In America, each fall, football dominates our national psyche. The game outdraws news of an ongoing war, worsening inflation, climate degradation, and reporting on natural disasters. Political crises, economic uncertainty, waning faith in government and other key institutions, efforts to immunize against disease, and other hot-button concerns trail interest in our favorite form of entertainment—football.
Football is so thrilling, so insistently promoted on television and social media, and so geared to producing stellar athletes and their memorable performances that it attracts 150 million American fans.
Football has its feeder systems that sustain interest. These start with grade school teams and skills-building, bolstering individual bravery and teaching lessons about the value of teamwork. Football enlivens family life and supports social life, generating loyalty. The game yields up its local heroes in small towns where civic life centers on Friday night football. Colleges build their reputation on football. We easily forget which university employs this year’s Nobel Prize winner, but we’ll remember that star quarterback.
The game saturates our emotions, focuses our attention, colors our feelings about success and failure, bolsters our belief in meritocracy, makes us proud, lionizes the underdog, and draws us together—rising above (or obscuring) issues of race or class that elsewhere so divide us. Football has a lot going for it.
Week by week, local journalists and podcasters amp up enthusiasm. The Monday following, news outlets feature highlights—the last-minute game-winning touchdowns, the near-superhuman receptions, the 60-yard science-fiction-like field goals, the heroic goal-line stands, unexpected game-changing interceptions and fumbles that we so keenly count on, the punishing tackles that look so good on video that millions re-share the footage, and those injuries that alter a team’s playoff prospects.
The Cheeky Question: Will Football Survive Brain Damage?
There is a lot to be said for football, and there is a lot to be said about it. In a recent “Play in Mind” post, I followed the apparently audacious question that journalist and ethicist Chuck Klosterman asked about the future of football: Will the game be around three generations from now? Will it, in time, follow the diminishing fortunes of fencing, horse racing, boxing, and—so the trend looks—baseball, too? Will football become a regional niche?
How long can the seasonal riveting hoopla, fabulous financial inducements, and the sex appeal of celebrity even for high-schoolers persist in the face of mounting evidence of cumulative brain injury? Players, with linemen at the forefront, sustain micro-concussions on every play. And these add up. The longer and harder one plays, the worse the effects.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, is the looming ethical, economic, and legal elephant loitering in the room for the future of football. Klosterman asks pointedly, “Why has society coalesced around a sport that wrecks people’s brains?”
Why, indeed?
The most alarming study, released a month ago, determined that of those retired players who died between 2016 and 2021 who had arranged for post-mortem examination, an alarming 91.4 percent tested positive for CTE. Note: CTE sufferers experience impaired balance, memory loss and confusion, and a range of “executive dysfunction” which includes difficulty in planning and in concentrating, mood swings and explosive outbursts, anxiety, depression and apathy, and suicidal rumination. This is a sobering list.
Popularity Does Not Ensure Permanence
Football is so deeply anchored in our present that it’s hard to imagine it won’t continue to thrive. As families make individual decisions about withholding permission for their kids to play football, though, we are already seeing massive, collective shifts that may starve football of new recruits. Suburbia is leading the change.
In 2021, a survey of private high school sports participation showed that, among male athletes, soccer has edged out tackle football, 29 to 25 percent. At charter schools where parents are more highly engaged, the trend is even more precipitous. At these schools, almost six in 10 students aspire to play basketball. More than a third want to be soccer players. Put together, volleyball and track and field outpace football. The trend arrow points downward. In the decade after 2016, tackle football participation declined between 7 and 12 percent.
The gap between the popularity of the spectator sport and the participatory sport has begun to widen.
So, What’s Next?
A collection of alternatives waits in the wings. Flag football rises in popularity. The game trains the body, the mind, and the social sense much as tackle football does. Crucially, flag football entails more running and less crunching than tackle football. With collisions minimized, as the Centers for Disease Control estimates, flag-football players experience 19 times fewer high-intensity head impacts. Parents have begun to notice.
Another fast-paced and increasingly popular physical game, lacrosse, holds a key distinction: It is a contact sport but not a collision sport. In Canada, where lacrosse rivals hockey as a national game, data indicates that football players suffer 10 times more injuries than lacrosse players. Game rules reserve their severest penalties for head-to-head contact, including ejection from the contest.
Wrestling, while surely a kind of individual combat, trains strength, toughness, and self-reliance; it also tests cleverness and alertness while minimizing collision. Wrestlers won’t avoid bumps, scrapes, strains, and sprains. But no wrestler gets blindsided on the mat. Basketball, for its part, entails plenty of shoving and bulldozing on the court, and allows accidental contact. A deliberate elbow to the head, however, gets a basketball player tossed out.
Now nearly 900,000 young men and women in almost equal proportions play soccer, a demanding game of skill, fitness, and cunning. Quick pivots make soccer hard on players’ knees and ankles. But concussion is about 80 percent less likely than in tackle football. The micro-concussions, those impacts that accumulate so tellingly in football, are largely absent. In soccer, goals are few and far between. Keen expectation puts spectators on the edge of their seats.
As Culture Changes, the Games Change
One last observation of a cultural and psychological nature. With its rigid timing, tightly controlled plays, specialized tasks (and bodies), centralized management, and male dominance, football seems to be a 20th-century business.
Three rising sports differ in 21st-century ways. Basketball, lacrosse, and soccer are fluid games that women and men play. Play itself is mostly continual. Positions are less specialized; tasks are more reactive. Coaches outline general strategies rather than dictating specific plays. Players rove the court, the field, and the pitch as play shifts, in real time.
Our 21st-century work rhythms and team play seem to be converging. As much as the neural toll will influence parents’ guidance, these powerful cultural and psychological trends may determine the fate of football.