Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game
by proposal on 1/27/2026, 7:57:24 PM
<a href="https://archive.is/mi308" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/mi308</a>
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2026-01-22/chuck-klosterman-new-book-football
Comments
by: IvyMike
To me, <i>this</i> is the only real football game: <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football" rel="nofollow">https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football</a>.<p>(No spoilers please!)
1/27/2026, 8:23:14 PM
by: gorfian_robot
his books "I Wear the Black Hat" and "But What If We're Wrong?" are really good.<p>but I don't give a shit about team sports
1/31/2026, 6:14:30 AM
by: dwd
There are a lot of sports that are much better in person. Football is made for TV as the action is confined. Types of play that would require viewing player movements outside the "set" are discouraged like lateral passes.<p>Basketball is similar as the action is very much confined to the video frame.<p>Non-US sports like Australian Rules or Gaelic football are an in person spectacle. They're free flowing (like ice hockey), constant action, and the ball can move 50+ metres up/down or across the field in a few seconds so you need to see the player movements off the ball. There's also something about a very large arena with 100,000+ spectators and a constant murmur of sound that can erupt in a moment.
1/28/2026, 2:55:19 AM
by: tenahu
Interesting, and I have also finished live football games thinking it would have been better to just watch it on TV at home.<p>However, his claim that a spectator would "automatically reframe what she saw into the way it would appear on television" is never supported other than him saying "trust me, it's true, if you don't believe me you are in the minority".
1/27/2026, 8:29:01 PM
by: vessenes
I think of football as one of the killer apps for tv. Baseball is one for radio: baseball is almost always better over radio; there’s lots of space to do something else at the pace of most baseball games.
1/27/2026, 8:11:58 PM
by: egl2020
Is Marshall McLuhan in the house? Calling Marshall McLuhan.
1/31/2026, 5:51:46 AM
by: cheschire
Whenever I think it might be worth it to finally go watch an NFL game live, and I start looking at those ticket prices, I start to question if it's worth it or not. Then I get to the seat view simulator and instantly close the tab because holy hell are the "affordable" NFL seats absolutely terrible to watch a game from. Can you even see the player numbers let alone the names? I guess you need to be a big enough fan to know all the players by number on offense, defense, special teams, and the full depth chart for every position in case there are injuries.<p>Nah. A one time purchase of a 77" TV with surround sound was absolutely the better option.
1/27/2026, 8:38:47 PM
by: jimbob45
Bit silly considering the scoreboard typically has a TV that shows the most important bits that would have been seen at home anyway. His argument may have made sense in 1980 before TVs were introduced in stadiums.<p>For an actually interesting topic worthy of your time, check out how 1st down markers are calculated and shown on screen at home. It’s much more complicated than you’d think.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_%26_Ten_(graphics_system)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_%26_Ten_(graphics_system)</a>
1/27/2026, 9:06:04 PM
by: andrepd
> 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.<p>This man has absolutely no idea what he's talking about x)
1/27/2026, 9:30:32 PM
by: legitster
It's often pointed out that the ball is only live for about 18 minutes of every game. But what makes football so fascinating is that for every play there are 22 different jobs being executed at the same time. And the jobs change every play.<p>For something like baseball, you can basically see everything happening in frame the whole time. But for football, the game is so information dense that you can spend hours unpacking the game afterwards to see what was going on. That's why replays and highlights are so much more satisfying. And that's what makes it fun to analyze and or watch videos during the week - you can find all sort of unique or interesting aspects just watching the same play again and analyzing a different personnel group.<p>It also explains why cameras are everywhere (besides them being just flat out cheaper for high school games, etc). Film study is a crucial part of the game for players - more than in any other sport.
1/27/2026, 8:35:57 PM
by: shuntress
This guy is not totally wrong but he is also <i>way off</i> about pretty much everything even just simple basic facts. He writes "Michigan Stadium, the third‑largest sports venue on earth." which is not even remotely true. Michican Stadium isn't even in the top 5 of venues <i>in the US</i> never mind globally[0]. And thats if you just take capacity counts at face value and don't try to include places that have huge standing room capacity like horse racing tracks.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_venues_by_capacity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_venues_by_capac...</a>
1/27/2026, 9:51:22 PM
by: j4cobgarby
It wasn't until he mentioned 'soccer' that I realised football meant American football.
