The Gridiron and the Gray Flannel Suit: NFL Football and the Modern U.S. Workplace

Welfare Capitalism and the Birth of the NFL

Company-sponsored teams (also known as industrial teams) were driving forces in the early development of professional football in the United States. Born in the Ivy League in the aftermath of the Civil War, American football was exclusively a college game until the end of the 19th century (Peterson, 1997). Industrialists in Pennsylvania and Ohio organized the first pro teams—managers hoped the enterprise would help diffuse labor tension (Riess, 2013). To cite one notable example, industrial sports programs became part of the Carnegie Steel Company’s long-term antiunion strategy in the years that followed the legendary “Battle of Homestead,” the violent confrontation between workers and union-busting Pinkerton guards at the company’s Homestead mill in 1892. In 1900, the Carnegie Company fielded football teams in both Homestead and nearby Braddock (Riess, 2013). Two decades later, representatives of other company-sponsored teams helped found what would eventually become the NFL. The NFL began as the American Professional Football Association, chartered in the late summer of 1920 at a meeting of representatives from teams across the Midwest. These included Green Bay, Wisconsin’s Packers (sponsored by the Indian-Acme Packing Company), the Dayton Triangles (bankrolled by Delco and other employers in Dayton, Ohio), and the Decatur Staleys, representing the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company of Decatur, Illinois, makers of cornstarch and other products derived from corn and soybeans (Riess, 2013).

Like industrialists throughout the country, Augustus Eugene Staley came to view sports as a key tool in industrial relations—a mechanism for raising morale and directing workers’ energies away from labor radicalism and collective organization (Forrestal, 1982). Indeed, the Staley Company’s sports programs, launched in 1918, represent a case study in the history of welfare capitalism—the workplace paternalism that represented the dominant mode of U.S. labor relations in this period. The company newspaper frequently framed the Staley sports program in paternalistic terms, as in a representative article from the summer of 1920:

The Staley Company athletic teams are known all over the Middle West. . . . there isn’t a stronger booster for the teams than A. E. Staley, who rarely misses a chance to cheer his men on to victory and give them the encouragement of his presence and his support.

Thanks to the sports program and other morale-lifting initiatives, the article’s author (a writer from the Chicago-based advertising agency Lord & Thomas) concluded that the Staley Company was “like a big, happy, contented prosperous family organization, where every man and woman takes a pride of ownership in the institution, and joy in serving it” (Carrithers, 1920, pp. 6-7). This vision of labor peace through industrial athletics captured the essence of what Gerald Gems (2001) has described as a core ambition of welfare capitalism’s sports programs, “producing more docile, efficient and co-operative employees” (p. 47).

Augustus Eugene Staley also saw in sports the potential to build his company’s brand. The plant baseball team found early success as an athletic advertisement for the company. Staley recruited former major league star Joe McGinnity as a manager, and the company team performed well under the leadership of “Iron Joe” (Forrestal, 1982). By 1920, Staley had set his sights on a football team as the next priority in developing a top-notch industrial sports program. He hired former University of Illinois star George Halas to run the company athletic program and—most important—to both play on and direct the football team. Halas, in turn, recruited former collegiate players, who would work production jobs and receive time off for football practice along with a cut of ticket sales. The football field, directly outside the main production floor, was equipped with basic locker-room facilities and a grandstand with seating room for approximately 1,500 fans. Admission was US$1; US$.50 for employees (Forrestal, 1982; Halas, Morgan, & Veysey, 1979). While the team excelled in the inaugural season of the American Professional Football Association, running such a top-flight enterprise was more expensive than Staley had expected, and the limited size of home crowds in Decatur capped the team’s revenue potential. The cornstarch magnate moved to cut ties with his short-lived football operation, bankrolling the Staleys for one more season (1921) as they transitioned to their new home city of Chicago. By 1922, the team was an entirely independent company with a new name: the Chicago Bears. Almost all of the players took the leap from secure employment at the Staley Company to pursue dreams of stardom on the professional gridiron. According to George Halas’s memoir, only one player stayed behind. John Mintun, who had grown up in Decatur, chose to remain with the Staley Company, where he became the night superintendent (Halas et al., 1979).

