Super Bowl 59 and the game the league wanted: the ritual outgrows the sport

The Super Bowl was played on 9 February in New Orleans, and the game gave the league exactly what its marketing department ordered: the defending champions back on the biggest stage, a half-time show that the streaming services will count in the record books, and a result that the neutral viewer could enjoy even when the score was not close. The ratings, reported the following morning with the particular glee that the television industry reserves for such numbers, set a record that the previous year’s edition had already set, and the record was the confirmation that the event has outgrown its sport. The Super Bowl was, as always, the largest secular ritual the country performs, and the bigness was the story.

The game itself was a contest between the league’s two most complete teams, and the contest was decided, as such games usually are, by the details. The champions’ defence, the unit that had carried them through the season, controlled the line of scrimmage from the first drive; the challengers’ quarterback, the most decorated player of his generation, was under pressure that the offensive line could not hold; and the score, which the commercials interrupted with their usual frequency, widened through the second half to a margin that the broadcasters described, with the diplomacy of the genre, as commanding. The analysis in the days after will argue about the play-calling and the adjustments; the result will be remembered as the one that the champions’ defence imposed.

The half-time show deserves its own paragraph, because the show has become the event’s most watched segment and its most reliable headline. The performance was built, as the recent editions have been, on the reunion of the era’s defining artists, the songs that the audience knows by heart, and the production values that the network spends the year preparing; the broadcast’s social-media metrics, released in real time, showed the spikes at the set pieces, and the morning-after coverage measured the show’s success in the memes it generated. The show has become the Super Bowl’s second economy, and the second economy, the analysts note, is now worth more to the league than the first one.

The event’s economic footprint was the part that the host city felt most directly. New Orleans, a city that hosts such spectacles with the particular skill of long practice, filled its hotels and its restaurants for the weekend, and the local businesses reported the receipts that the chamber of commerce had forecast; the city’s recovery from the disasters of the past decades has been measured, in part, in its ability to host the country’s largest event, and the hosting is the proof of the recovery that the statistics can only approximate. The game’s broader economy, the advertising, the gambling, the merchandise, the travel, was estimated in the billions, and the estimate, the economists noted, was the event’s most reliable number.

The game after the game is the part that the league manages as carefully as the game itself. The off-season will begin with the draft order and the coaching changes, the free agency and the salary-cap arithmetic, and the champions will face the particular challenge of the teams that win the Super Bowl, which is the retention of the roster that won it. The neutral viewers who watched the game for the spectacle will not follow the off-season, and the league knows this, and the league’s business model is built on the gap: the event reaches the millions, the sport keeps the millions’ attention through the year, and the annual ritual renews the cycle. The game on 9 February was the largest event of the year, and the year after it will be spent, as always, on the business of the sport that the event advertises.