Super Bowl XL - Why it matters

Super Bowl XL
Pittsburgh Steelers v Seattle Seahawks
Ford Field, Detriot
Sunday, 5 February
1830 EST on ABC / 2330 GMT on Sky Sports 1 and ITV 1


No game of football matters more but the Super Bowl is not only the high-profile finale of the NFL season. It is an unofficial American holiday, with the whole country grinding to a halt for Super Sunday. No other major sport has a one-off final - basketball, baseball and ice hockey all play best-of-seven series - so this is the one chance the sporting public gets to watch the two best teams in their given field go head-to-head in a winner-takes-all playoff.

Not only are the top 10 most-watched TV programmes ever in the US all Super Bowls, but the last two feature in the top five, with the 144,400,000 who watched New England's victory over Carolina in 2004 the best ever. An estimated billion people will watch world-wide. It's not surprising that a 30-second slot on ABC this Sunday will cost $2.4 million (£1.36m), with many advertisers coming out with commercials specially shot for the event.

On top of it all, this is the 40th enactment of a game that was conceived as an end-of-season spin-off, pitting the champions of the long-established, prestigious NFL against those of the upstart American Football League. The Los Angeles Coliseum was just two-third full for the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game to see the old guard Green Bay Packers knock off the new boy Kansas City Chiefs. The Packers' real test had come two weekends earlier, when they beat the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL title. Appropriately, the term "Super Bowl" was first applied for the third contest, when the AFL's New York Jets ushered in the era of parity by knocking off the Baltimore Colts. An echo of the college bowl games that have littered New Year since the turn of the century, the title apocryphally came from the"Super Ball" toy owned by one of AFL bigwig Lamar Hunt's children.

In 2006, tickets with a face value of $600 (£340) are changing hands for four times that amount, according to Pittsburgh radio, and there will not be a spare seat in the whole of 64,500-capacity Ford Field, which opened as a new home for the Detroit Lions in 2002. The game's second visit to the city (San Francisco beat Cincinnati in the Silverdome in 1982) is expected to generate something like $370 million for the depressed area in the "rust belt" formerly dominated by manufacturing industry and also provides Detroit with a stage rarely accorded a northern city as this is just the third time the big game has been played away from the sunshine states of the south and west.

The Steelers and Seahawks have been part of a massive pageant this week, from the circus of media day on Monday - "Is it your mother who’s blind, and your father who’s deaf," Raiders QB Jim Plunkett was asked in 1981, "or the other way around?" - to the music marathon on Sunday, which features Patti LaBelle before kick-off and the Rolling Stones at half-time. The result seems like an afterthought, but it will go down in history as one of the most memorable games ever whatever happens on the field.




NFLBriefing.com