Super Bowl Tickets

The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League and the most-watched television event in the United States in a typical year. It was born from the 1966 merger agreement between the established NFL and the upstart American Football League, whose champions met for the first time on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Green Bay Packers, with quarterback and Most Valuable Player Bart Starr leading the way, won the first two editions, and the AFL announced itself when the New York Jets shocked the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. When the merger was completed in 1970, the AFL clubs joined three NFL teams to form the American Football Conference while the rest became the National Football Conference, and the two conference champions have met in the Super Bowl to close every season since.

The name itself is an accident of history. Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt casually called the game the Super Bowl during merger meetings, possibly inspired by his children's Super Ball toy, and reporters adopted it immediately. The matchup was officially the AFL-NFL World Championship Game until the Super Bowl label stuck for good with the third edition in 1969. Roman numerals have identified each game since Super Bowl V in 1971, with a single exception for Super Bowl 50 in 2016, and the name became a trademark so valuable that the league guards it, which is why non-sponsoring advertisers keep calling it the big game. The audience explains the fuss. The seven most-watched broadcasts in American television history are all Super Bowls, and Super Bowl LIX drew an average of 127.7 million viewers in the United States, the largest audience on record for any American television broadcast.

No city owns the game, and the demand for Super Bowl tickets travels with it every year. NFL owners choose the host site, usually three to five years in advance, and the league leans toward warm-weather destinations, since stadiums where the average game-day temperature falls below 50 degrees must have a fixed or retractable roof or receive a waiver. The rotation has clear favorites. Through the first 60 editions, the Greater Miami area and New Orleans had each hosted eleven Super Bowls and the Greater Los Angeles area eight, and the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans has staged the game more often than any other stadium, eight times. Since 2022 the game has wrapped up the NFL season on the second Sunday in February.