The Super Bowl sold out months ago, but many of those tickets are still for sale on the secondary market, and prices are down—the lowest in at least the past four years. On StubHub, on Friday morning, you could get a seat in the upper-corner section 345 of MetLife Stadium for $1,642.57, which, we’ve been assured, is a whopper of a deal, down from between two and three thousand dollars. (For reference, the view would look something like this.)
The widely cited culprit for these discounts is the game’s location (New Jersey)—or, more precisely, the predicted game-time temperature at that location, currently expected to be in the high thirties for kickoff, at 6:30 P.M., which, considering recent local weather patterns, means that a warm front must be coming. Regardless, sitting in a football stadium for four-odd hours when the temperature is in the thirties and headed lower can be judged appealing only to a certain group of people in a certain set of circumstances. You are either a Seahawks fan or a Broncos fan, or you won a contest. And that probably covers it. Which is why, this year, attending the Super Bowl is now a possibility not just for members of the one per cent but, let’s say, the one per cent under them as well. (There is, after all, the cost of transportation, parking, hotels, thirty-two-ounce hot chocolates, and other related charges to take into account.) Call this the two-per-cent Super Bowl.
Why did the N.F.L., back in 2010, decide to hold the game in New Jersey, in February? It might be because the league has its headquarters in New York, or that the metro area has a few more attractions to offer visitors than Indianapolis. Maybe commissioner Roger Goodell got sick of travelling too far afield, or he had a dream of tobogganing in the middle of Times Square. When the location of Super Bowl XLVIII was announced, commentators asked, incredulously, don’t they know how freezing it is going to be? The answer, I think, is yes, they certainly did.
The real reason for choosing a cold-weather location had little to do with the comfort of the fans in the stadium and far more to do with the demands of TV spectators in their living rooms. Perversely but undeniably, we enjoy watching football players get punished. (We excuse it by pointing to the millions of dollars they make, but this doesn’t absolve us of our moral meagreness.) And there is nothing more obviously punishing than having to run, and jump, and catch, and hit, and fall to the cold ground on a winter’s night. It’s what’s given stadiums like Soldier Field and Lambeau Field their great mystique, and some of their most iconic moments, and why we fetishize all those images of hot breath escaping from players’ face masks as they line up for another brutal play. During the playoffs, when the 49ers travelled to Wisconsin to play the Packers, the temperature plummeted to the single digits, with the wind-chill factor falling well below zero. The Packers struggled to sell out their home stadium. But television viewers, safe and warm at home, revelled in this raw expression of manhood in the extreme elements. It was, according to the national mythos, what football is supposed to be. There is something unsatisfying about watching the biggest game of each season contested in a climate-controlled dome or in some balmy Southern stadium—the stakes feel lower because the environment appears safer. (Of course, as last year’s unexpected blackout proved, nothing is ever completely foolproof.) Goodell and company are not shocked to discover that it can be brutally cold here; they were counting on it.
We didn’t come to love cold games entirely on our own. Like most things related to football, we’ve been prodded along by the league and its marketers. Every year, when a playoff game is held somewhere cold, broadcasters intone about the legacy of the game, in 1967, between the Packers and Cowboys played at Lambeau in temperatures of fifteen below. Even its famous name, the Ice Bowl, was a creation of the football-industrial complex. The Fox network has latched on to the notion of this Super Bowl as the coldest ever. Producers are planning to use infrared cameras to monitor changes in players’ body temperature during the game, as well as devices that show how wind is experienced by quarterbacks and kickers. Fans at home will want to see these gizmos reflect the most extreme conditions. Only the kindest will be worried about the comfort of the players; the rest will be cheering, “Colder! Windier!” Yet it may turn out that the N.F.L. didn’t go far enough north. With no major snow or ice predicted and temperatures not expected to be frigid, the weather may turn out to be too good. Was Buffalo not available?
The Super Bowl is the ultimate prestige event in American sports. Attending the game in the Superdome, in New Orleans, or at the Rose Bowl, in Pasadena, fans could feel like they had gained entry to the biggest luxury box on earth. They were the high rollers, the superfans, while everyone else, watching on television, was on the other side of the rope, left out of the real action. Of course, within the general class of attendees there have always been finer distinctions—the people who get into the fancy parties versus those who share rooms with their pals at the Motel 6. Sunday’s game will just make those distinctions much clearer—the people in the stands will be cold, and the people with access to one of the two hundred and eighteen luxury suites, whose prices began at four hundred thousand dollars, will be warm. At some point, perhaps in the middle of some interminable timeout during the third quarter, the guy sitting in section 345 may not especially feel at the center of anything. At that moment, the best seat in the house may indeed be at a house, where the parking’s easy, and you get to watch the Puppy Bowl and all the commercials.
Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty.
