CONTEXT

As a mediatized spectator sport, American football has never been more popular. The game’s signature platform, the National Football League (NFL) is the most profitable sports league in the world, taking in approximately $18.6 billion in revenue in 2022. Televised football is probably the closest thing that America has to a national pastime; it is an entrenched autumn and winter ritual for tens of millions of Americans, and it continues to take over more and more of the annual calendar. Most of the highest-rated programs each year are NFL telecasts. 29 of the 30 most-watched American broadcasts of all-time are Super Bowls. In February 2024, over 123 million Americans tuned into the Super Bowl. As a result of this immense guaranteed audience, the cost of a 30-second ad during the game is now $7 million. Meanwhile, close to 10 million people currently play Madden NFL, the league’s most popular video game franchise. The offseason NFL Draft has become a multiday event that draws over 50 million viewers. Around 75 million people participate in fantasy football on an annual basis. And it’s estimated that yearly NFL sports betting totals over $100 billion, done with ever-increasing ease via phone apps that allow wagering on events happening in real time.

Football’s staggering commercial success and vitality as a cross-platform mass cultural product, however, belie rising uncertainty about the sport’s long-term outlook. Research linking football-induced repetitive head trauma to progressive and fatal brain damage has led to a decline in youth participation. American football’s growing brain injury and CTE epidemics add urgency and stakes to our film’s reflection on the sport’s hold on the public imagination, which has been enhanced and amplified through the sport’s audiovisual presentation, epitomized in the work of Ed and Steve Sabol and their company, NFL Films; and the physical, emotional, and cognitive effects on those who play, represented here by the Turner family story. 

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates tenders that to be Black in America is to live in constant fear of disembodiment. The physical and psychological threats of police brutality and the lasting corporeal and cognitive strains caused by the sport of football correspond. They are socially-produced forms of damage that routinely displace (raced) bodies from their humanity. Given the exigency of these issues, it is necessary to make a film that is accessible to large, diverse publics. OHYU also grapples with how in mainstream American sports media, the labor of football is regularly transfigured as narrative (“real-life drama”). Blurring the lines between reality, spectacle, and narration is a means through which content (game action) becomes form (myth, master-narrative). This resultant mythic irreality, we argue, disavows the material, oftentimes punishing physicality of the sport. 

This century’s data-driven turn in sports management, analysis, and fandom has added a further layer of abstraction and distance, as athletes’ bodies become increasingly perceived as data points and profiles to be atomized, parsed, and controlled. We argue that football’s success as a media sport relies on a sense of disembodiment, as viewers are sutured into the action through increasingly immersive means – wherein the actual sporting body begins to represent and be manipulated by a dematerialized likeness. Fantasy football, sports gambling, video games, and the language that is used to describe football players (“freaks,” “specimens”) contribute to this condition. The way that players are reduced to their measurable “traits” also contributes to this widening gap between the way we experience football’s performers, and the conditions of that performance.