The Super Bowl — what we love but mostly hate about it

While the Super Bowl is ostensibly a football game for the NFL championship, it’s actually a combination sporting event, concert, and promotional convention.

This year, Rihanna will appear at halftime in a highly anticipated return to the stage. And 30-second commercials have sold for as much as $7 million apiece.

An investment management group estimates the event will bring in $700 million for the city of Phoenix, and an estimated $16 billion is at stake.

And, oh yeah, the Kansas City Chiefs are playing the Philadelphia Eagles.

While the league likes to present itself as simple men who play sports for the love of the game, their teammates and the city they were drafted or signed to, elite and professional sport is first and foremost a business.

More specifically, it’s a mass spectacle where athletes put their bodies and brains on the line for our entertainment. You are both worker and product. Dollars and cents come to the league through ticket sales, television licensing deals, merchandise, advertising, and anything else the league and its organizations may be able to sell.

While we know that elite sport is a business, we rarely question what business and making profits mean for everyone involved in the NFL business ecosystem, from the workers (players) to the capitalists (managers and owners) to the the consumers (fans). .

This is intentional. The NFL, like most companies, doesn’t want their consumers to see how their sausage is made, especially when it comes to the level of violence, exploitation, and harm that exists in football.

The most obvious of these damages is long-term injury – particularly brain injury – to players. There is ongoing evidence linking football to traumatic brain injuries, dementia, memory loss, depression and premature death.

A 2017 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association states that 177 of 202 former football players of all levels studied suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), including 110 of the 111 NFL players studied.

In the latest study from Boston University, 345 of the 376 former NFL players studied had (CTE).

Because CTE can only be diagnosed postmortem, these studies include samples from brains donated by affected families, which are therefore more likely to have CTE. Still, they show rates of 92 percent for the NFL players studied.

In contrast, a 2018 Boston University study looked at 164 donated brains from men and women: only one had CTE, and he was a former college football player.

It is staggering to imagine how many players – not just in the NFL but also at the college and high school level – develop CTE and experience irreparable and lifelong damage to their brain and life.

Soccer isn’t the only sport where athletes risk lifelong injuries (rugby, ice hockey, and martial arts are other big culprits), but many soccer players can’t even make money for their physical sacrifice.

While the NFL and the college football industry sell the dream of scholarships and superstar status, only 6.5 percent of high school students will ever play college football. And they are not paid for their work. And a tiny 0.00075 percent (800-900 out of 1.1 million) will play the game professionally.

If players beat those lottery-level odds and make it to the NFL, the average football player’s career lasts about three to four years. Many contracts are not guaranteed, with teams cutting players short and unable to pay them the full amount of their salary.

Add to this the exploitation of a predominantly black workforce of unpaid players who sacrifice their bodies and minds to fund the coffers of predominantly white coaches and team owners.

As scholars Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva and Johanna Mellis put it in the Guardian, “Big college sports are often about rich whites exploiting blacks for profit.”

The treatment of athletes as mere commodities or investments to be collected and traded, used to capture value and profits, and then discarded permeates every stratum of the NFL.

There are other issues, too: This is not an exhaustive list of the harms associated with football and the NFL. These are just some of the behind-the-scenes facts and relationships the NFL doesn’t want fans to think about, least of all during the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl — the culmination of the NFL’s long history of reporting — aims to ensure we continue to ignore these issues by providing us with a spectacle to distract us from the tough questions.

Karl Marx originally coined religion as the “opium of the masses,” and sports scientists have long since transferred this passage to sports, namely to mega-events such as the Super Bowl or the Olympic Games.

Aside from distracting fans from their own personal issues and the unequal world they live in, the aim of the football spectacle (from a league perspective) is also to distract fans from the harms the sport itself is causing.

If you want to keep watching, that’s your prerogative. Super Bowl traditions run strong and the game is often something that brings family and friends together. But at least think about the violence and damage it takes to get to this game, and remember that there are people beneath those helmets.