1/27/2026, 8:09:51 PM
by: bahmboo
For me the interesting part of his argument is that we reframe things we see in real life based on the recorded version of the similar thing we have seen before. It often makes it more compelling and easier to relate to. Then it becomes the way we interpret our world and since so many people consume it similarly it becomes a mass mental constraint on our perception, understanding and interpretation of the real world.<p>This excerpt isn't really about football per se, so if you take it only that way you might be missing his point.<p>I like Klosterman. I can't write as well.
1/31/2026, 5:02:21 AM
by: nlawalker
<i>>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.</i><p>I remember there being discussion here about coverage of when the NFL first made all-22 available for public viewing: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4549832">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4549832</a>
1/27/2026, 8:05:56 PM
by: ggfdh
I’ve only ever seen Klosterman do friendly interviews. I think his work would improve if it was challenged more.
1/27/2026, 9:23:13 PM
by: iamwil
I'd be interested in what kind of eSports game is condusive to VR spectating.<p>I tried doing Dota spectating before, and rigged up a mod for Minecraft vlogging/spectating, and concluded it wasn't quite like being at a stadium, or watching it on Twitch in a way that was interesting.
1/27/2026, 9:22:00 PM
by: sidrag22
I kinda went into this article hoping he was gonna touch on a topic i find distasteful about modern televised football.<p>Years ago, TNT for NBA games had this annoying habit during live action where they would follow a player after they scored or whatever and cut back to broadcast view, but it was so late, you would lose considerable amounts of context into the next possession and the players would already be in their actions(sometimes the player being followed would be involved in this action to make it even more stark that you were missing important context).<p>the NFL, has this pretty much every single play, for a game where the setup matters a lot. they'll cut to the fans, the sidelines, a player's face... and then with a second before the ball is snapped, they'll show the broadcast view, and you'll have to make a quick read into what the offense/defense is showing.<p>Kinda kept hoping he'd lead there with the funny "fascism" statements, but it never really led to a criticism of the broadcast, and he just kept harping on the same point that anything besides broadcast view is trash, and how he assumes everyone forces broadcast view in their mind instead.<p>I'm pretty negative about the modern sports broadcast experience, so i guess i was pretty let down seeing an article with a title like this... and instead of it being a critique, it was a celebration of it.<p>He even kinda setup the point about important context with his skyview cam stuff, and just still comes back to the same point, that broadcast is best...<p>I also don't wanna pretend everyone would want the same experience I do, but that brings me to another issue i have with the broadcasts in general. The generalist broadcaster is the beloved announcer in modern broadcasts, but it just feels lazy.. why is there not 4 different broadcasts for major games that deliver products catered to casual viewers, enthusiasts, kids? The casual viewer would probably prefer to see a fan wearing a funny hat, but the enthusiast would prefer to see the formation 5 seconds sooner.
1/27/2026, 9:11:24 PM
by: the_cat_kittles
i like thinking of tv as an art form, and football as the artist that perfected it
1/27/2026, 8:42:51 PM
by: mrandish
Related but tangential to the article's thesis, I just want to add a technical perspective about NFL football broadcasts from someone with a background in professional live broadcast television production. Due to the massive popularity of televised NFL football (they're >95 of the top 100 most watched programs on television every year), the production budgets for broadcasting games are equally massive.<p>The result is that NFL game broadcasts are generally the most technically sophisticated live, multi-camera broadcasts in existence. What they manage to do in real-time in front of a live global audience is remarkable, requiring orchestrating a complex ballet of split-second hand-offs between over a hundred production professionals each coordinating their contribution to the broadcast in perfect sync.<p>From a pure IT perspective, a Super Bowl broadcast relies on a terabit scale, high-reliability IP and power distribution infrastructure that would impress even the most jaded big data center architect - and it's all installed, tested and working on-site in about a week - including fail-over backup generators and multiple data feeds to off-site backup production locations. In the past two years they've even reached the level of switching <i>the entire broadcast</i> from an off-site backup location in the event of a catastrophic failure of the main production truck. That means every raw HD camera feed from wireless sideline handhelds, to pylon cams to multiple Skycams all arriving in sync at 60 fps hundreds of miles away (last year's game used >160 on-site cameras),<p>Even if you think of the Super Bowl as just some kind of weird 'sport ball thing', it can be interesting to meta-watch how the production is being composed. Every year the Super Bowl is where the best new innovations in live broadcast technology show up first. Every vendor is vying to have their latest toys strutting their new visual magic on the planet's biggest live stage. Last year an obvious standout was 3 new $150,000 Canon 122X zoom lenses (that's <i>insane</i> zoom) with a special new optical block allowing instant switching between normal zoom and film-like shallow depth-of-field.<p>Those 3 units were the only samples then in existence, hand carried by their engineers from Japan just for the Super Bowl. And I knew the instant one of them popped on the screen because it created a super telephoto zoom showing a quarterback's forehead-to-chin face so close you could see every crease and bead of sweat - from ~100 yds away(!) - all with the beautiful shallow depth of field that is, in any other live broadcast zoom lens, simply impossible. You either get the insane zoom or you get the depth-of-field but not both at once, at the same f-stop. Magic indeed. I have no idea what new, never-seen-before tricks await us in ~10 days, maybe some new Skycam motion control wizardry, or an impossibly small wireless camera giving us a new viewpoint or some new GPU-rendered live CGI incorporating real-time position data from the wireless trackers now in the shoulder pads of all 22 players - but I'm excited to find out!
