GAME OF LOVE
With the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day this week, we look at the love of the game and love in general
Host with the most
Arizona is hosting the Super Bowl for the fourth time, three of them coming after 2008. But the Super Bowl has given the most love to Miami. It has hosted 11 times and New Orleans has hosted 10.
Love watching
Of the 32 most-watched broadcasts in U.S. television history, 30 are Super Bowls.
The total viewership of the 2021 game declined nearly 10 million viewers from the previous year. The amount of people streaming the game has increased from 3.4 million in 2020 to 5.7 million in 2021.
Super Bowl XLI was watched by 99.18 million viewers in the U.S. The most-watched Super Bowl in history is Super Bowl XLIX, Patriots-Seahawks in 2015.
Ratings dominance
How much do people love watching football on TV? In 2022, Variety's annual list of the year's 100 most-watched prime-time telecasts found eight of the Top 10 prime-time shows were NFL games and 22 of the Top 25 shows were NFL games. The NBA Finals Game 6 was the next highest sport to get ratings. It was ranked 28th.
Loving those ads
Fox reportedly set its asking price for Super Bowl ads at $7 million for a 30-second window during the game. It marks a steep increase from the cost of running a commercial in previous years. $7 million for 30 seconds is about $233,333 per second.
Super Bowl ad costs by year:
2023: $7 million
2022: $6.5 million
2021: $5.6 million
2020: $5.6 million
2019: $5.2 million
Who loves football?
Colormatics, an advertising company, compiled the following demographics of football fans: Male 59%
Female 41%
Ages 18-49 years old: 70%
College educated: 68%
Household income over $75,000/year: 54%
Football fans are older than any other sports fanbase. More than half (55%) of all NFL fans are over the age of 35.
Football fans have the highest income of all sports fan demographics, with over 70% earning more than $75,000 annually.
Favorite league
Home Team Sports, a leader in sports marketing, commissioned a joint study with Wakefield Research Partners and YouGov to better understand the roots of fandom. They surveyed 2,462 fans representative of the U.S. adult population who selected a favorite league.
NFL (45.3%)
MLB (21.9%)
NBA (18.9%)
NHL (10.3%)
MLS (3.5%)
Love and loyalty Major wagers
The Super Bowl is considered the largest day for sports betting of the year.
In 2018, the Supreme Court removed the federal ban on sports betting, allowing states to legalize it if they choose. Now 36 states offer some form of legal U.S. sports betting either in person or online. Arizona has joined that group and live betting was launched in September 2021.
According to Sportsbook Review, Americans went from wagering $44 billion in 2021 to $74 billion in 2022, a 70% increase.
Until 2018, the NFL worked hard to distance itself from betting. But the league has done a complete about-face with the big money involved.
Love and facts
In past years the claim had been made that more women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day. According to fact checkers at Snopes.com, this claim is false. The following details are from Snopes: The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” is a case study of how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as “fact” even when there is little or no supporting evidence behind it. Christina Hoff Sommers charted a timeline of how the apocryphal statistic about domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday was widely (if erroneously) publicized over the course of a few days leading up to the Super Bowl in January
1993 held in Pasadena.