The game needs to change. It has changed once before, when football was a smaller pastime largely limited to colleges and universities. It still took a standing president of the United States’ intervention to temper the violence of the sport — and only then, after actual deaths occurred on the field. The game wasn’t the heavily leveraged, culturally embedded, and highly lucrative billion-dollar industry it is today. The odds of significant change happening now without legal intervention, given what the sport is and who profits most from it, are very, very long.
If — and it is a huge if — football will survive, then its revamp should start simple. Those who want football to continue in one form or another should think of the basic building blocks of football itself as changeable, updatable programming. They should start at the grassroots of the sport to affect the largest number of possible teams and games and leagues playing the sport. They should think about the nature of the game itself, and how to keep as much of it as possible without leaning into the excesses of football as it is currently played.
It should start now. Football 3.0 is coming, and this is what it will look like if it wants to survive.
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