Sunday (well, Thursday, but really Sunday) signalled the start of a new season of the National Football League. Like many Americans whose favourite sport is baseball, I have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with this interloper we call football. My enthusiasm for college football has waned as I’ve gotten older and attended college outside the United States, much less outside the Top 25, so this is going to be primarily about professional football.

There are several things to strongly dislike about the National Football League. The first is the entitlement the owners feel towards public subsidies for stadiums. Now there’s no doubt that many of the owners of Major League Baseball franchises feel the same way, but in the last thirty years we’ve seen NFL owners show they mean it, as hallowed franchises like the Los Angeles Rams, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts and Oakland Raiders (and Los Angeles Raiders) skipped town. Tom Benson, who owns the New Orleans Saints, tried to hold New Orleans hostage right after Hurricane Katrina, which is quite possibly the most tasteless thing ever, Al Davis’s sartorial choices excepted. Obnoxiously, these guys (and Georgia Frontiere) usually win and get their free stadium.

With the league rolling around in money, the distasteful way they treat the players looks even worse. The NFL is the only sport in America not to have real guaranteed contracts for its players. Now I do understand on a certain level that the extracting nature of the game requires financial flexibility for teams; nonetheless, this is self-justifying and the lack of care for fringe players and even worse retired players hurts the league. Baseball is no walk in the park for your body, but it’s much less common to hear of guys getting hip replacements before they turn 50, and God knows baseball doesn’t go after your noggin the way football does. The harrowing tale of Mike Webster and how the accumulation of brain injuries in his career just completely sapped him scares me.

But I just can’t rip myself from the sport. Football was invented at the Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, and various other public and private Eastern colleges, and the characterization of the football player as a Spartan philosopher-warrior arose early in football’s history. Damned if it doesn’t work; football is considerably more egalitarian now and the education standards for college players has possibly fallen, but these guys usually are articulate and it makes sense that a sport which relies heavily on quick reads and memorising playbooks should attract such men (even if Alex Smith is a MENSA member and can’t throw a goddamn pass correctly).

NFL Films turns the sport into melodrama – not drama, melodrama – and I eat it up. The graceful running of a back, the way the lines crash into each other like gladiators, the way the punter extends his leg almost up to his shoulder when kicking the ball is always expertly captured by NFL Films and usually matched with some orchestral suite (often times hilariously named something like “Dance of the Fumblers”) with the booming voice of someone like John Facenda or the dearly departed Harry Kalas. That the head of NFL Films, Steve Sabol, happens to be a personable chap and an outwardly enthusiastic historian of pro football doesn’t hurt.

Lastly, being a historian and buff of post-war American middle-class life – my life – it’s impossible to ignore the ascension of pro football in that sphere. Football is middle-class nirvana; best played in the suburbs on well-appointed fields at public high schools, best watched on television while firing up the barbeque and pounding brewskis with Tom from accounting and your next door neighbour Bill and generally most appreciated by people who have enough leisure time (that’d be the middle class) to obsess over their fantasy football teams, watch re-runs of games on NFL Network and look at stats on Pro Football Reference. It would be wrong and quite insufferable to say that football is only enjoyed by the middle class, since that’s a load of codswallop. All sports are enjoyed across the class boundaries, unless it’s something ridiculous like yacht sailing or polo, and plenty of football players come from the working class and the poor. But football seems to suit it best.

Also I really like those old helmets and the long-sleeve jerseys.

So here’s to you football. I’ll be crossing my fingers while raising my toast, but I do like you.