While the Decatur Staleys were short-lived, and are generally remembered only as the forerunners of the Chicago Bears, it would be a mistake to dismiss the team’s brief history as an insignificant prelude to the subsequent “real” history of the NFL. Welfare capitalism’s imprint on pro football’s birth went much deeper than the initial capital that figures such as A. E. Staley contributed. Industrial football’s boosters also invested the sport with ideas about workplace discipline that left a profound imprint on the game long after the Decatur Staleys became the Chicago Bears. One such booster was Walter Camp. Often described as the father of American football for his innovations as a player and coach at Yale, Camp later served as an advisor to the U.S. military during World War I, creating exercise regimens for soldiers (Des Jardins, 2015). After the war, Camp added his influential voice to the chorus championing industrial athletics. In 1920, he published Handbook on Health, and How to Keep It, a wide-ranging volume about the value of sports and physical exercise for modern times. The social value of football—and industrial football, in particular—figured prominently in Camp’s (1920) treatise:

The red-blooded boy will play football and take chances which cause the old man sitting in the stands to hold his breath, and it is upon these chances of a like nature that his development depends. . . . This applies to the boy in the factory just as it does to the boy in college and to every boy who was in service. In other words, we must always have the vigorous, strenuous, risky, if you please to call it so, kind of sport. (pp. 154-155)

The concluding chapter of Handbook on Health elaborated Camp’s case for company-sponsored sports programs as critical tools of worker discipline: “Baseball beats Bolshevism and statistics are already beginning to show that the brotherhood of athletics can be made to take the place of the association of the saloons” (Camp, 1920, p. 197). Handbook on Health echoed long-standing claims about rugged masculinity on the football field; decades earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt had made similar arguments about the college game (Watterson, 2000). But Camp and other advocates’ emphasis on football as a bulwark against unruly forms of socialization among the industrial working class marked a key shift: No longer just an elite college game, football would now be conceived as mass sporting practice.

As professional football migrated out of workplaces such as the Staley Company and became a business of its own, gridiron boosters continued to frame the game as a source of valuable lessons in both masculinity and labor discipline. In the fall of 1922, during the Chicago Bears’s first season as an independent entity, the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune took special interest in the team, and in the nascent NFL (the new name, as of that fall, for the American Professional Football Association):

We’d like to see [professional football] succeed because it will stimulate more boys to play football, boys who are outside the college and high school influence. It is valuable as a developer of discipline, quick thinking, and physical hardihood. (“Professional Football,” 1922)

The Tribune’s editorial board, like A. E. Staley and Walter Camp, saw in football the power to train, discipline, and inspire U.S. industrial workers. It was this pervasive cultural discourse of work and masculinity that defined modern pro football’s birth in the 1920s, and continued to shape its development—both on the field and as a mass-mediated spectacle—in the decades that followed.

Organization Men: The Modern Office and the Modern NFL

If football staged performances of work, it also presented narratives of management. In 1951, David Riesman and Reuel Denney published an article in American Quarterly titled “Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion.” The two co-authors had recently collaborated (along with Nathan Glazer) on one of the landmark texts of mid-century social science—The Lonely Crowd, published the previous year, exploring what they termed the “other-directed” conformity of modern organizational life and mass culture. In the evolution of rules and strategies amid college football’s shift from Ivy League elites to broader communities of players and fans in early decades of the 20th century, Riesman and Denney found dynamics that helped explain the roots of mid-century American culture. In football, they saw an athletic enactment of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s (1911) Principles of Scientific Management:

The mid-field dramatization of line against line, the recurrent starting and stopping of field action around the timed snapping of a ball, the trend to a formalized division of labor between backfield and line, above all, perhaps, the increasingly precise synchronization of men in motion—these developments make it seem plausible to suggest that the whole procedural rationalization of the game . . . fitted in with other aspects of [Americans’] industrial folkways. (Riesman & Denny, 1951, p. 318)

