Football is so thoroughly established in American culture that it’s gonna take decades for it to lose its grip.
I’d expect the NFL to still be around in 2050, say, but I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that football will increasingly be regarded as either something only poor people play, because no middle-class parent would let their kid’s brain cells be mashed around like that, or have already become a minor sport in terms of the attention its games command.
That’s “a pretty good chance” - I’d say it’s far from certain. I do think it’s a near-certainty that tackle football will be way less popular in 2050 than today, and that the number of college athletic conferences which compete in football will have shrunk considerably.
If schools were required to pay the lifetime medical and income losses from these injuries I think you would see a massive decline–but they are not.
I think you will see continued slow changes to improve equipment and rules to eliminate certain activities which are high risk but not much else will happen. As stated it is part of American culture.
The only thing which could cause a massive decline in football is if another sport arose to replace it, for example soccer. Anyone see this happening?
I don’t think the concussion issues have hit home enough for it to hurt high school football yet. What will end it is liability. Once there are a few successful lawsuits by parents of kids who are brain damaged or killed, the cost of insurance will make it too expensive to budget for most districts.
There will be schools that continue with it; Texas is a good example, since they can pay for the insurance by charging more admission to games. But the number of schools will drop as time goes by, replacing it with soccer, or, more radically, concentrating on education, with sports as a sideline.
Not even close. The thing is, the CTE/concussion issue is a relatively recent thing- since hard plastic helmet shells and facemasks. Prior to that, we didn’t see this issue because they played differently.
I have a feeling that the NFL is going to get bitch-slapped with a series of lawsuits for concussions / CTE, and that combined with the fear of similar suits and realization of the dangers at lower levels of the game will combine to make football much more 1930s-1940s style than it currently is. No facemasks and no hard helmets is likely, which will force players to adopt different styles of blocking and tackling that are a lot less likely to cause concussions / CTE in the long term.
The NFL will keep on going- as will college and high school football programs. The game they play will be different though. Whether it remains as popular as it is today… I don’t really know. I don’t see soccer taking football’s place as a fall sport, so I think football will still be king between August and December.
I wouldn’t be surprised if football gradually faded into the woodwork, kind of like boxing. Football’s signal to noise ratio is just brutal - the “ball in play” action just takes up a few mere minutes and the rest is a huge pile of ads, sideshows, replays or just standing around. As backward as it seems, even golf can be a much more action packed sport from a spectator’s point of view.
Because its main demographic is still relatively young, football’s decline is a ways off. But, like every other sport in this country’s history, it is hardly immune from falling from public favor in the decades to come. The liability lawsuits will have an effect on youth participation and the lawsuits against college “amateurism” might have an effect on the availability of the sport at the pre-professional level (that one is coming to a head relatively soon).
Still, football works well on television, where replays and chatter can obscure the relative lack of minutes in a game with actual action and that will make it hard to kill it off altogether. Expect the next wave of stadia to be built with smaller seating capacities, though, as the next generations of fans won’t be particularly interested in attending a game where it takes three and a half hours to play, most of it filled with, well, nothing really.
The sooner it goes away, the sooner “length of a football field” will no longer be a standard unit of measure. As a non-fan, I could never properly visualize that.
I don’t think that’s much of a consideration at all, really, because of alcohol. I think attendance has been trending downward because of two things: money and television. It’s super expensive to go to a game, and frankly, depending on your tolerance for drunks, crude behavior, etc it may not be your cup of tea.
On top of that, the TV experience with all the camera angles, HDTV, etc plus the amenities of home makes staying home to watch the game a preferable experience for many.
The median age for NFL viewers is approaching 50. It’s a bit younger than the audience for baseball, but I’m not sure that counts as relatively young. I think this is reflected in some of the league’s bizarre behavior - the increased effort they’re putting into punishing players who get arrested (for crimes that get covered in the press), the proposed crackdown on racial slurs (well, just one racial slur), etc. They’re reassuring a somewhat conservative demographic. A combination of this and the concussion thing is going to gradually erode the audience. The NFL is a long way from losing its dominant position, much less disappearing, but I think the combination of demographics and the head trauma issue - and not just the injuries itself, but the NFL’s public dissembling and disregard for its own player - have reached critical mass.
With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder what solutions the NFL is going to come up with to address this issue further, beyond the increased concussion protocols, etc that they have already put into place. I assume they will be at least somewhat proactive going forward in order to head off potential litigation. I am trying to think of what they might do that won’t compromise further the essence of the game (violence).
Given the recent ruling allowing some college players to unionize, the college game is going to be forced to make some changes in the way things are done. Whatever changes are made will have effects in the NFL and at the high school level as well.
Sports viewing demographics is a fascinating topic. A fellow named Richard Luker has been doing annual polling for ESPN tracking the nation’s sports interests and notes that in the 12-17 age bracket, football has tailed off slightly in interest over the past few years – as has baseball and pro basketball – mostly at the expense of soccer. http://espnfc.com/news/story/_/id/1740529/mls-catches-mlb-espn-sports-poll?cc=5901 Note that Luker limits the first graph to MLS; I think greater tv exposure to the high quality of international soccer will have an even bigger effect on future polls.
I guess I still see football’s demographic as fairly young even if the median age of fans is 50. Those people will be watching for another 30 years (if we have football that long). And Olympic ice dancing notwithstanding, the NFL remains a big deal with women fans, too. Soccer, maybe not so much.
I love football but I honestly think its days are numbered. Suburban parents will be first to stop letting their kids play, then it will trickle down to all socio economic groups and very slowly but surely it will wither on the vine. It will take a long time because it is very VERY popular but these injuries aren’t going away. The very nature of how the game is played causes them. Football’s other option would be to change its rules enough where it will be safe to play but it will them essentially be a different sport.
Yes schools could drop football. But they could be picked up by club teams.
Right now football is the only sport out there in the US in which club teams do not dominate or are not in danger of domination. High school level soccer, baseball, tennis, gymnastics, and in some cases hockey is dominated by club teams. Basketball club teams are growing.
A big reason why I don’t watch pro football much these days is what you stated last although that’s hardly unique to football. Nowadays on the relatively rare occasions that I turn the T.V. on for a professional sporting event (outside of soccer) I figure that when I go to the channel that the game is supposed to be on a commercial (or, rather, a sequence of commercials) will probably be showing. Most of the time, I’m right.