The Super Bowl Is Dying. Why That’s Bad for America.

What Happens When America’s Most Unifying Day No Longer Unifies Us?

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We hold these truths to be self-evident: Everybody loves The Super Bowl! The Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year! The Super Bowl is America’s religion!

Well, like many other aspects of American life these days, none of those truths turns out to be true anymore. It’s easy to miss what's happening amidst all the hype, but here’s the real truth: The Super Bowl is in trouble. And that’s not good for America.

Let’s start with some facts. Super Bowl viewership has generally been declining for a decade, from an all-time high of 114 million viewers in 2015 to just 92 million viewers last year—or 96 million if you throw in streaming. Even if you look to the pre-pandemic year of 2020, the number of viewers was only 100 million, still a significant drop. (P.S.: The NFL has been bragging for weeks about its uptick in ratings for this season, but they’ve failed to point out that a tweak in the rating system now counts “out-of-home viewing,” from hotels to bars, meaning most of this uptick is from adding new screens to the count.)

Still, even these declining numbers hide a much bigger problem. Younger people are abandoning the biggest television event of the year in droves. To pick one example, let’s compare the 2010 Super Bowl with the 2021 game. Overall viewership was down 13%, while viewership among 18 to 49-year-olds, the audience most prized by advertisers, was down 33%. You read that right: one-third fewer young adults watched the Super Bowl last year compared with a decade ago.

And that’s not even the worst news: Interest among Gen Z, the generation that comes after millennials, is lower still.

Michael Lewis, a marketing professor at Emory, recently found that Gen Z is almost completely bored by sports—both playing them and watching them.

As the New York Times reported: Only 23% of Generation Z said they were passionate sports fans, compared with the 42% of millennials, 33% of Generation X, and 31% of boomers. “More striking was that 27% of Gen Zers said they disliked sports altogether, compared with just 7% of millennials, 5% of Gen Xers, and 6% of boomers.”

For generations, sports leagues have counted on parents to pass along their love of sports to their children. That’s simply not happening anymore. As Tim Ellis, the chief marketing officer of the NFL, told the Times, “What we know is that if you don’t acquire a fan by the time they’re 18, you’re most likely never going to get them.”

On the one hand, you might be thinking: Who cares? The NFL has dominated American culture for years; a smaller number of viewers for its signature game is no big deal. Also, American football is violent, leaves a brutal trail of mental health problems, and has an abysmal track record of hiring minorities. On top of those problems, the league has embraced gambling in recent years to a degree that makes even fans like me sick to my stomach.

I agree with all those criticisms!

But at a time when American culture appears on many fronts to be coming apart at the seams, the decline of the Super Bowl suddenly feels more ominous. As we all know, our politics are splintering. Two new books published this month alone, The Next Civil War and How Civil Wars Start, openly imagine armed conflict within our own borders. From the Olympics to the Academy Awards, every other collective event has also seen viewership melt away. The 2022 Winter Olympics have drawn viewership less than half of four years ago!

So what do we lose when we stop watching the Super Bowl?

1. Shared ads.

The biggest thing we lose is a shared cultural experience. The Super Bowl is not just about football. A recent Morning Consult study found that 58% of viewers over 45 watch for the game itself, while 59% of Gen Z say the game is either a minor reason for watching or not a reason at all.

By contrast, three-quarters of viewers cite ads as a reason for watching, including 30% who call it the major reason. The Mean Joe Greene Coke ad was voted the greatest Super Bowl ad of all time—and can bring tears to even the most jaded TV viewer of a certain age. Funny ads are especially unifying, the study found. See, all those cute athletes and animals can bring the country together!

But not if we don’t watch.

2. Shared music.

That same Morning Consult study found that 50% of Gen Z viewers cite the halftime show as the sole or major reason for watching. My children are certainly in that category. Where will we be without Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction or Katy Perry’s dancing shark?

3. Even shared patriotism.

Finally, even one of the Super Bowl’s most iconic (and sometimes grating) elements, its patriotism, now seems valuable in its old-fashionedness, maybe even necessary. As Robert Gudmestad of Colorado State University recently explained,

It was in the 1950s that the singing of the National Anthem became commonplace before athletic contests in the United States, but professional football went further. As the commissioner Alvin “Pete” Rozelle later explained, the NFL made “a conscious effort…to bring the element of patriotism into the Super Bowl.” The NFL was responding to social anxiety from the Cold War. Before the Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl II in 1968, Air Force jets flew over the Orange Bowl. The 1969 contest upped the ante even further. In a game that became famous for Joe Namath’s guarantee of victory and the New York Jets' upset victory over the Baltimore Colts, the halftime show featured a patriotic theme.

So, yes, for all its flaws, we need the Super Bowl now more than ever. Without it, one last ritual that brings the country together will become a thing of the past.

So, enjoy the game—or ads, or the anthem, or the halftime show—everyone. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

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