Riesman and Denny were not alone among their contemporaries in observing key connections between the gridiron and the modern workplace; football appears throughout mid-century analyses of U.S. corporate culture. One of the period’s most prominent commentators on the workplace was Fortune magazine writer William H. Whyte, whose bestselling 1956 book The Organization Man became a cultural touchstone—joining other popular texts such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—as the United States came to grips with postwar corporate conformity. Four years before The Organization Man, Whyte (1952) published a study of the new language of corporate office work—Is Anybody Listening? How and Why U.S. Business Fumbles When it Talks With Human Beings. As evidenced by the word “fumbles” in the subtitle, Whyte’s analysis reveals the special place of football metaphors in what he terms the “businessese” of the period (Saval, 2014, p. 162). “Outstanding is the great American football analogy,” Whyte observes. “No figure of speech is a tenth as seductive to the businessman.” The football analogy “is bounded by two great goal lines and is thus finite. There is always a solution. And that is what makes it so often treacherous” (Whyte, 1952, pp. 60-61). In one of the book’s more remarkable sections, Whyte assembles a composite corporate address—titled “Cooperation—An Opportunity and a Challenge”—out of the text of 200 business speeches:

The team can’t put the ball across for a first down just by wishing it. The guards and the tackles can’t do their job if the quarterback doesn’t let them in on the play. And we, the quarterbacks, are muffing the ball. How are we to go over for a touchdown? My friends, this is the $64 question. (p. 57)

Football metaphors’ place in the expanding corporate offices of mid-century U.S. cities and suburbs indexed the sport’s growing popularity. Some observers of corporate culture saw the growing power and popularity of spectator sports as a depoliticizing force. In his landmark 1951 study White Collar, C. Wright Mills argued that mass-mediated sports and leisure “divert attention from politics by providing a set of continuing interests in mythical figures and fast-moving stereotypes” (p. 336). Professional football was just one in a constellation of spectator sports that Mills’s white-collar subjects encountered in the immediate postwar years, lagging behind both college football and Major League Baseball in popularity. But by the end of the 1960s, pro football’s “mythical figures” were diverting more attention than those of any other sport (MacCambridge, 2004; Watterson, 2000).

At the heart of the NFL’s surge in popularity in this period was an innovative approach to the business—and narrative power—of mass media. In 1961, NFL owners—led by league commissioner Pete Rozelle—crafted a national television strategy that culminated in a landmark contract with CBS. The deal distributed revenue equally among all teams, regardless of local market size (MacCambridge, 2004). Encouraging fan interest in the NFL itself as a media product, the CBS contract inaugurated one of the league’s signature corporate strategies. From the 1960s onward, NFL executives carefully cultivated their brand.

One of the most important institutions in what Michael MacCambridge (2004) has called the “self-mythologizing of pro football” (p. 183) was NFL Films, which commissioner Rozelle incorporated into the league’s marketing apparatus in the early 1960s (Vogan, 2014). From the start, NFL Films productions were, at their root, narratives about charismatic management and the division of labor. Coaches were central figures in NFL Films productions during the 1960s, beginning with the very first scene of the very first film—Pro Football’s Longest Day (Sabol & Endy, 1962). As Travis Vogan (2014) has detailed in his excellent study of NFL Films, Keepers of the Flame, the film opens against the backdrop of Green Bay’s working waterfront, and features close-up shots of coach Vince Lombardi (dressed in his signature suit, tie, and overcoat) and Packers quarterback Bart Starr (dressed in clothing reminiscent of that of a longshoreman) as they recount the coach’s stern approach to player discipline and strict standards for on-field performance. This opening scene’s presentation of football as a performance of managerial mastery established a core narrative framework that would return in subsequent NFL Films productions. Such representations of on-field personnel management were, of course, profoundly gendered—coaches such as Lombardi and the New York Giants’s Allie Sherman were portrayed as heroes for their ability to create disciplined men out of boys, as in 1969’s The Man Behind the Men. As Thomas P. Oates has argued in his important 2017 study Football and Manliness, later generations of NFL coaches have continued to earn valorization as charismatic managers of men, standing as key figures in shaping “how masculine wisdom about organization and self-development is packaged for popular consumption” (p. 97).

