goes so far as to say that the physical game only exists to “facilitate the broadcast version,” and even when there is “no camera, our mind inserts one,” meaning we’d automatically reframe what we saw from beyond the end zone, for example, to the standard sideline view. With the same characteristic dogmatism that animated his criticism in Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman insists “this is how it works for most people, including most who insist it does not.” I am, apparently, deluding myself that it doesn’t work like that for me, though I’ll concede that the broader theory holds true insofar as I’ve been mentally conditioned to impose the rules of television onto live sports. Attending games in person, I’ve found myself reaching for a phantom remote to pause for bathroom breaks; resisting checking stats on my phone because I’m worried my “broadcast” is delayed; and waiting for a color commentator to clarify the most recent play.
Klosterman’s larger conceptual framework, his contention that “the reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life,” is hardly novel, for his writing and in general. He’s refashioning 20th-century media theory—McLuhan, Postman, and a low-calorie helping of French poststructuralism—to explain our experience of 21st-century football. Baudrillard in particular has informed Klosterman’s work since at least his Page 2 days at ESPN, when he wrote about fantasy football as a “collection of simulacra,” a series of “symbolic, inexact interpretation[s] of what makes a football player valuable.”1 There’s an element of pastiche to his theorizing that’s consistent with his larger pop-postmodern project, as the self-reflexivity and meta-ness of it all befits the Gen-X cinephile-auteurs (Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith) he covers in The Nineties: “Content could [now] be made from content,” he writes of the titular decade. “A fixed reality was no longer needed; there was enough unfixed reality inside a single Blockbuster to sustain the entire cinematic multiverse.”
What is unusual is Klosterman’s unabashed embrace of his (our) simulated experience: “This is what I want,” he writes of his relationship to football, “I want to be controlled.” There is no praxis that follows his analysis, there is just wholehearted embrace of America’s favorite “prolate spheroid.” Klosterman may often be subversive, kind of lazily seditious, but he is clearly self-aware about his counterrevolutionary inclinations, accepting and even celebrating football as a stabilizing—some might say paralyzing—force on the American imagination.
He explores this idea through the hyper-personal in “My Own Prison,” the third chapter in Football, and for my money the most compelling. The longest chapter in the book, it’s an earnest, collage-like essay—Klosterman’s always been partial to the collage—about the American mythos as it’s hazily mediated through the country’s most football-crazed culture: “I’ve spent my life dreaming of Texas,” writes Klosterman. As a child in rural North Dakota, he idolized “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys, and specifically their quarterback, Navy veteran Roger Staubach. “Captain America,” as Staubach was known, retired before Klosterman entered the third grade, so his relationship to his hero was derived entirely from “magazines, listening to what adults said about him, and fantasizing about games I never watched.” Of course, Klosterman was (and still is) idolizing the myth of Staubach more than the man himself, which only serves to strengthen the sentiment: “When a story is fictionalized,” he writes, “the details don’t matter as much as the essence.” His image of Staubach can’t be sullied by the truth because it never adhered to the truth, only to hagiography passed down from fans of yore.
Klosterman’s romantic notion of Texas extends to the amateur ranks, specifically the state’s religious reverence for high school football. Sports columnist Bob Ryan dubbed the Cowboys America’s Team because they’re always the second-most popular team in any other region, or so the ratings suggest. “What makes the football identity of Texas so charming,” writes Klosterman, “is the conviction that this is true even in Texas itself, where the Cowboys can never matter as much as whoever’s playing for the local high school.” A young Klosterman internalized the “masochistic delight” with which Texans approached prep football, so much so that, as a fifth grader, he would simulate entire high school seasons—“pages upon pages of handwritten documents”—where he and his North Dakotan teammates would reach a title game against an invented Texan powerhouse.
