Football will be the world's biggest sport.
The greatest comeback story in sports is the NFL itself
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future…A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE…Soon high schools decide it isn’t worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it’s mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma…Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies. There’s a lot less money in the sport, and at first it’s “the next hockey” and then it’s “the next rugby,” and finally the franchises start to shutter.
What Would the End of Football Look Like? by Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen.
This essay was written in 2012, when football’s impending death was consensus in the intelligentsia. CTE had entered the lexicon. Will Smith pivoted from fighting aliens to fighting NFL lawyers. Lakers bench players had higher Q scores than any football player not named Brady or Manning. Private school parents proudly announced to anyone who would listen they wouldn’t allow their kids to play football.
Twelve years later, an alternate future has played out. Football has not only extended its lead as America’s most important sport, but has devoured everything else in the culture:
But football’s conquest has just begun. Just like blue jeans, rock and roll, and McDonald’s, football is the next American cultural export to inevitably reach world domination. The very qualities football haters dismissed as flaws are its greatest strengths— and will propel football beyond our shores.
Myth: Soccer is too big to fail.
Reality: Soccer is structurally flawed.
Soccer’s cultural inertia masked a fundamental flaw: the sport's byzantine structure undermines its own drama. Try explaining to a newcomer which games actually matter. Is it the Premier League match on Saturday? The Champions League fixture on Tuesday? The domestic cup game next week? Even dedicated fans need spreadsheets to track their team's campaign across multiple competitions. Soccer recognizes this problem but won’t be able to fix it.
Football satisfies our monkey brain desire for narrative simplicity. For 1, you know where and when football is going to be. At the end of each season, there's one champion, crowned through a gauntlet of high-stakes games that everyone understands. No byzantine point systems, no relegation battles, no juggling multiple trophies. Just win and advance. Every September, fans of almost any team can legitimately dream of February glory. One loss won't doom you, but every victory inches you closer to the prize everyone agrees matters: the Super Bowl.
Myth: Football is boring.
Reality: Football is perfect for modern attention spans.
Football haters (including my younger self) loved to parade that in three hours of football television time, there is 18 minutes of action. This is now my favorite part of football. You can tune in and know the exact stakes of every play— 3rd and Long, 2nd and 9, 4th and inches— watch for a few seconds, and then relax and get back to scrolling2. Paying attention to 90 minutes of continuous action in soccer feels exhausting in comparison, like watching Metropolis instead of TikTok.
Myth: Football is too weird for mass appeal.
Reality: Everything is perfectly weird.
When you first learn about football rules, everything seems design to confuse the viewer. 4 downs for a “first down”. Touchdowns are sometimes 6, 7, or 8 points. Safeties. Special teams. Clock management. It’s the Electoral College of sport rulebooks.
But one day it clicked for me: football’s over-engineered rules have produced a perfectly competitive sport. The weird numbers mean that every score is meaningful— but not enough to easily end the game. Four downs seems arbitrary—until you realize you’re always a play or two away from a high-stakes third down. Field goals are just valuable enough to settle for, but not enough to feel safe.
Myth: Concussions will kill the sport.
Reality: The culture needs contact sports, and football is the safest one.
Sports are proxy for war. Football’s violence is naturally alluring. Even when I was intimidated and perplexed by the sport, I couldn’t look away. The bulky pads. The big hits. The lumbering linemen. The messy dogpiles. Contact sports aren’t going anywhere3 and after a decade of concussion protocols, rule changes, and better equipment, football is most controlled version of violence we have.
Myth: Europeans won’t like something as American as football.
Reality: Our Europhilia made us want football to fail.
Predictions of football’s premature demise were driven by a fundamental bias: football is run by fools4. We don’t want to admit that football is perfect because none of its perfections are by design. Kansas City real estate moguls and New Jersey car dealership owners lucked into the greatest cultural property of the 21st century. But the story of football is the story of America: frustratingly inevitable ascendance. Otto von Bismark once said “God has special Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.” Add football to that list.
And the Chiefs.
This is coincidentally the perfect form for First Take culture and fantasy.
This is coincidentally the perfect format for advertising.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/netflix-boasts-record-breaking-numbers-mike-tyson-jake-paul-boxing-livestream
