No sport's popularity is guaranteed, and several factors point to a possible long term decline of football's.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
This post argues football may be about to experience a long, slow decline in popularity. First, two disclosures about why I may be predisposed to believing this - and one very important point of emphasis. Disclosures: 1) I am a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan, and since they returned to the NFL in 1999 they have been hopeless and embarrassing (one fluke playoff season excepted). Watching year after year of lousy football is enough to make anyone question his interest in the sport. 2) The Browns owner has a big financial stake in fracking, and I find it hard to cheer for a team whose success will benefit someone visiting environmental hazard on his fan base.
The point of emphasis is this, and I'M PUTTING IT IN BOLD CAPS BECAUSE I CAN ALREADY SEE PEOPLE MISSING IT: The decline in interest will be among casual fans, not hard core ones. Those who played in high school, go to fan sites throughout the day, listen to sports talk radio, obsess over their fantasy teams, etc. will continue to be big fans. My argument concerns not those people, but the ones on the margins.
The main reason I think football will start becoming less popular is because of the increasing awareness of the long term damage it can inflict. A sport that society decides is too violent cannot be a national pastime. It can still be very popular and profitable, just unable create cultural moments.
Consider boxing: In the early decades of the 20th century it was arguably the most popular sport in America, rivaled only by baseball. Look at the accounts of matches like 1927's Tunney vs. Dempsey match or 1938's Louis vs. Schmeling - they brought in huge numbers of spectators and money, and transfixed the nation. Even through Muhammad Ali's prime - through, say, 1975's Thrilla in Manila - a boxing match could still be at the center the country's of attention. After that, though, boxing drifted from center stage.
Even the sport's aficionados admit as much. Seeing the toll it took on Ali may have turned some off the sport. Or perhaps an even more dramatic event did: In 1982 I enthusiastically watched what turned out to be a man getting beaten to death. I lost my taste for the sport at that point and haven't watched a match since; I suspect I wasn't the only one.
While there haven't been any on-field deaths in the NFL (though stories like this are not unheard of), the long term damage the sport can inflict is becoming much better understood. Statistics aside, it's hard to miss the poignancy of the suicides of Dave Duerson and Junior Seau - or not think of some unflattering company they put the NFL in. The more that information like that gets diffused through the culture, the more casual fans will lose their attachment to it. As with boxing.
There are other issues as well. One is the slow migration of the game off of free airwaves, though this is not happening as much at the pro level. I just began my first football season since the 80s without cable TV, and have been surprised at just how much of the college game has migrated there. It used to be that starting at noon Saturday there was a pretty full slate of games to choose from on the networks. That's down to a smaller division regional game at noon, and maybe a single big conference matchup. Later in the afternoon there's usually a couple better games on, but nothing like the abundance there used to be. Even their postseason games - all the way to the championship game itself - have moved behind the cable paywall.
That may well be the more profitable move, but it's also the move of a niche player - not a universal one. If you've got your base locked in and little prospect of drawing in anyone beyond that, then squeeze the die hards for as much as you can. Again, think boxing: the biggest fights are on pay per view. The more that dynamic plays out in football, the more the sport goes to the periphery of American life. Again, that's more a college football phenomenon than an NFL one, though the latter has begun putting more of its games on cable as well.
Finally, there are two changes independent of the sport. The first is the decline of daily newspapers. Sports sections give casual fans a way to interact with their teams. For a sport that has only one game per week, sustaining interest is a pretty big deal. Getting a daily fix from the paper is a great way to do that. Yes, these papers still have online operations, but people browse the Internet differently than they read newspapers. For one, newspapers are self-contained. You can't click on a few related hyperlinks end up God knows where. Instead, you read the paper until you're done with it - and usually in an orderly fashion. Start with one section, read the next one, and so on. That gives readers a much better chance of getting even a passing look at sports news. Eliminate that and there's one less way to keep in touch.
The other change is with the next generation of potential fans: they live in an on-demand world, and they've come to like it. I've seen it first hand with my own children. Instead of watching series when they air, they watch whole seasons of other shows on video services, or play video games. Neither of those makes you wait around for airtime. And no, this is not the place in the post where I start complaining about Kids These Days. The technology was put in front of them; they got used to it and have come to prefer it. If I was a kid now I'd probably be doing the same thing.
But those expectations are death on an industry that asks its fans to wait until kickoff and watch games in real time. If today's young people can't be sold on that, the football audience is almost guaranteed to be much smaller twenty years from now. Because at that point we're not talking about loving it or hating it, about any moral or political implications to the sport. At that point we're talking about indifference. Football can overcome a lot of bad publicity, but a generational shrug of the shoulders will permanently diminish it.
None of that is guaranteed to happen, of course. Football might continue for many decades as the most popular sport in America. But I think most people take that popularity for granted, to the point of not even being able to imagine it not being the case. A popular sport can slowly recede from the popular imagination, though. Growing awareness of the violence of football, its migration off free TV, the erosion of a key channel for keeping people connected to it, and the generational change in entertainment choices all might combine to gradually sap its popularity over a period of years.
And if that happens - if football leaves the spotlight and goes from being one of the lead actors in American cultural life to a walk on role - that's when the Browns will finally win a Super Bowl.