I don’t care about music. I never have. Neither have I met a person who listens to less.
What I do care about is football. I care about it more than almost anything. It occupies a sacred space in my mind. Naturally, when I heard Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, my response was, “Who cares? It’s halftime.” Getting worked up about Bad Bunny performing at halftime is akin to arguing over which team won the post-game press conference. You’re missing the game for the spectacle.
The fact that America will see a non-English halftime show for its biggest annual event is far from a slap to the face of the game. It’s a natural outgrowth of football’s long-observed shift. American football is losing its tradition, its identity, and everything that makes it sacred. If you’re taking issue with Bad Bunny, you’re woefully late to the party.
In a previous age, football was personal. The Super Bowl halftime show was a display of the host city’s culture and tradition. There were collegiate marching bands in the Los Angeles Coliseum, Mardi Gras jazz in New Orleans, Motown classics in Detroit, and holiday music in Minneapolis.
That all changed in 1993, when in response to television counterprogramming the previous year, the NFL elected to create a spectacle that would specially attract viewers who didn’t care about the game at all. The holiest ground in all football — the Rose Bowl — was defaced by the image of worldwide pop culture himself, Michael Jackson. His performance was at once a spectacular show and a grim herald for football’s future.
Football is synonymous with pop culture now. The game is a commodity that will be repackaged as many times as possible as long as it sells. Networks don’t care that fans hate the constant pans to Taylor Swift: It gets engagement. It makes no difference to the Los Angeles Rams that they don’t have any actual fans like they did in St. Louis: The seats still get filled. The thrill-seekers and celebrities in Southern California will pay far more for a ticket than any football-loving peon from Missouri. Don’t know a single player’s name? Can’t tell an H-back from a tight end? Who cares! No organization needs fans when it can have viewers.
This year’s halftime show featuring Bad Bunny is no departure from America’s game — it follows it in lock step. With very rare exceptions, the Super Bowl halftime show has progressively devolved into nothing more than a pop culture exhibition, favoring provocative individual performers with little actual skill over musically and talented shows. As long as it gets eyeballs, it doesn’t matter if the people are enjoying it. That’s how we got four different installments of Beyoncé and yet no Ed Sheeran.
The Bad Bunny saga proves the NFL is making too much money from non-fans to listen to its real audience. This is no more apparent than in the league’s international ambitions. The NFL now hosts games in Britain, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, and Spain. Many humorous interviews on the ground indicate that they don’t generate or attract any real fans, but they do expand media rights deals and create another broadcast window.
In the past two years, the NFL has laser-focused this push on Latin America. Multiple NFL por la cultura commercials air with every game, all featuring the league’s few Hispanic stars. They’re desperately attempting to hook the southern hemisphere on football’s more accessible variant, albeit an absolute abomination to the sport, flag football. An immensely popular Hispanic rapper on the sport’s biggest stage is the natural next step.
Don’t dislike the NFL because of the Bad Bunny decision. Dislike it for everything that came before. Our proud American tradition no longer runs deeper than bare, unashamed mass appeal. If you genuinely care about football, you’re not the target audience. You haven’t been for some time. In the quest for viewers, all will bow — even football. Bad Bunny is nothing new.
Lewis Thune is a senior studying politics.
