This essay is excerpted from culture writer Chuck Klosterman’s new book, “Football.”
Television defined the last half of the twentieth century, outperforming all other mass media combined.
This was already understood by the onset of the 1970s, prompting countless network executives to kill themselves in the hope of creating something impeccably suited for sitting in front of an electromagnetic box and remaining there for as long as possible. This typically entailed thoughtful consideration over the content of TV: what a program was about, how it was written, and what personalities were involved. But what’s even more critical, and far harder to manufacture, is the form of the program: the pacing, the visual construction, and the way the watcher experiences whatever they happen to be watching. How a person thinks about television is a manifestation of its content; how a person feels about television is a manifestation of its form. And there’s simply never been a TV product more formally successful than televised football. This was an accident. But it turns out you can’t design something on purpose that’s superior to the way televised football naturally occurs.
Football is a purely mediated experience, even when there is no media involved. It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television. Television is the only way you can see it at all.
I realize I’m making an aesthetic argument many will not accept, particularly if they start from the position that football games are boring, meaningless, or both. The merits of televised football as a formal spectacle are immaterial to someone who hates the thing being televised, in the same way the harmonic simplicity of Miles Davis is immaterial to someone who hates jazz. Appreciating the TV experience of football requires some casual interest in the game itself. But what makes the TV experience of football so remarkable is how “casual interest” is more than enough to generate an illogically deep level of satisfaction. The way football is broadcast manages to obliterate any difference between an informal consumer and a face-painting fanatic. This is due to many factors, the most critical being that football is always, always, always better on television than it is in person. The televised experience is so superior to the in‑person experience that most people watching a football game live are mentally converting what they’re seeing into its TV equivalent, without even trying.
The only sport universally understood to be better when watched in person is hockey. In the same way football is always better on TV, hockey is always better live. With almost every other sport, the difference is debatable. Baseball is sometimes better in person, because it’s nice to sit outside in the summer (the weather and the park have more influence than the game). Basketball becomes more compelling if you sit close to the court and less compelling if you’re in the rafters, though the prime seats in any NBA arena tend to provide ticket holders with the same viewpoint they’d get from a TV broadcast. Live tennis and live golf offer details that can’t be captured on television, but there are rules of decorum and big potential for monotony. Soccer is exclusively about atmosphere and identity, so the experience of being in the crowd and the experience of the game itself are only nominally associated, in the same way going to see the Grateful Dead in the late 1980s was only nominally about music. Live boxing and live auto racing deliver palpable electricity with subpar sightlines. In all of these non‑football examples, the debate boils down to how effectively the televised depiction of an event can translate its in‑person actuality, which is why hockey is an outlier (the ambient feeling of bodies colliding with plexiglass is not digitally transferrable). Televised football is an outlier to an even greater extent, and for a much stranger reason: The TV experience doesn’t translate the live experience at all, in any way. The game happening in the physical world only exists to facilitate the broadcast version of the game, even if the game is not being televised. Here again, it must be reiterated: Football is a purely mediated experience, even when there is no media involved. It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television. Television is the only way you can see it at all.
With football, the psychology of fascism works.
Football fans attend football games for lots of different reasons. However, one of the expressed reasons can never be “A desire to see what’s really happening.” If that was someone’s true desire, they would stay home and watch it on TV. No one inside a football stadium — including the coaches on the sideline and the players on the field— can see the game with the consistent clarity of a person watching remotely. The announcers have the game happening directly in front of them and still watch the action on TV monitors, in part because they want their commentary to match what the home viewer is seeing but mostly because the camera is the perspective that matters.
And even when there is no camera, our minds insert one.
By now, it’s difficult to find any football game that isn’t being filmed by someone. When CBS broadcast Super Bowl LVIII in 2024, the network utilized 165 cameras. When Super Bowl I was broadcast in 1967 (on two competing networks at the same time), the total number of cameras was 11. This is now unthinkable. Show up at a random Pop Warner football game in rural Idaho, and you might find 22 different parents recording the action on 22 different camera phones. When I played high school football in the 1980s, not even the state championship was broadcast by any local station; today, most regular‑season high school games in every state can be streamed live, sometimes with a multi-camera professionalism on par with the broadcast of Super Bowl I. A camera‑free event has become rarer than the alternative. But the mental phenomenon I’m describing has little to do with how videography has expanded. The mentally inserted “camera” is not a machine. It is a way of seeing. It’s a type of forced perspective, invented by cameras and normalized through the omnipresence of television. In other realms of existence, such a phenomenon would be bad, since what I’m describing is a kind of psychological fascism. It is, technically, a form of mind control. Yet in this one particular instance, it benefits both the sport and the audience. With football, the psychology of fascism works.