This was all long before Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, a behind-the-scenes look at the 1988 Permian High football team, birthed a Billy Bob Thornton film (2004) and an NBC drama (2006–2011), the collective force of which further popularized and idealized the Homeric tragedies of small-town Texas football. As a teenager, I myself fell victim to Friday Night Lights fever: Reading Bissinger’s book in middle school, I longed to be a hard-drinking high school halfback in west Texas oil country. Bingeing the show while recovering from mono in high school, I envisioned myself as Jason Street, the star quarterback who loses his scholarship to a debilitating spinal cord injury in the (truly exceptional) pilot episode. I, evidently, also dreamed of Texas, also craved the kind of “adolescent commitment that all but guarantees adult depression” in a community where “peaking at the age of seventeen is pretty much the goal.”
Needless to say, the Texas of my teenage dreams had no basis in reality: It was the by-product of a TV melodrama based on a manipulative sports film adapted from a work of narrative nonfiction waterlogged with the literary aspirations of New Journalism. I was, like Klosterman, romanticizing some kind of quixotic Southern simulacrum, a “portrait of rural America that’s beloved in fiction but denigrated in actuality,” as tales of small-town sporting heroics are countervailed by those of postindustrial precarity and religious fanaticism. As Klosterman notes, these two planes occasionally intersect, like in the case of Tyler Ethridge, a high school hall-of-famer from rural Texas who dropped out of college, struggled with addiction, and slept under a bridge before finding God in Colorado. Then, at “some point between 2019 and 2021,” writes Klosterman, Ethridge joined a “radical branch of Protestant clergy that aspires to make America an exclusively Christian nation through any means necessary.” He stormed the Capitol on January 6, served seventy days in federal prison, and was pardoned last year.
Ethridge’s story, for Klosterman, is a “romance that collapses into tragedy by necessity,” because he’s less believable as a real person, which he is, than as the protagonist of a politicized update of Friday Night Lights for the MAGA era, which he should be. Klosterman doesn’t care about Ethridge the human, but he does care about Ethridge the football player, a figure capable of “match[ing] the melodrama of [his] imagination.”
This is all so very Klosterman, and it’s no less unsettling for his self-awareness: He treats his subjects with a certain disposability, appropriating real people and real stories and discarding them as soon he’s exhausted their utility. And, frankly, some of his rhapsodizing seems to lack real utility; he often circles his point so long he neglects to make it. But Klosterman’s form of the literary collage is kind to such indirectness, and “My Own Prison” is, taken as a whole, an entirely sincere attempt at confronting what’s right there in the title, the prison that is fandom for the individual and the sporting superstructure for the collective. Why do we need football? his essay tacitly asks. Why do we need the fictions and myths it births? Why does America need the Cowboys? Why does Klosterman need Staubach? Why, as a sixth grader, after the murder of the then–Washington Redskins’ 24-year-old All-Pro safety Sean Taylor, did I feel the need to wear his shirt every day for weeks and pen letters to the franchise?
The simple answer is a kind of transference. Sports provide a permission to emote, together and individually, in a way that is simultaneously impudent, cathartic, and socially acceptable. Klosterman relays an anecdote about sobbing his eyes out following a Cowboys loss in the fourth grade, “the only instance” he can recall of his father coming to his room and comforting him. There is obviously a masculinity angle here, but Klosterman isn’t much interested in it. What he does conclude is this:
I still need the Longhorns to beat the Sooners in the Red River Shootout, and I still need to insist the Southwest Conference should have never disbanded. I still need to wonder what happened to Eric Dickerson’s gold Trans Am. I still need to remember the unrealized glory of Kenneth Hall and Tyler Ethridge. I still need to worry about Roger Staubach dying, even though he’s eighty‐three years old and any actuary would tell me he’ll likely be dead before this book is published. I still need to do all these things, and I can’t stop. Because the moment I stop, it all goes away. The dream will dissolve and Texas will no longer exist, except in reality.
Some of the references won’t make sense to the blessedly uninitiated, but there’s an unmistakable sense of resignation, of blue-pilled surrender. It’s eerily reminiscent of similar sentiments in “Fail,” Klosterman’s 2009 essay where he bemoans technology as “unnatural” and “bad for civilization” only to admit he’d “do nothing to change the world’s relationship to technology even if he could.” Klosterman may have devoted his career to excavating the depths of middlebrow America’s cultural canon, but he’s less reckoning with its implications than he is opining on, and ultimately surrendering to, its magnetic draw. In Football, he says he’s “too normal to confront [his] simplicities.” There’s plentiful evidence that we can take him at his word.
