For the past few weeks American radio and television commercials for many products, usually food, drink or some type of flat-screen innovation, have boasted almost identical taglines about how you simply must buy this in time for “the big game”.
Same story in supermarkets. Sprawling displays, sometimes replete with cardboard cut-outs of oversized gridiron goalposts, hawking the suitability of crisps or crackers for “the big game”.
These snacks are owned by companies that won’t pay big bucks for the right to use a copyrighted name. And why would they? Everybody already knows they are referring to the Super Bowl.
At a time when this nation is so divided that almost every aspect of our lives, the shows we watch, the books we read, the athletes we cheer, gets refracted through the prism of our politics, here is one event that still just about brings people, Trumplican or Democrat, however fleetingly, together.
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Once described by the Los Angeles Times as “New Year’s Eve, Fourth of July and Mardi Gras all rolled into one”, the Super Bowl remains a communal gathering that grinds the country to a halt for a few hours on the second Sunday night of every February.
The culmination of this and every NFL season will be watched by plenty of day-trippers who couldn’t tell you what those initials stand for. They might even struggle to vouchsafe whether the ball is pumped or stuffed, and think a blitz is something to do with second World War London.
Yet, inexorably, they are drawn to the gaudy spectacle. Failure to know what happens when the Kansas City Chiefs meet the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans could be social death at work on Monday. Better to know enough to be able to bluff.
Super Bowl parties are like midnight mass used to be when Ireland was still in the maw of the Catholic Church. The faithfully devoted are present for the blessed sacrament, hanging on every single word, rapt and relishing each repetitive instance of the holy ritual, so convinced that something truly miraculous is about to happen they spend half the time shushing everybody else. Meanwhile, the casuals are standing bleary-eyed and weary at the back, hastily second-guessing their beery decision to straggle in on the way home from the pub, wondering does the rite always take this long, and shout-whispering that they thought the food and drink options would be better.
“I want you to step back from the guacamole dip!” roared Bruce Springsteen into the television camera when he kicked off his half-time show back in 2009. “I want you to put the chicken fingers down!”
A bacchanal of vulgar excess, it’s estimated 1.25 billion wings will get scoffed at shindigs next Sunday night. Nearly 20 million pounds of crisps and tortilla chips will be dunked in 140 million pounds of avocados. One in seven Americans will order takeaways, and more than half of those will involve pizzas. All of this will be washed down by 325.5 million gallons of beer.
In a related note drunk-driving statistics skyrocket in the hours after the game, antacid sales spike next morning, and there’s a sporadic campaign for Super Bowl Monday to be declared a bank holiday.
The game is not just about imbibing savage amounts of food and drink, it’s also about people gambling money they don’t have on something they don’t understand. Betting underscores everything in this sport and did so long before it became legal in 38 states.
From the length of time Jon Batiste will take to sing the national anthem, to the Chiefs’ inevitable margin of victory, to the number of occasions Fox will pan to Taylor Swift cheering on her beau Travis Kelce, there’s a wager for every palate. In 2024, 68 million Americans punted more than $23 billion on this fixture, many of them complete novices seduced by the hyperbole and relentless, first hit is free, drug-dealing stratagems of vampiric bookmakers.
FanDuel, one such gambling predator, paid Fox $7 million for a 30-second ad in which Eli and Peyton Manning, two ex-NFL quarterbacks, will do their awful shilling.
Ridiculously overpriced and overhyped, the commercials are a welcome diversion for non-sports fans watching. Spotting the celebrity picking up a massive cheque for little work is a fun parlour game, and among those trousering the easy money this year will be Barry Keoghan in a turn for Squarespace (me neither) and David Beckham (Stella Artois). Both will be overshadowed by Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reprising the famous diner scene from When Harry met Sally in the name of flogging mayonnaise.
The presence of movie stars glitzing up the ads lends itself to serious commentators describing the Super Bowl as a true representation of what passes for culture in modern America. No argument here. An elongated and pompous pre-game ceremony. Jingoism and commercial patriotism coursing through every aspect of the production. Fetishisation of the military industrial complex with US Marines conducting a flyover of the stadium. An overlong half-time that prioritises the needs of gluttonous viewers at home rather than those of the players competing on the field.
Then the unctuous presentation of silverware to the owner of the winning team. Not the captain. Not even the coach. The plutocrat who writes the cheques and didn’t incur a single brain-damaging hit all season somehow gets the glory of lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
America’s way. America’s game.
