The Superbowl is over for another year. People are happy or sad about the outcome, based on their life-long affinity for one team or another, or sometimes based more on whim. If someone won last year, that team is sort of automatically served up as the Goliath that David needs to take down. There are political angles to this year’s match-up and fans, too, but I can’t be bothered to track them down.
No one comes to me for draft picks
I am famously hostile to American football, but I come by it honestly. As a teenager I worked at Bronco Stadium, selling hot dogs and cokes, and I found football fans to be giant jerks. It was cold, the pay was lousy, there were no tips, there was a lot of shouting and grumbling and drunk old guys, it was often raining or snowing… what’s to love?
But it’s a big hairy deal in the U.S. It’s big business, too. The following are some round figures my sister and I found on the internet about all the money this big day costs or brings in, depending on your perspective (and by the way, this whole post was my sister’s idea!):
This does not include five-figure luxury boxes, player salaries (only the day-of bonus), or gaming or betting. You can see my sources at the bottom of this post. I didn’t put a bunch of time into it – maybe a couple hours. I was just curious. And the final figure wowed me.
Which is, in economists’ terms, a metric sh*t-ton of money, for one day, one game. Incidentally, if we count the 2025 Superbowl and the one from 2024, you have the whole annual USAID budget – that’s the agency Elon Musk fed “into the woodchipper” on a ketamine high while trying to impress his coterie of 19-24 year old hacker buddies.
With that same amount – two Super Bowl Sundays – one of the things USAID does is buys $2b of American farmers’ surplus food to send to people who are starving or at risk of starving – along with a raft of other funding that affects American farmers. USAID also saves millions of babies and adults from dying from HIV/AIDS.
I can tell you about projects I’ve evaluated that:
- Help a country digitize their Customs system and business registration
- Encourage women engineers to pursue careers in industry
- Train young adults in growing fields in their home countries, so they do not migrate
- Save coral reefs and watersheds from becoming wastelands
- Partner with the private sector to help agricultural cooperatives weather shocks.
That’s just five contracts that were halted last month, dead in their tracks, whether they were just starting or in their last days. No deliberation, no review, no “waivers” – don’t be fooled by their public relations. Even when the administration has approved a waiver, they have not approved the funding. The administration is letting the food rot in ports and storage units rather than let starving people access it.
I’ve got twenty-plus more years of projects I can tell you about. There’s too much to list. It’s exhausting reading about the evisceration of these imperfect human endeavors that nevertheless benefit millions of the world’s poorest people – so Musk and other billionaires can get richer with less (no) oversight.
Not even part of the story
But I digress. Let’s go back to the Superbowl for a minute. The $24b listed above is just one slice of the spoils. Interesting to see how the billionaire owners of the football teams have increased their teams’ value when they win their way to the big game:
Wowsers, ladies and gents. I guess the Superbowl is a microcosm of our society these days – wild money going to the wealthiest. Do these valuations mean anything to you? Can you imagine that kind of wealth? Meanwhile regular folk are cheering the game in a rare respite from arguing about the price of eggs and electing and defending a despot. Might want to rethink some priorities, but that’s just me, the football curmudgeon.
References and Credits
Football picture courtesy of Dave Adamson on Unsplash
“SAM” on Marca.com. “Super Bowl to cost $3 billion for American businesses,” 8 February 2025. https://www.marca.com/en/nfl/super-bowl/2025/02/08/67a7c1f3ca474126298b4597.html
Bondarenko, Veronika, Eric Reed and Kirk O’Neill. “Super Bowl LVII: This Is How Much $$$ The Big Game Makes Every Year,” The Street, 9 February 2023. https://www.thestreet.com/sports/super-bowl-revenue
Morris, Chris. “How much will the winners (and losers) of Super Bowl LIX get paid?” Fortune magazine, 10 February 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/02/09/super-bowl-59-winners-losers-compensation-chiefs-eagles/
Cunningham, Nate. “How Much Money Do NFL Owners Make for Winning the Super Bowl?” Sports Illustrated, 5 February 2025. https://www.si.com/nfl/how-much-money-do-nfl-owners-make-for-winning-the-super-bowl
Sanborn, Jerome. “Estimated Superbowl spending for 2025 and how your store can share in the profits.” North, 5 February 2025. https://www.north.com/blog/estimated-superbowl-spending-for-2025-and-how-your-store-can-share-in-the-profits