While championing the power of managerial figures such as Lombardi and Sherman, the NFL’s “self-mythologizing” cultural productions celebrated players’ enactment and perfection of workplace discipline. This narrative emerged in vivid detail in NFL Films’s most heralded early production—1967’s They Call It Pro Football, (Sabol & Hentz, 1967) which, as Vogan (2014) has argued, “codified NFL Films’ signature aesthetic practices” (p. 49). A striking dramatization of football’s on-field division of labor, They Call It Pro Football (Sabol & Hentz, 1967) presents a position-by-position representation of “the disciplined professionals” who make “pro football . . . the sport of our time.” Narrator John Facenda’s deep-voiced description of the quarterback position, booming over dramatic footage of Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas, and others, lends a rugged romance to the managed workplace: “Eleven trained men face-to-face on the field of play. Each man a specialist. But one man stands above the rest.” The narration of the linebacker position moves from the workplace to the war zone: “The fringe of no-man’s land is patrolled by the linebackers, the search and destroy men of the defense.” In 1967, the phrase “search and destroy” was, of course, a loaded cultural signifier, conjuring images of the war in Vietnam. Through representational vehicles such as NFL Films productions, pro football executives framed their game as the story of rugged organization men achieving greatness in a world of violence.

NFL Films constituted one key media institution engaged in the production and framing of the NFL’s cultural meaning during its ascendance to peak popularity among U.S. sports. Other important voices in the construction of NFL meaning included newspaper writers who covered teams on a daily basis, sports journalists working for major national magazines such as Sport and Sports Illustrated, radio and television commentators, and, more and more by the end of the 1960s, NFL players themselves. In 1968, Packers guard Jerry Kramer published a diary-style memoir of a year on the job, titled Instant Replay:

Lombardi chewed on us again tonight. Sometimes he seems to hate everybody without regard to race, religion, or national origin. First, he compared the Packers to a large corporation, like General Motors or IBM or Chrysler, and he said that a large business cannot tolerate mistakes. “We’ve got seventy people here in camp now,” he said. “If the ones we have can’t do the job, we’ll get some more.” (p. 30)

If Kramer’s book added color to an existing dominant narrative about Lombardi’s management style, a number of subsequent player memoirs took increasingly oppositional stances. In his 1970 memoir Out of Their League, St. Louis Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy offered a counternarrative, critiquing the militarism, racism, and violence of his workplace: “After playing the sport most of my life, I’ve come to see that football is one of the most dehumanizing experiences a person can face” (Foreword). Also in 1970, New York Jets defensive back Johnny Sample published Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer:

Mention my name to most anyone who knows anything about professional football and they’ll tell you that I’m a “troublemaker,” or a “dirty ballplayer,” or that I have a “big mouth.” . . . By all the standards that guys like Vince Lombardi and Pete Rozelle hold forth, I am a troublemaker. They believe, you see, that a professional football player should be a nice, clean-cut guy who always smiles at the right times and gives his team the credit for his own performance. I don’t buy that. (pp. 3-4)

Sample’s autobiography invited fans to view the NFL from the perspective of a veteran African American player: “I didn’t want to be subjected to what I saw other black people being put through. So I fought to overcome the obstacles” (p. 6). Over the course of Sample’s 11 seasons in the NFL, the percentage of African American players in pro football grew from just over 10% in 1958 to just under 30% in 1968. By the early 1980s, Black players would constitute a majority of NFL athletes (Oriard, 2007). Sample’s outspoken memoir was one signal of a new era in pro football, as African American athletes helped lead a revolution in the styles of both on-field play and off-field self-presentation. As in U.S. workplaces more broadly, the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s upended the cultural hegemony of the postwar “organization man.”

