Football is Awesome because I hate French People

Empirically, football is the most popular sport in America. There is no other professional athletic endeavor that comes close to creating such fervor among American sports fans. Football brings Americans together; it creates commonality and solidarity among people that have nothing else in common. It’s a beautiful thing really. What I’m wondering is, why?

I mean, sure it’s great that we’ve got some modern day gladiators beating the shit out of eachother in some modern-day Coliseum. Is the real reason we love football simply an extension of the id within American males? Can it really be true that we’ve not come any further than the Romans? Actually, that could be true, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth.

The real reason Americans love football is xenophobia. Football is the only sport still solely dominated by Americans. For every Christian Okoye there are 1,000 Dominican baseball players making it to the big leagues or humongous German shooters playing in the NBA. Football is the last bastion of American preponderance of power. The thing is, I’m not saying that this is some conscious anti-immigrant feeling that pervades American fandom. It’s just that, like always, we favor Americans, and in this day and age in a world system where we don’t really have any enemies who will show their faces, we juxtapose our old feelings of jingoistic fervor onto the closest approximation we have; sports, and by sports I mean football. Fuck. And. Yes.