The Super Bowl took place in America last night and whilst I know that the Super Bowl is a football game, after reading the news this morning it seems like it’s a bit bigger then just a sporting event.
I woke this morning to papers littered with stories about the Super Bowl but not one of them mentioned the game. That almost seems secondary to everything else that went on around it. So far I’ve read how Christina Aguileria made a catastrophic mess of the national anthem, and how the Black Eyed Peas half time show was the best since Bruce Springsteen three years ago. Whole news articles have been dedicated to the celebrities that were at the game, but none mention the game itself, so it seems to me isn’t the super bowel more of a TV show then it is football game?
A 30 second advert for The X Factor was shown during the match, which apparently cost $1.8 million to air. $1.8 million for one single advert! That is a ridiculous amount of money, yet companies pay it! And I can’t help but think… why on earth isn’t the UK doing this with the FA Cup final?
The FA Cup is as big a sporting event we get in the UK. Soccer lovers all over the world tune in for the final in May, yet we don't make a big deal out of it like the US do with the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl have the Black Eyed Peas and Slash at half time and the FA Cup gets Gary Linekar and Adrian Chiles. The Super Bowl has a 5-time Grammy winner singing the national anthem but we get a runner up of Britain’s Got Talent. I’m aware that we can’t put adverts in during a game of soccer like they do during in Football, but there is still no reason why it can't be as exciting as the Super Bowl.
It could be changed from an afternoon game to an evening game. We could have performances before the match that were shown on TV (rather then the historical montages of FA Cups gone by that we get now) There could be half time entertainment instead of fifteen minutes of needless analysis by Gareth Southgate. We could get international superstars to sing the national anthem and get big name stars involved in the build up rather then the bitter ex footballers that we get now. The UK are not going to get to host the World Cup for at least another sixteen years, so in the mean time why don't we start making the FA Cup a bigger event, to show FIFA what could have been. If we did all this there is no reason why ITV couldn't charge ridiculously high prices for advertising throughout the coverage. FOX showed us how big an annual sporting event can be last night and we need to start following suit. Who knows it may even attract people who've never watched a football match before?
Oh by the way the Packers won the Super Bowl just in case you were wondering, but I doubt everybody watching last night really cared about the score.
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