Frank Crum of the Denver Broncos celebrates with his teammates after scoring his first career touchdown against the Buffalo Bills at Empower Field At Mile High on January 17, 2026, in Denver. | Justin Edmonds/Getty Images

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere.

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match.

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life.

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape?

I invited Klosterman onto The Gray Area to talk about all of this and why he thinks the sport may be both more powerful and more fragile than it looks. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died.

Is that why you wrote it for people who aren’t born yet?

That’s a bit of rhetorical exaggeration, but the idea behind it is real. Books force you to commit in a way other media don’t. Online writing gets overwritten constantly. Books make you stake a claim that’s supposed to endure.

When this book comes out, it’ll already be out of date in certain ways. And five or 10 years from now, it’ll feel even more distant from the moment it describes. That’s kind of the point.

What’s your experience with football?

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. We played........

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