In place of the self-mythologized consensus of the Lombardi era, the NFL gridiron of the 1970s and 1980s became a stage for competing narratives of management and rebellion. On-field expressions of player individuality, in particular the creative touchdown celebrations pioneered by Billy “White Shoes” Johnson and other African American stars, became the subject of endless debate among NFL officials, commentators, and fans. The voluminous commentary about players’ departures from traditional modes of comportment and deference to authority indexed a changing dynamic in NFL power relations, as a new generation of African American athletes revolutionized pro football’s politics of style (Dinerstein, 2005). Since the 1970s, contestation over the racialized cultural politics of workplace discipline has defined the NFL—the push and pull between creative celebrations and 15-yard penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct (Andrews, 1996; Cunningham, 2009).

Gambling and NFL Fandom

To this point, I have suggested two critical points of connection between pro football and the world of work more broadly: Pro football was born from welfare capitalism, and came of age as a touchstone for mid-century ideas about management and workplace discipline. I turn now to a third and final link between pro football and the modern U.S. workplace: gambling. One need look no further than George Halas’s memoir, with its vivid descriptions of the wagering that surrounded the Decatur Staleys and other early pro teams (Halas et al., 1979), to recognize that gambling was a prominent dimension of NFL spectatorship from the beginning. Mass betting played a critical role in propelling pro football’s mid-century growth into the nation’s most popular sport. The modern NFL proved to be an ideal subject for weekly wagers. Beginning in 1947, gamblers could inform their picks with information gleaned from NFL teams’ weekly reports on player injuries. NFL commissioner Bert Bell instituted this practice in the wake of the 1946 championship game, when allegations swirled that gamblers had access to inside information about the health of a few key players. The league began requiring teams to issue weekly public reports detailing player injuries, to guard against any implication that the games were not on the up-and-up (MacCambridge, 2004). Somewhat paradoxically, such efforts to assure the public that the NFL was free from the undue influence of professional gamblers only made betting more attractive to everyday fans.

Gambling on NFL games was especially commonplace among working-class fans. Government scrutiny of such practices in the postwar decades, from local police raids to U.S. Senate investigations, revealed the widespread nature of football gambling (Davies & Abram, 2001). A representative example unfolded in Decatur, Illinois in late 1963, when a local sting operation exposed rampant betting in several working-class bars (“Betting Cards,” 1963). Four decades after the Staley Company helped create professional football, Decatur workers (including, presumably, Staley employees) were using the NFL as a form of speculative entertainment. Football gambling was hardly confined to off-work hours; weekly betting sheets were ubiquitous on shop floors across the country. In 1961, an official with the National Labor Relations Board described conditions at Chicago’s Young Spring and Wire company: “Gambling was so rife that the plant might more appropriately be described as a gambling establishment than an automotive parts factory” (Bliss, 1961, p. A1).

Football betting was an open secret in workplaces and working-class bars for decades, and in the age of the modern NFL, it helped to drive interest in Sunday telecasts. The popularity of football betting made a national celebrity out of Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, an oddsmaker whose weekly column on betting lines for the Las Vegas Sun entered syndication soon after its debut in 1963. Before making it big in Las Vegas, he had cut his teeth in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, which he later described as “a wide-open town, a steelworker’s town, forty thousand citizens including the employees of eleven bookmaking establishments” (Snyder, 1975, p. 8). In 1976, CBS added Snyder as a co-host of The NFL Today. Sharing a studio with Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, and Irv Cross, “The Greek” would offer his predictions for the day’s games. The NFL establishment’s embrace of the celebrity oddsmaker represented an acknowledgment that millions of NFL fans were tuning in with a little action of their own on the line.

Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder appeared on The NFL Today until January 1988, when he was fired for making reprehensible comments about African American athletes. Speaking to a reporter working on a story timed for release on the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday, Snyder said, “[if blacks] take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people.” He went on to give a racist, essentialist assessment of the sources of athletic talent: “the black is a better athlete to begin with, because he’s been bred that way” (Solomon, 1988, p. A18). Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s comments were revealing—not simply about one celebrity’s views, but also about betting’s dehumanizing potential as a framework for viewing athletic performance. Wagering on games invites spectators to attempt to assess and evaluate the profit potential contained within athletic bodies. In the context of the modern NFL, in which the majority of players are African American, gambling’s speculative gaze bears traces of the historical commodification of laboring Black bodies under slavery.