With its mythology so deeply entrenched in the American psyche, the question remains: Why will football fall? Klosterman spends most of the book eulogizing the game rather than investigating its demise, until the penultimate chapter, when he finally gets to prognosticating and explaining why he believes the last bastion of the monoculture to be doomed.
CTE is certainly part of the reason. Klosterman acknowledges that grade-school tackle football is already deemed child abuse by many, particularly in deep-blue strongholds, and he predicts that such sentiments will escalate and youth participation will dwindle, giving rise to a generation of football agnostics with no personal, familial, or social connection to the game. Klosterman’s analogy is horse racing: Still a premier American sport into the 1950s, it became a sideshow by the millennium because, he argues, “a normal American no longer has any relationship to horses.” In 1900, there were around 21 million horses in the US servicing a population of 76 million. Today, there are fewer than 7 million horses in a country of 340 million people.
But less immediate contact with the game is hardly a death sentence given our hyper-mediated relationship to football, the same relationship Klosterman privileges as the key to football’s success: We’re already happily detached from its physical facts. The ultimate death knell, and the most convincing piece of Klosterman’s argument, is that nosediving participation on the youth level will eventually be accompanied by the largely unrelated phenomenon of waning ad revenue on the pro level (an unusually sizable chunk of NFL revenue comes from national media deals). The death of display advertising killed the American newspaper. The death of television advertising will, if Klosterman is to be trusted (and I think he is on this point), kill American football.
This seems unfathomable given the continued revenue growth of broadcast TV’s only remaining cash cow, live sports, and especially football. Total NFL revenue surpassed $23 billion last fiscal year, and it’s expected to keep growing, thanks in large part to a $110 billion media deal running through 2033. All is hunky-dory in the short-term, and the NFL has made some subtle shifts to adapt to streaming, but it seems unlikely that a broadcast-dependent model can remain lucrative for long in the age of targeted social media promotion. (There’s also evidence, per sports-media critic Richard Deitsch, that modern-day boosts to NFL viewership have been aided by changes in media-measurement firm Nielsen’s ratings methodology.) At some point between 2040 and 2060, says the ever-deterministic Klosterman, NFL advertisers will think better of their mammoth bets on broadcasting, and for the first time in a lifetime media revenue will contract. This will lead to a bitter dispute between the league and its labor as they fight for dwindling dollars. The players and their union will want to keep their salaries, a demand that would require owners to take an even smaller piece of an already-smaller (albeit still billion-dollar) pie.
There will be lawyers and cryptic tweets and late-night negotiations and NFL reporter Adam Schefter’s grandson reporting live from headquarters on Park Avenue. A deal will, probably, be reached. But an increasingly football-ambivalent culture will hardly care that the game is back after realizing they didn’t miss it when it was gone—just ask the MLB, which saw a 20 percent dip in attendance following the 1994–1995 lockout. (Klosterman touches on this lockout in The Nineties, fairly pointing out that the ensuing decline also had much to do with the Steroid Era.) Maybe, in this post-post-cable epoch, the NFL would, per Klosterman, switch to a subscription model (a la New York Times). But the proverbial writing would still be on the wall, and the NFL would go out with a cash-strapped whimper. There is no concussive bang.
While I don’t agree with all the particulars, the principles are convincing: As Klosterman notes, the pandemic proved that the NFL is “too big to stop”; the “cultivation of revenue can never relent or plateau,” but both the league’s business model and growth rate are fundamentally unsustainable. It’s also hard to dismiss the cynical contention that economics will play a larger role in the sport’s demise than any moral panic over its deleterious health effects. Given what we already know in 2026, I firmly believe there’s no amount of empirical evidence that can convert the conversations on CTE into meaningful change; I also think, for a hyper-mediatized object like football, a singular tragedy in a marquee game replayed ad infinitum has more destructive potential than any new research, no matter how damning. But then again, the potential for tragedy is more than just an occupational risk. That potential is also the point. Our scientific understanding of brain damage has advanced, but as NFL player-turned-academic Michael Oriard points out, the “arguments for and against football’s violence have remained remarkably consistent for over a century.” We’ve always, on some level, known exactly what it is we’re witnessing.
