“Describing how NFL football transpires on a play-by-play basis is like trying to explain the incremental mechanics of a nuclear reactor.” So writes Chuck Klosterman in the introduction to Football, his new book (an instant New York Times bestseller) out just in time for Super Bowl Sunday. “The levels of editing are so unlike every other sport that there’s a tendency to talk around it, almost as if what’s transpiring on the field were somehow a surprise to everyone involved. But there are few surprises in football.”

The author, who lives in Portland, is one of the most influential cultural critics of the early twenty-first century. He’s written for a who’s who of major magazines and publications over the last 30 years, including Spin, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and many more, and is the author of 13 books, including the underrated novel Downtown Owl (2008), the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003), and the nonfiction pop culture compendium The Nineties (2022). He was also a founding editor of ESPN’s influential sports and culture blog Grantland, which shuttered in 2015.

Facets of the sport’s societal sway have dominated discourse on and major reviews of Klosterman’s book. Much of the wider mainstream interest (i.e., from non-diehard football fans) has focused on the CTE of it all, the conservative coding of it all, and the provocative idea, featured prominently in its New York Times review, that football might well be “doomed.”

More interesting is the sheer magnitude of football. Klosterman argues the game is both conservative and liberal at the same time: The NFL can run US Army recruitment ads and feature prominent ICE critic Bad Bunny as its Super Bowl halftime star (with Green Day on the pregame show). “It’s able to balance these things by playing both sides against the middle,” Klosterman told me over the phone. “You put ‘Stop Racism’ in the end zone, you create the Rooney Rule”—a modern effort to diversify senior management roles in the NFL—“and that seems to mitigate in an overt way the negative accusations, which means you don’t really have to change anything.”

Portland is a funny football town—in some ways it is the northernmost, westernmost college football city, where you’re far more likely to see Oregon Ducks merch and flags than anything from an NFL team. “In Portland it isn’t really that popular, and it’s still the most popular sport here by a wide margin,” Klosterman said. “In some ways this question is why I selected football for a book in the first place.” Local fandom is nothing compared with that of cities further east, which follow high school, college, and pro teams with religious fervor. But “even in a place that seems ideologically opposed to what football represents,” Klosterman added, “it’s still more popular than anything else.”

One stat is particularly hard to argue with: As Klosterman recounts in the book’s early pages, 96 of the 100 most watched American broadcast events of the last decade are football games. Sports fandom is global, of course. Ask people in India about cricket or Italy about soccer, and they’ll express a depth of passion and desire commensurate with the American football obsession. But their national viewership numbers pale in comparison. “There’s no global equivalent to the way football controls US television,” Klosterman writes, adding the telling wrinkle that other countries don’t care much about American football. “American consumers are myopically obsessed with something other countries don’t really consume at all.”

I am a lifelong football obsessive. Watching the sport for me is as natural as breathing oxygen or drinking water; I have done it quite literally my entire life and I will do it for the rest of my life and I cannot imagine living without it. That said, outside of one particularly notable long-shot flier of a casino bet at the start of this season, I’ve never been recompensed in any fashion for the considerable part of my waking life and brain space I’ve dedicated to the game. I had never really sat down and thought about any of this before reading Klosterman’s book, either, which is kind of the whole idea here.  

Football works around a series of essays, each roughly the length of a #longread piece one might have encountered in the age of the weblog, and each tackling (and occasionally roughing) a different topic through the lens of the oblong spheroid. Some of this looks as you might expect: race in America dissected via controversies in the sport’s history, including the backlash to Colin Kaepernick and the onerous bias (now largely excised) against Black quarterbacks; Klosterman recounting the 1970s successes and eventual degradation of the Dallas Cowboys, which profoundly impacted him as a child growing up in North Dakota—a state with no professional franchise—rooting for “America’s Team,” a moniker you’d better believe he dissects.

Other passages read like talking with an interdisciplinary postdoc after a coupla beers at the college bar, weaving in theory and history. He notes, sharply, that what we think of as football is actually the act of watching football—the curated and produced aura of it instead of the material reality of cleats and pig skins and wet grass and chalk lines. Few of the millions and millions of Americans who watch football regularly have played the game with any degree of seriousness; our growing disconnect from the sport itself in favor of a mediated (or meta-mediated, in the case of video games) experience creates a distinctly postmodern patina. “The reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction,” Klosterman writes, “which is the same way we understand most of modern life.”

Football tinkers with this level of thought throughout its pages: Noam Chomsky shows up; epistemological author Nassim Nicholas Taleb checks in. A single paragraph contains the phrases “hermeneutic weirdness,” “quasi-antediluvian ethos,” and references the Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” to expound on the cultural institution of Texas high school football. A book for dumb jocks this is not.  

I found it impossible to sit and watch a game after reading it without Klosterman’s ideas about mediation rolling around my head like an onside kick (one of the good ones, before the last rule change). Yet when I asked Klosterman about the meta-context of it all—whether writing the book impacted the way he thought about football—he demurred. “Not really,” he said. “But I understand why you’re asking the question.”

Klosterman is no clinician, however. Writing the book, he told me, felt like unspooling a ball of yarn in his head that had been a lifetime of semiconsciously collected football info. At its best moments, reading it feels the same way—at least it did for me. It’s not about remembering some games or some guys, though a great many guys and games are remembered in its pages. It is instead a semiotic journey into the media-addled soul of America, a 300-page hand-waving argument to unpack the meaning of football’s unique perch atop the flaming pyre of a dying monoculture.

Like any good sports book, there’s plenty to disagree with. He states as if it were fact that true fans prefer the college version to the pros. He hates instant replay (“it does not benefit the game in any way,” he told me), which is a baffling stance for someone who’s made a career of painstakingly dissecting cultural phenomena after the fact.

Still, Football the book was all I could think about whilst deeply invested in the playoff fortunes of my own team, as I watched the Seahawks utterly demolish the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round of the playoffs then go on to confidently defeat (in a predictably much closer match-up) the Los Angeles Rams. I screenshotted pages between texting my brothers and shouting at the television and disturbing my family. It comes closer than anything I’ve read to describing the eminently public, profoundly personal, simultaneously manifest and latent secret language of football in our American lives. “Once you slow things down to a granular level,” Klosterman said on our call, “the meaning changes.” We were talking about instant replay, but not just.