Editorial: Will football make it to Super Bowl LXXII?

Justin Timberlake, star of the 2018 NFL Super Bowl halftime show, said he would never let his son play football. 

While Timberlake may have said so in jest, he is not the only parent wary of letting his son get involved in the sport. Youth tackle football is on the decline in the U.S., likely due to a flurry of studies that found football was closely linked to CTE, a neurodegenerative disease. This correlation was not limited to those in the NFL; research also demonstrated that playing tackle football before age 12 was linked to cognitive and behavioral problems later. The NFL, on a mission to keep the sport alive, recently invested $45 million in USA Football. 

But who will the NFL keep in the game? 

More and more sports are becoming inaccessible to kids from low-income households. Aspen’s Sports & Society program released research that concluded, “All that matters is if kids come from a family that has resources. If you don’t have money, it’s hard to play.” 

Youth sports have become a lucrative industry in the U.S. — transforming sports like soccer from accessible-to-all to limited-to-some. Participating in an elite sports club is almost a necessity to winning a college scholarship.   

Still, even the parents of middle-class families who can afford to send their kids to football leagues like Pop Warner have been reconsidering in recent years. ESPN’s "Outside the Lines" reported that the nation’s largest youth football organization lost 23,612 participants from 2010 to 2012, the largest two-year decline in the history of the association. Youth football in general has seen far lower numbers since the 2000s, falling from 3 million youth players in 2010 to 2.169 million in 2015.

While middle-class families can afford to pay for their college-athlete hopefuls to play sports that are generally considered safer, lower-income families may not be able to afford this luxury.  

Football seems to be one of the only sports that remains available to low-income households — and therefore stands as one of the only avenues left for a college scholarship — the golden ticket for some students to higher education. 

This could have a disparate effect on who plays football, rendering it a classist sport. 

While a group of star-studded parents including Mark Cuban and Barack Obama seem to be pushing to keep kids out of the sport, the same push might not be occurring in households where football is not only a large part of their surrounding culture, but a part of their life. 

Behind the plays are players, and each of those players are people with childhoods and futures ahead of them. Athletics are a cornerstone of American culture, let's make them safer and more accessible.