Klosterman largely dismisses the most fervent CTE doomers. He goes through some impressive logical gymnastics to answer the question, “Should strangers be allowed to do very dangerous, very popular things?” Some qualifiers are probably necessary, but he basically settles on “yes,” because people can’t be “obligated to remove every unessential hazard from day-to-day existence.” If we abolish this sport, he asks, why not also abolish swimming? Isn’t swimming also dangerous? Don’t people drown? They certainly do, but this seems to me a textbook false equivalence, as I personally would distinguish between the danger of a violent, socially constructed commodity spectacle and that of the natural creation—you know, water—covering 70 percent of the earth.
This fallacious argument exemplifies one of Football’s greatest weaknesses: Namely, Klosterman can be myopic in asserting the supremacy of his occasionally reactionary-ish arguments, sidestepping the structurally coercive and exploitative conditions powering the football superstructure (conditions he is aware of, briefly mentions, and swiftly glosses over). The coercion comes from the cruelly optimistic conditions establishing football as the single means of economic transcendence in underfunded and under-resourced areas. The exploitation comes from, for one example, large public universities participating in “an extreme racial transfer of wealth,” per Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva’s The End of College Football. As of 2020, Black students comprised 55.7 percent of football players at Power Five Schools and only 5.7 percent of the student body. Football is the primary source of revenue for these athletic departments, and the unpaid labor of Black athletes has historically been used to subsidize the experience of their predominantly white counterparts.
Klosterman, for his part, gives the college game comparatively short shrift in his end-of-football thesis, since he believes its ongoing “mismanagement” has already set in motion its own unique implosion. “Every 21st-century policy decision involving NCAA football,” he writes, “has been wonderful for the players and terrible for the game: the destruction of traditional conferences, the 2018 introduction of the transfer portal, and the 2021 legal decision allowing college players to financially benefit from their name, image and likeness (a sensible modification that was immediately misused).” It does seem likely that college football will become increasingly disconnected from its actual member institutions, and this will absolutely constitute a loss for the many American towns oscillating around their beloved universities and affiliated programs. College football is, as Klosterman says, becoming a “less interesting version of pro football.” But his obstinance about returning to the status quo strikes me as absurd: If the system can’t be simultaneously “wonderful” for the game and the players, maybe the system shouldn’t exist.
There are, clearly, countless very legitimate ways to frame football as a thoroughly damning institution, from peewee all the way up to the pros. What’s strange is that, my better judgement be damned, I still ultimately—occasionally—regret never playing football, despite understanding both its structural ramifications for society and its risks for the individual. I opted instead for basketball, though I was regularly harassed by the football coaches, being north of six foot four and two-hundred-and-twenty pounds by the age of fourteen. There’s obviously a healthy dose of privilege operating here, but I worry I missed out on some gloriously deranged, horrifically American rite of passage. Like Klosterman, who played in high school but no further, I’m nostalgic for a world I never inhabited, a world my rational self finds plenty of reasons to deplore. Why, fifteen years after Friday Night Lights, do I still fantasize about gridiron glory? Perhaps I’m too normal to confront my simplicities.
In this sense, fantasy sports presaged the rise of contemporary sports betting, a flurry of gameified microsimulations and accumulation of decontextualized stats—colloquially known as prop bets—that certainly feel more real to millions of gamblers than the contests from which they originate. Klosterman’s not much of a gambler himself, though he’s been surprised to find that gambling “enriches football, at least conversationally,” because someone’s “private, passive simulation” can result in a “temporary, simulated friendship.” I’d like to chock up Klosterman’s disturbing nonchalance to a careless oversight, the gambling boom being in its hastened infancy while Football was being written. Still, it takes considerable apathy to frame a regressive tax on a nascent generation of addicts as a vehicle for “friendship.” (Speaking generously, around 2-to-3 percent of online sports bettors turn a long-term profit.) ↩
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