Betting, of course, would continue to constitute a prominent dimension of NFL spectatorship long after Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s departure from the national stage. In the final decades of the 20th century, a wildly popular new mode of speculation on player talent emerged, in the form of fantasy football. As in other fantasy sports, fantasy football players act as if they are in charge of their own pro teams. Fantasy leaguers draft and manage rosters of NFL players, competing with other “owners” to compile the best statistics over the course of the season. Dedicated fantasy enthusiasts devote several hours each week to researching up-and-coming and undervalued players, to execute trades with league mates, and otherwise improve their teams. Recent years have seen the growth of so-called daily fantasy leagues, which dispense with season-long team management and allow fans to wager on their ability to select a high-performing roster of players during a given weekend’s NFL action. While those who do not wish to place bets can find both season-long and daily leagues in which to play simply for entertainment, most fantasy leagues compete for prize money.

Given that 70% of NFL players are African American, while 80% of fantasy leaguers are White (Kaylor, 2015; Lapchick, Malveaux, Davison, & Grant, 2016), fantasy football is a profoundly racialized mode of fan engagement (Hill, 2010; Oates, 2009). Furthermore, it positions fans to view players as dehumanized commodities in ways that both recall and extend the discourses to which Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder gave voice in 1988. As Oates (2009) has argued, fantasy football’s exploding popularity coincides with the concurrent ascendance of other new outlets that construct players as commodities, notably the video game Madden NFL and intensive media coverage of the annual NFL draft. Oates’s analytical term for these forms of entertainment—“vicarious management”—powerfully underscores the ways in which NFL fans are increasingly invited to “identify with the institutional regimes of the NFL . . . rather than with the athletes” (p. 32). Fantasy football’s positioning of fans as managers reflects shifts in both the construction of NFL spectatorship and in the organization of work beyond the gridiron—the constellation of modern workplaces where, behind countless cubicle walls and on every variety of Internet-equipped screen, millions of U.S. workers take part in the imaginary management of NFL talent.

Fantasy Football: Workplace Cultural Practice

Fantasy football’s roots stretch back to 1962, when a tile company executive and part owner of the Oakland Raiders, together with two sportswriters covering the team, hatched the idea for the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (Anderson & Bowman, 2016). Spinoffs and copycats followed, in the Bay Area and around the country. Sportswriters from other NFL cities who learned about the game through friends and colleagues in Oakland set up their own leagues (Donaldson, 1984). Professional sportswriters did not hold a monopoly on fantasy football expertise or enthusiasm, however. In 1984, two fans from Minneapolis—Cliff Charpentier and Tom Kane, Jr.—created their own publishing company, Fantasy Sports, Inc., and produced 5,000 copies of what would become an annual volume, distributed nationwide—“The Fantasy Football Digest” (“Sports World Specials,” 1984). By the early 1990s, fantasy football was an established if relatively minor form of spectatorship. One of the striking aspects of fantasy football’s development in this period was its close proximity to older forms of sports betting. Danny Sheridan, arguably the nation’s most prominent oddsmaker after the demise of Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, published an annual fantasy football guide from 1990 to 2000 (Sheridan, 2000).

The Internet era saw fantasy football explode into a mainstream form of NFL spectatorship. ESPN.com debuted a fantasy sports platform in 1995, and several other online sports sites quickly followed suit (Belsky & Fine, 2016). Instead of tabulating statistics themselves using newspaper box scores, or subscribing to print or call-in subscription services, fantasy leaguers could now watch their teams compile points in real time on the web. They could also research players, make trades, and otherwise manage their rosters any time they found themselves online. Content providers joined together to found the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) in 1998, which became a powerful collective voice for the industry (Billings & Ruihley, 2014). As part of its efforts to advocate on behalf of fantasy providers, the FSTA began publishing periodic research reports on the industry. According to the FSTA, in 1988, approximately 500,000 people in the United States and Canada played fantasy sports; by 2016, the industry counted more than 57 million players, who spent a total of nearly US$32 billion on their habit (FSTA, 2016).

