From Buckeyes to Brand: How Ohio State Football Became America’s Sneaky Export of Empire

Ohio State Football: America’s Gladiatorial Cult Reaches Out to the World
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Buenos Aires

The first thing to understand is that in most countries, the word “football” conjures images of Lionel Messi gliding past defenders or a rain-soaked Champions League night in Manchester. In Ohio, however, it summons 102,780 Midwesterners dressed like scarlet fever, screaming at 19-year-olds who’ve been taught that blocking schemes are more important than basic compound interest. Welcome, international reader, to Buckeye Nation: a place where the local religion’s cathedral is a concrete horseshoe and the communion wafer is a $12 slice of pepperoni that tastes faintly of economic despair.

From afar, Ohio State football looks like the distilled essence of American excess. There’s the marching band that spells “OHIO” in cursive while performing a flawless Michael Jackson moonwalk—because nothing says higher education like synchronized brass instruments celebrating a man who last moonwalked in 1983. There’s the coach, Ryan Day, who earns $9.5 million a year, or roughly the GDP of the Solomon Islands, to answer questions such as “How do you stop a 240-pound teenager from Wisconsin?” with the gravitas usually reserved for nuclear launch codes. And then there’s the television contract, a 12-year, $7 billion deal that ensures the Buckeyes will be beamed into your cousin’s Manila living room at 3 a.m., right between a rerun of Friends and a Korean skincare infomercial. Globalization, but make it shoulder pads.

The geopolitical angle is deliciously absurd. Qatar has liquefied natural gas; Ohio has liquefied hormones. Both are export commodities, both finance shiny new infrastructure, and both leave outsiders wondering whether the environmental cost is worth the thrill. Only one, however, requires its laborers to memorize a 400-page playbook and risk early-onset dementia. The NCAA insists these young men are “student-athletes,” a phrase that sounds charming until you realize the average player’s scholarship is worth about 17% of the revenue he generates—less equitable than your average lithium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Meanwhile, the brand is metastasizing. Alumni clubs now meet in London pubs where expats argue whether the defensive coordinator’s Cover-4 scheme can stop the spread offense the way Brits once debated the Maginot Line. In Shanghai, bootleg “Buckeye” hoodies—complete with the iconic nut that looks suspiciously like a shriveled testicle—sell for ¥199 on Taobao. Even the Kremlin has taken notice: Russian state television recently ran a segment suggesting that if the U.S. ever tires of proxy wars, it could simply challenge Iran to a neutral-site game in Dublin. Winner takes sanctions relief; loser learns what a “targeting” penalty feels like.

All of this would be merely farcical if it weren’t so grimly predictive. Study the Ohio State phenomenon and you see tomorrow’s soft-power playbook: wrap tribalism in nostalgia, monetize nostalgia through media, then export the package to countries hungry for spectacle and starved of meaning. The Saudis already tried it with LIV Golf, but money alone can’t manufacture 100 years of manufactured tradition. You need marching bands, fight songs, and at least one grainy black-and-white photo of Woody Hayes punching an opposing player. Authenticity, even of the ersatz variety, can’t be purchased; it must be laundered through decades of shared delusion.

And so, as COP28 delegates argue over carbon targets in Dubai, a caravan of charter flights will ferry Buckeye boosters to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl—each jet spewing roughly 12 metric tons of CO₂, or the annual footprint of a Malawian village. The halftime show will celebrate California’s “natural beauty,” a phrase that now evokes wildfire smoke and bankrupt utility companies. Somewhere in Lagos, a 12-year-old wearing an Ohio State jersey will watch on a cracked Android, dreaming not of curing malaria but of one day obliterating That Team Up North. The circle of life, sponsored by Coca-Cola.

In the end, Ohio State football is less a sport than a multinational fever dream: part carnival, part hedge fund, part military parade. It teaches us that if you package nostalgia aggressively enough, the world will queue up to inhale it. Just don’t ask what happens when the lights go out and the unpaid labor discovers compound interest. Until then, O-H? I-O. And pass the antacid, comrade—global capitalism is a contact sport.