Author Chuck Klosterman
(Joanna Ceciliani)
Visualize, for a moment, a capacity crowd at Michigan Stadium, the third‑largest sports venue on earth. Imagine the Michigan Wolverines are playing the Ohio State Buckeyes, with 107,601 people in the stands. Those 107,601 people are all seeing the event in a unique way, because every individual seat is in a unique location. All 107,601 sight lines are personal. Throughout the game, the ball moves up and down the field, and — every so often — a play will happen directly in front of a handful of fans coincidentally located in the ideal spot to see the action. Perhaps a woman’s seat is in the tenth row of section 15, located in the westerly corner of the south end zone: If an Ohio State receiver runs a fade pattern and catches the ball over his shoulder in front of the southwest pylon, that ticket holder will witness the reception with an unmatched lucidity. No one else will experience that extemporaneous moment like the woman in that particular seat. However, this solitary play is probably the only time when that will be true. There will be 179 other plays throughout the game, none of which will unequivocally cater to the singular view of this specific woman in this specific location. And what will happen during those other 179 plays is a bypassing of consciousness: The woman will see a play from her unique vantage point and automatically reframe what she saw into the way it would appear on television. She will watch the play from where she is sitting, but she will process the play from the standard TV perspective of a wide‑angle camera stationed in the press box at midfield. What she sees with her eyes will not be what she sees with her mind.
“But that’s not true,” you say. “That’s not how it is for me.” And maybe it’s not. There are exceptions to everything. Maybe your mind doesn’t work like this. Maybe you’ve attended three football games a week for twenty years without ever owning a television. Maybe your visual relationship with the world is completely authentic and unchanged by technology. I can’t crawl inside your skull and prove you wrong. But this is how it works for most people, including most who insist it does not. The visual imprinting of television is more overpowering than the visual imprinting of life; a TV screen presents an enclosed reality inside the preexisting reality of your house, and that manufactured reality overwrites both your memory and your imagination. Think of the primary setting from an old multi-camera sitcom (Jerry’s apartment on “Seinfeld,” the living room on “The Big Bang Theory,” the bar from “Cheers”). The standard shot of the set is ingrained in your memory and can be instantly recalled, but try to imagine physically entering that set through a different door and meandering around, without referencing the original image and triangulating where everything is supposed to be. Think of a real place or a historical event you’ve only experienced through film (the streets of 1950s San Francisco in “Vertigo,” West Baltimore as depicted on “The Wire,” the invasion of Normandy as seen in “Saving Private Ryan”). How difficult is it to now reimagine these places or events in a manner unlike the fake images you’ve seen only a few times? If you’re still skeptical, try this test: Host a party in your home and prop up your smartphone in an inconspicuous corner. Film 20 minutes of the party while you mingle with various guests. Rewatch that footage once a week for a month. At the end of the month, try to mentally reconstruct interactions from the party that aren’t anywhere on the recording. Try to visualize how the party looked, but from a different angle. You may be alarmed to realize your own unrecorded memories are locked into the perspective of wherever you placed your phone.
“But that’s not how football on TV works at all,” you say in response. “Football is seen from multiple angles that constantly shift. A few paragraphs ago, you noted that CBS used 165 different cameras for the Super Bowl. Football is better on TV, but not for the reason you claim. It’s better on television because there isn’t one static view.”
It can even be argued that the standard camera view of a TV football game is the worst camera angle available.
That’s a valid response, and it might feel true on a moment‑to‑moment basis. A controversial play might be replayed from seven different angles in the span of thirty seconds. It can even be argued that the standard camera view of a TV football game is the worst camera angle available. During the college football playoffs, ESPN’s family of networks will sometimes show the same game on multiple channels, with one channel broadcasting the whole affair from the Skycam camera. This is a remote camera hovering above and behind the line of scrimmage, replicating the perspective one sees in a video game. Coaches call this the “All‑22” view, because all 22 players on the field are simultaneously observable. It’s the camera angle coordinators use for film study, and — when it’s available — it’s the way I prefer to watch football. The Skycam allows the viewer to see how the defense is aligned, to follow pass patterns as they develop, and to (almost) see the game the way it’s seen by the quarterback. In terms of absorbing what’s transpiring, it’s vastly superior to the traditional mid‑ field perspective from the press box. Yet even as I’m watching the Skycam view, I can sense what’s happening inside my brain: I’m unconsciously converting what I see into the classic sideline sight line, even though that’s an inferior shot. I prefer the Skycam, but I understand what I’m seeing through the limited perspective of the most traditional camera angle: a master shot that (a) exclusively fixates on the location of the ball, (b) doesn’t include every involved player, and (c) provides no sense of depth or spacing. It’s an inadequacy that should be a death blow.
But like I keep saying: Football is different. These are the flaws that make the magic.
Copyright © 2026 by Charles Klosterman. Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Klosterman is the bestselling author of nine nonfiction books (including “The Nineties” and “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”), two novels (“Downtown Owl” and “The Visible Man”) and the short story collection “Raised in Captivity.” He was raised in rural North Dakota and now lives in Portland, Ore.