By the early 2000s, the field of management consulting took notice of fantasy football’s growing popularity. Drawing on FSTA data, the Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas began publishing an annual report on fantasy football’s impact on U.S. workers’ productivity. In 2005, their report estimated that U.S. employers lost nearly US$200 million to workers managing their teams on company time (Boyle, 2005). In 2015, Challenger’s estimate of lost productivity ballooned to US$16 billion (Rocco, 2015). In its annual reports—timed to coincide with the football season, generating plenty of publicity for the company’s consulting services—Challenger, Gray & Christmas has consistently cautioned employers against blocking access to fantasy football websites or otherwise preventing employees from playing on company time. A number of companies—including General Motors in 2004—have attempted to institute such bans (“GM Cracks Down,” 2004). Instead, citing survey data showing that large percentages of fantasy leaguers report talking to their co-workers about their teams during breaks in the workday, Challenger, Gray & Christmas argues that leagues can help improve workplace culture (Rocco, 2015). Another consulting firm, J. J. Keller, offers similar advice:

Trusting that employees will get their work done in a high-quality manner, and that they know how to juggle both their jobs and the responsibilities of fantasy football team ownership, can build morale. This approach holds workers accountable for doing their jobs well without depriving them of the opportunity to make or boast about a strategic trade. (Dougherty, 2012)

As the ongoing attention from consulting firms suggests, recent years have found millions of U.S. workers spending significant amounts of time on the job playing fantasy football. What should we make of this dimension of contemporary football spectatorship—those millions of office workers, sitting at their desks, spending unproductive hours evaluating talent and executing trades? There is a rich and diverse scholarly literature on gambling, ranging from T. H. Breen’s (1977) work on horse racing in Colonial Virginia to Amy Chazkel’s (2011) recent history of the “jogo do bicho” lottery in Brazil. For scholars of everyday acts of betting and speculation, Clifford Geertz’s (1973) classic ethnographic analysis of the Balinese cockfight as “metasocial commentary” looms large—“a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves” (p. 448). Millions of office workers, the so-called human capital of the knowledge economy, have made the wagers and trades of fantasy football a key story of their own working lives. The most iconic representations of white-collar office work in U.S. popular culture of the last quarter century, Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoon (1989–) and Mike Judge’s comedy film Office Space (Rappaport, Rotenberg, & Judge, 1999), figure the cubicle as a site of stupefying drudgery under the threat of corporate downsizing. As a cultural practice, online fantasy football has proved powerfully adaptive to the spaces and daily grind of modern office work. In the captivating challenge of constructing a successful roster over the course of a season, fantasy football allows office workers who spend the rest of their day being managed an outlet in which to act as managers themselves. If texts such as Dilbert and Office Space construct the cubicle as a scene of emasculation, fantasy sports providers construct their products as escape routes to experiences of domination, expertise, and wealth.

Fantasy football’s positioning of spectators as imaginary managers has proved useful to the NFL in the midst of one of the most serious crises in the league’s history—growing public outrage over revelations of the debilitating brain injuries suffered by NFL players. In the fall of 2013, critical scrutiny of the NFL reached a new level, with the release of League of Denial (Fainaru-Wada & Fainaru, 2013). The book, written by two ESPN reporters, with its accompanying PBS Frontline documentary of the same name, was a damning expose of the NFL’s obstructionist response to research on players’ safety and health. That same fall, the NFL launched a striking new advertising campaign—“Together We Make Football.” Soliciting video submissions from fans, the league built a multi-year ad campaign, including TV ads during game broadcasts as well as a long-form NFL Films production (“Together We Make Football,” n.d.). The campaign exemplified one of the NFL’s most distinctive public relations strategies in the concussion era: to frame fans, rather than players, coaches, or NFL executives, as the sport’s key makers of meaning.

