The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America. By Gregg Easterbrook. Thomas Dunne; 354 pages; $25.99. Buy from

WHY should readers care about the difference between a tight end and a slot receiver, between the counter trey and the fumblerooski? Because football in America is not only a sport; it is also big business, and getting bigger.

Starting next year a group of four American television networks and a satellite-service provider will pay the National Football League (NFL) $6 billion in broadcast rights, up from $2 billion in 1998. Nearly a third of this will come from ESPN, a sports network, to broadcast Monday Night Football. This amounts to roughly $112m per game, or 14 times the per-game price it pays to show professional baseball. The NFL’s total revenue last year was around $9.5 billion.

It is not just professional football that is popular. In the early 1950s broadcast rights for all college football cost $8m in current dollars. In 2012 ESPN paid $55m for broadcast rights for a single game (the Orange Bowl). At many universities football coaches make more than the presidents. In 2011 California’s highest-paid state employee was Jeff Tedford, who coached its flagship university’s football team—and was fired a year later for poor results.

In “The King of Sports” Gregg Easterbrook, who writes a column on professional football for ESPN’s website and is also a contributing editor at several American magazines, examines what football’s popularity says about America. It brings political heft of the sort that drives politicians to grant non-profit status to the NFL, thus letting it avoid millions in taxes. It drives universities to throw scholarships at promising young athletes, while caring little about whether they get an education as long as they perform well on the field. In 2010 Auburn University, for instance, won a national championship and paid its head coach $3.5m, yet just 52% of its black football players actually graduated.

Popularity also lets rich team-owners negotiate sweetheart deals with cities. Starting in 2001, for instance, the Louisiana legislature voted to give Tom Benson, the owner of New Orleans’s football team, an annual $8.5m “inducement payment” to keep him from moving his team. Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, spent $26m a year on servicing the debt for their professional football team’s stadium while the county cut spending on public schools.

Facts such as these are infuriating, but a compelling book must be more than an agglomeration of facts, and Mr Easterbrook’s work is strikingly uneven. He is given to spluttering fits of moral outrage that lead him to contradict himself. Regarding university alumni who donate to their alma maters’ football programmes, he loftily pronounces, “Money given to sports does not serve a larger social purpose,” whereas later in the book he waxes lyrical about how football can “bring Americans together for civic celebration”.

The writing is also annoying. Mr Easterbrook makes flat jokes and can be oddly lazy. “Perhaps in some ineffable way the too-big nature of football helps stimulate American freedom and affluence.” Yes, perhaps. Those are the questions one might want to ponder—in a book about American football, for instance.