The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will meet on Feb. 8 to play in the 60th Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). It’s certain to be the most highly viewed television program of the year in the United States. But football isn’t just a mainstay of U.S. culture—it’s also an enormous business.
What is the relationship between football and the U.S. military? Does football lead to violence in American society? And are Super Bowl commercials worth their enormous cost?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: One expression of football’s specific role in American life is its relationship with the United States military. How would you characterize that relationship?
Adam Tooze: There was a scandalous phase where it emerged in the early 2010s that the U.S. military was paying the NFL. So, this was actually just secret advertising, but de facto, the NFL was receiving funds from the U.S. military for the staging of flags at the beginning of games, the honoring of veterans, the whole works. It was actually paid advertising coming out of the recruitment budgets of the U.S. military. This was exposed by a senatorial committee led by [Jeff] Flake and [John] McCain and stopped as far as I’m aware.
So, there’s no longer a commercial arrangement. But because this was established as a precedent, the NFL has continued to do it. Obviously, it takes money and resources to do a flyby—quite a lot, flying a bunch of military aircraft across a football field is not free. But apparently the Air Force logs it as training flying time, so it’s okay. But there’s no actual payment from the U.S. military to the NFL anymore, at least as far as I’m able to establish.
CA: Violence is inherent to the sport of American football on the field. Could football be said to be producing violence in American society?
AT: On the field itself, there have been long-standing concerns about the damage done to the players, up to and including death, permanent disability, paralysis, and long-term brain damage from repeated concussions. Because it’s a sport with a very large percentage of African American players, there is also an element of racial and socioeconomic inequality at play. It’s a little bit like boxing: This is one of the ways for highly talented Black young men to make their way up the American social ladder by way of scholarships to prestigious universities. And they pay a very heavy price.
It’s completely normal to watch an American football game and see somebody experience a career-threatening, if not career-ending, injury. In fact, you can watch a game and see several people suffer that kind of disastrous fate, and it ruins their lives.
The other thing that’s striking if you watch American football as opposed to, say, soccer, is the extraordinary hierarchy of the game: the division of labor, the rigid divisions between different roles, and the extraordinary top-down management. So, in the history of warfare, it seems like it would be like an 18th-century battle with intense remote control, with lines of soldiers facing off against each other. But in fact, it has little to do with modern warfare, which requires much higher degrees of autonomy and flexibility. It’s more like a computer version of what an armchair tactician or strategist might imagine war to be like.
The social psychological inquiries do show spikes in violence around major American football games, notably when you have reversals of fortune. So, basically, look at what the betting odds were ahead of the game—and there’s no laughing matter because what we’re talking about is that domestic violence spikes as men who have suffered profound disappointment because their team has lost unexpectedly take it out on their families.
It should be said, however, that you see exactly the same pattern in other sports that have been studied, including rugby and soccer (or football) in the British context, which is widely thought of as a non-contact sport, but in fact is very physical if it’s played at a high level and engages passions. There have been several studies of the famous Glasgow clash between the Celtic and Rangers soccer clubs. In the aftermath of a Celtic and Rangers game, there are regular spikes of violence, notably in games where the odds are overturned. (All of this pales by comparison with just the general spike in domestic violence that happens around all holidays.)
So, all of these specific logics—of competitive sport, male humiliation, and, in the case of football, the actual visceral violence of the sport—produce these reactions. One of the things from a European point of view that’s also fascinating about American football is that virtually no adults play it [recreationally], right? Whereas soccer, men go on playing, women play soccer in large numbers, just as a hobby.
American football, because it’s so violent, just narrows down incredibly quickly. In high school, a broader cross section of kids play. By the time you get to college, you’re either in the elite college teams or you’re not playing. And there aren’t multiple tiers: It’s not like there’s a second division, a third division, a fourth division, or certainly not one that counts for anything—unlike in soccer, where you have an entire infrastructure of teams.
The number of people that are directly involved in the sport is quite small—fewer than basketball, for instance, where there are loads of pickup games going on all over the place, or baseball for that matter, or softball, or any of its spinoffs. You know, you don’t see a bunch of middle-aged people playing a real game—of course, there’s flag football and things like that. In the adverts, they like to invoke these kinds of images of family pastime football, but it’s not really a thing.
CA: Commercials aired during the Super Bowl are the most expensive of the entire year in the United States. In what sense can they be said to be worth it?
AT: The evidence is that they do work. So, Budweiser, which usually has a prominent beer endorsement, sees a spike in consumption. Would they see a spike anyway? I think their argument is that they need to have the spot, because otherwise one of their competitors will have it. So, the crucial thing is not to lose brand positioning relative to somebody else. Coke and Pepsi basically both have to be there because if [just] one of them was there, they would be taking market share away from their competitor and that’s not acceptable, so they’re both there to counterbalance.
And, again, the evidence is that it does work. The most dramatic evidence of this is the Macintosh, the very famous 1984 [Super Bowl] advert, which essentially launched Apple as a dramatically conspicuous consumer product company.
It was the first cinematic advert maybe on U.S. television. Ridley Scott directed it, and basically, they started with an Orwellian scene of—this is what 1984 was supposed to be like. So, there’s this sort of thought dictatorship, there’s a hero character that’s being chased, and then—this is not how 1984 is going to go. Why not? It cuts to this, in a couple of weeks’ time, we’re releasing the computer by the computer. And because it’s all going to be your personal computer, it’s this promise of freedom, autonomy, and everything else.
This advert is widely thought to have had a massive double effect. It launched Apple as the—to coin a phrase—consumer brand of modern America. And it also established the Super Bowl advert as this defining element. It’s also said that it helped that this was a particularly boring game in which it was clear from the very start who was going to win and so attention shifts to the snacks, the beer, and the adverts. Then along came this Ridley Scott—a year and a half after he’d done Blade Runner, really in his pomp, not in his current degenerate phase.
So, the commercials can really matter; they are moments in American popular culture.
