It’s going to take awhile for football to get to where boxing is today. (And regardless of how it got there, boxing is basically an outcast sport with most people now. Even if it was cleaned up, and had only one championship-granting body, it wouldn’t come back from the shadows.) I expect to live to mid-century, and I may or may not live to see it.
But I will venture this prediction: in the next 20 years, football programs will all but disappear from college prep schools. In 25 years, there will be no football at Ivy League schools and other elite colleges. By then, public high schools that serve suburban areas where parents expect their kids to go to college will be dropping the sport as well.
None of that will kill the game, but there will be a stigma to it, of young working class through underclass men destroying their bodies and minds for the entertainment of the rest of us. The sorts of demographics that advertisers like will increasingly drift away from the game, having had no experience with it growing up. Eventually that will relegate the game to the shadows.
I haven’t read all the responses, but is there anything to the theory that we should remove helmets and some other protective equipment from the game, and change the rules/positions slightly? Would anyone stand for that? I’m not sure that this problem can be solved by just making “better” helmets alone.
We also have a tendency, in the glare of football’s astounding popular success, to overlook the possibility that something better can’t be invented. Football’s replacement as the nation’s No. 1 spectator sport, if there is to be one, may still be in the design stages of its creators. Something may come along to capture the fancy of the younger generations and we creaky old football fans will become the equivalent of the retirees hanging out at the horse track every day.
Worldwide the replacement sport for football is soccer (football to you non yanks). On weekends the soccer fields near my house are absolutely teeming with kids, it’s clearly the sport of choice for the youth and I bet part of the allure to the parents is that it’s perceived to be safer than football. The other advantage to soccer is that it can be played on existing football fields with little modification so those investments won’t be lost. Currently soccer loses popularity at the High School level but with better marketing and promotion I could see it becoming the spectator sport of choice.
The issue isn’t really with concussions, but rather with the sub-concussive hits that many (most?) players make on every single play.
As a result, players like offensive linemen, defensive linemen and linebackers are typically the ones who are at highest risk for CTE, not guys who get 7 concussions like Troy Aikman, but very very few other hits through their career as a quarterback or receiver.
Personally, I think the game will change- probably to something more 1950s or even rugby-like, where the helmets can’t be used as a weapon. Removing the face mask would be a good place to start, actually.
Remove the helmet-as-a-weapon aspect, and you’ll dramatically drop the CTE incidence, because players won’t lead with their head like they do now.
I have heard the praises of futbol sang for the past 30 years. Whatever athletes in America that decide not to play football will go into basketball, baseball, or whatever next captures the imagination of Americans. If you wish to put it onto American’s poor attention span, lack of taste, or inability to appreciate artistry on the pitch, I don’t much care, but while there are inroads made, I don’t see soccer (excuse me) futbol, taking over any spot relinquised by American football.
And overseas. But the drop in popularity in America is precipitous. If you looked at the sports pages on February 1, 1932, the only pro sport you’d see was boxing, plus hockey if you happened to be in an NHL city. Boxing was among the big four sports (with baseball, football, and horse racing) until the 1950s, when football came on with a rush.
Others have touched upon the reasons – too many champions and classes (there were eight until the late 50s and all had one consensus champion most of the time), lack of free boxing on TV (preventing people from becoming fans), lack of any charismatic champions, fewer boxing clubs, competing governing bodies (who don’t govern but rather are out to enrich themselves), potential athletes moving to other sports (like football), competition from mixed martial arts and other similar sports. Injuries was barely a factor; when Floyd Patterson kill Benny Paret, boxing’s growth continued.
Boxing exists, and will for awhile, but will never go back to being a major sport.
As for football, it will continue, and it’s too good a TV spectacle to fade out anytime soon. It’s possible that, as parents withdraw their kids from high school and Pop Warner, that the player pool will become weaker, and I don’t think they’d have baseball’s influx of foreign players to fill it, since the game isn’t play much except in the US. For it to fail, the talent pool will have to drop to XFL levels, and that’d be long after our children’s lifetimes.
I think there will be a slow death of NCAA football. All of the new mega conferences aren’t good for the sport in the long term. Yes, we’ll have the playoff and the ESPN and talk radio blowhards will finally be happy. But the killing off of regional rivalry games that have been around for years isn’t good. Also, the students themselves are different these days. They aren’t showing up at State U at 18 for 4 yeas with a steamer trunk in a college town with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon. Even without mega conferences, I don’t think there is the same enthusiasm and loyalty towards their alma mater with so many students taking online classes and using community colleges to fill basic studies.
The mega conferences and huge tv deals may help appeal to wealthy alums in their 40’s and up, but I’m not sure NCAA football will be the same sport at all even without all of the injury and liability risks.
Honestly, if we’re going to count hockey as one of the “big four” we should really be talking about the “big five.”
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Especially when comparing an outdoor sport with two indoor sports…
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True. Soccer is played in larger venues than hockey or basketball. When soccer in the U.S. starts getting average crowds comparable to baseball or football and drawing TV ratings within the range of the NFL, NBA, and MLB, then we can talk about it being truly popular.
It’s not an ideal comparison, you’re right, but would those numbers have been possible even ten years ago? Soccer is FINALLY gaining in popularity and it’s even gotten increased coverage on the heart of the US sports world, SportsCenter.
Like I said, I think if we include hockey in a “big four,” we should really include soccer and discuss the “big five.”
I recall reading a piece by Peter FitzSimons, journalist, author and former Australian rugby player. He had played American football while attending school in the US. He felt that the use of helmets encouraged players to “lead with their heads” and IIRC gave up playing because he felt it was too risky. His other complaint was that practice largely consisted of more of the same.
Lets look at it this way the, NBC Sports just paid 100M plus to air English Premier League matches. Can you imagine that ten years ago? Football is not replacing American football anytime soon (or ever) but you would have to be blind not to see that it is gaining pace.
As a parent, my children will play neither American Football or rugby.
Is paying $100 million for airing rights (which is what, about 2 midfielders and a goalie these days? ) really an indication of increased demand by the American public, or more a symptom of an increasing glut of sports cable channels desperate for content, as well as being better able to monetize niche markets?
I’m 40 now, and when I was growing up we all played soccer, and it was going to be the Next Big Thing back then too. It’s like nuclear fusion–it’s 10-20 years away, and has been for decades.
That’s a lot of money for content though particularly for a foreign league. The MLS conitnues to do moderately well and the interest in the national team is quite strong. It’s certainly doing better than it has been at any time in the US.
) really an indication of increased demand by the American public, or more a symptom of an increasing glut of sports cable channels desperate for content, as well as being better able to monetize niche markets?