I feel your pain. My octogenarian mother wants to buy me a smartphone because
the voice quality of my dumb phone isn't very good and her vision isn't up to
text messaging.
I'm not a football fan, but you might be able to use a plug-in for Abrowser
called greasemonkey and this userscript:
http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/show/154468 to watch the game.
I believe that netflix requires something proprietary and that you would have
to go to the Ubuntu forums to find the workaround if you decided to go that
route.
We use DVDs for movies if sharing with friends isn't an option. You might be
surprised at what you can get from the public library as long as you get them
back in time.
hth