1/28/2026, 3:48:49 AM
by: ethanrutherford
The article presents its thesis ad nauseum, the idea that "everyone is always mentally reframing the game into the TV view, even if they think they aren't", but never makes any effort to prove the thesis or provide supporting evidence. I'm not convinced he even defines what "reframing it in my mind" even means. Throughout the entire article, the question in my mind is "in what way? What does 'reframing' it look like? What exactly are you claiming I'm doing?", and at no point is that question answered.<p>A hypothetical is set up where a woman gets to see one great play close up, but the rest of the game happens nowhere near her seat. If your thesis was that "football is better on TV because you get all these unique angles and instant replays that you can't get from the one seat's position", this would be a solid argument. But the thesis is that "we all imagine the TVs camera angle in our heads", and at the end of this hypothetical, you simply assert that this is what she's doing the rest of the game. "It must be true because it must be true", this is just a circular argument.<p>There is a bit about how every game in modern day is being recorded on cell phones, which is truly irrelevant. That games are being recorded by audience members is a. true of all sports and b. unrelated to what each person is thinking about in their heads in the moment, whether they are or are not the ones doing the recording. That recording, after all, is only from the perspective of the one seat, their present view of the game is unaltered by the presence of cameras in the audience.<p>There's another point, perhaps meant to follow from the previous irrelevant point, about memories of a party vs a video recording of a party. The idea is that if you watch the recording for a month, that recording will be the only thing you remember, but it's extremely unclear in what way this is meant to relate to the thesis. What you supposedly imagine in your head in the <i>perceptual present</i> has nothing to do with what you <i>remember</i> a month later, and it's not remotely surprising that reinforcing the memory of a <i>recording</i> over the course of a month will cause it to be more easily recalled than memories from the event itself. It's common knowledge that the human brain does not commit every detail and every moment to memory, and it's trivial to demonstrate that this is true: simply attempt to remember what color shirt you wore last Wednesday. There is interesting psychology here, but its simply not related to the premise in any way.<p>Then there's the throwaway comment about it being "fascism", where you seem to reduce the definition to just "mild behavioral conditioning". This is both based on your premise, which you have not provided proof for, and goes nowhere. It doesn't lead to any further point or conclusion, it's just an aside, "by the way I think that means it's fascism because I think that word means mind control". Even if we assume your premise is true, its more than a little bit of a stretch to say that counts as "mind control". All you've done is dilute the meaning of the word to the point of banality.
1/27/2026, 10:18:35 PM
by: stevage
The author keeps restating their thesis without offering much to support it. It's infuriating.
1/27/2026, 8:20:17 PM
by: direwolf20
The article repeats itself several times without any new substance, and then drivels nonsense — TV is psychological fascism?
1/27/2026, 8:39:50 PM
by: gretch
No evidence or supporting material, just continued insistence that the author is correct.<p>“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.“<p>Consider this direct excerpt of 2 back to back sentences and how 1 contradicts the other.<p>You can’t crawl inside my skull, but you can crawl inside everyone else’s?
1/27/2026, 8:44:56 PM