Fantasy football takes the fan-centered framing of NFL football to another level. Fantasy leaguers are not only invited to “make football,” they can own it and manage it, as well. After many years of keeping it at arm’s length, NFL officials came to wholeheartedly embrace fantasy football. The NFL began hosting fantasy leagues on its website in 2010, enticing fans with exclusive web content. For example, leagues holding their annual drafts on NFL.com could now hear the voice of commissioner Roger Goodell announcing the name of each player selected, just like in the real NFL draft (Burke, 2011). In 2015, multiple NFL teams opened fantasy football lounges where fans can congregate to follow their personal rosters as part of the game-day stadium experience (Holloway, 2015). These developments reflect an acknowledgment that fantasy football has been a boon to the league’s bottom line, driving rabid interest in every play of every NFL game. Even more important, fantasy football has performed valuable narrative and framing work for the NFL in an era of near-existential crisis. This extraordinarily popular form of speculative entertainment positions fans to view injured players as depreciated assets, rather than as human beings facing an occupational health crisis. At a moment in which growing numbers of commentators are calling into question the morality of spectatorship in light of football’s brain injury epidemic (Krattenmaker, 2016), fantasy football’s dehumanizing gaze seems ideally suited to serve the interest of NFL executives. It is revealing that a cultural practice so deeply embedded in contemporary U.S. workplace culture erects imaginative barriers to fans’ capacity to view players as fellow workers worthy of empathy and solidarity.

In recent years, social media platforms such as Twitter have become central platforms for fan engagement with NFL teams and players. Enabling new forms of direct communication between fans and athletes, social media sites play host to fantasy football’s proliferating discourses of commodification. During every game day of the NFL season, disgruntled fantasy owners can be observed tweeting at players who have failed to meet performance expectations, including those who have suffered injuries that prevented them from finishing the game. The expletive-laced tweet from a fantasy leaguer questioning an injured player’s manhood has become a defining genre of fan discourse in the age of social media. Given the comparative demographics of fantasy leagues and the NFL, the weekly tirades of White fantasy owners toward African American athletes are a revealing spectacle of the racial politics that structure contemporary professional football.

NFL players have responded to fantasy football’s dehumanizing discourses in creative ways. Over the course of his NFL career, Houston Texans running back Arian Foster became a master of engaging his online critics. A superstar when healthy, Foster suffered a long string of injuries, causing fantasy owners to treasure any shred of insight or inside information about his health. During a preseason game in 2011, he injured his hamstring, and was immediately inundated with social media inquiries from fantasy leaguers with a betting interest in his body. He tweeted, “For those seriously concerned, I’m doing OK and plan to be back by opening day. For those worried about your fantasy team, you people are sick” (Rosenthal, 2011). Two days later, he needled fantasy owners further by tweeting out a revealing image from his own medical records, along with instructions for informed viewing: “This is an MRI of my hamstring. The white stuff surrounding the muscle is known in the medical world as anti-awesomeness” (Foster, 2011a). Like all NFL players, Foster found his body the subject of constant news reports, social media inquiries, and fantasy football speculation. By posting his MRI results, he poked fun at the extraordinary spectacle of interest surrounding his injured hamstring. Here and elsewhere, Foster also called out fantasy football’s construction of fans as owners. After a great game later that season, a fan posted on Twitter to compliment Foster on his excellent performance: “Thank u for my 40 fantasy points.” Foster replied, “Those are mine. Give them back please” (Foster, 2011b).

In September 2014, reacting to the frenzy of fantasy interest that had accompanied the opening weeks of the NFL season, San Francisco 49ers’s wide receiver Stevie Johnson (2014) tweeted, “I drafted many of you to my fantasy work team so make sure to grab me some points today at your workplace. Don’t let me down.” Johnson’s witty post revealed deeper threads that wind through multiple periods of transformation in the history of the NFL. In disrupting a racialized script constructed about his labor, Johnson enacted a cultural politics that recalled the narrative interventions and stylistic innovations of African American players from earlier generations, like Johnny Sample and Billy “White Shoes” Johnson. Moreover, Stevie Johnson’s tweet humorously underscored the fact that the gridiron has always been constructed in relationship to other sites of labor. Welfare capitalists of the 1920s, NFL mythologizers of the 1960s, and imaginary managers of recent decades all made and remade the game in relationship to the dynamics of workplaces far removed from the playing field. Highlighting this ongoing, central theme of NFL history, Stevie Johnson cautioned football fans that they cannot begin to understand his workplace without taking stock of their own.