Britain bids for football’s hottest ticket
Americans go crazy for the Super Bowl. Could Britons learn to love it too?
Many
readers, I suspect, will, like me, have little love for American football, or indeed understand what is going on in the game. Our cousins over the pond, however, still cannot get enough of it, as shown by the “sky-high” prices for tickets for last weekend’s Super Bowl, says Nathan Frandino on Reuters. The Super Bowl is “always a hot ticket”, but prices this year were fuelled by a “perfect storm” of factors, including the fact that the Los Angeles Rams were playing in their home stadium and there were no Covid-related restrictions for the first time in two years. Entry-level tickets exchanged hands on StubHub, a retailer, for “just below $4,000”; average prices were around $6,500, leaving some die-hard fans in shock.
But if the tickets seem a tad pricey, that’s as nothing compared with the cost of commercials that air while the game is on, say Aimee Picchi and Khristopher Brooks on CBS News. A 30-second advertisement costs $6.5m, but that’s “just a fraction of the overall cost for advertisers” – firms “spend millions more on producing movie-quality advertisements and related marketing campaigns”. The cost may be justified given that the message is “beamed” to 100 million US viewers, but it also means that any mistake will be seen by the entire country, making finding the right message a “highstakes game”.
In 1999, for example, Just for Feet, a shoe retailer, ran an advertisement that depicted white hunters tracking a barefoot Kenyan runner before capturing him, drugging him and forcing shoes on his feet. As you might expect, that created a backlash and Just for Feet sued its advertising company. Super Bowl advertisements also have a habit of signalling a market top. The “dotcom” Super Bowl in 2000 saw more than a dozen new internet firms buying time only for many of them, including E-stamp.com and Pets.com, subsequently to fold. If you’ve invested in digital currencies, you might want to think again: several crypto firms this year “aimed to score big with viewers” by buying slots.
Football’s coming home
Next year, all this craziness might be coming to the UK. It might seem strange that British football club Tottenham Hotspur is “lining up a historic bid to stage the Super Bowl”, says Matt Hughes in the Daily Mail. But Tottenham in fact already has close links with the NFL, the American football league. In 2015 it agreed a ten-year contract worth £40m to host two regularseason matches each year for a decade at its stadium, which was built with an artificial American football field underneath its retractable grass pitch. Still, Tottenham and London will have to work hard to win the Super Bowl and the estimated $300m in economic benefits, as the bidding process is “akin to that for a World Cup or Olympic Games”. The NFL makes an “onerous list of demands of their hosts on issues such as parking, hotels and tax exemptions” and London will face competition from the likes of Sydney. That makes sense. Sports-mad Australians, famously, will watch anything. But Britain? Apparently, interest in the game is soaring here too. So why not. Super Bowl Tottenham 2026 here we come.
“Tottenham has agreed a tenyear contract worth £40m to host two regular season matches at its stadium each year”