Super Bowl Sunday

Super Bowl is the annual championship game between the winners of the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. Although "merely" a game of American football it is, de facto, a national holiday in the United States and the day on which more food is consumed than any other day, apart from Thanksgiving.

Super Bowl's origins lay in the rival football leagues, the relatively new AFL and the long established NFL, who decided in 1967 to play a game between their respective champions, originally called the AFL-NFL World Championship. With the merger of the two leagues the championship became Super Bowl.

Super Bowl is much more than a American Football match. It is a day of feasting and entertainment which has been re-scheduled to give it maximum East coast television coverage.

TV coverage alternates between CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox in the US, and in 2007 a 30-second TV commercial is said to cost in excess of USD$2.5 million. To enhance audience numbers pre-game, half-time and post game entertainment is provided by major popular music stars. This has itself led to controversy, as in 2004 the singer Janet Jackson's dress "adjusted" itself so as to reveal her breasts on prime time TV, which caused great offence in the United States (where the sight of a woman's breast is deemed obscene) in particular.

Although Americans view Super Bowl as being a world event, the truth is that American Football is almost uniquely a US sport and many attempts to globalise it have been marked failures, although some countries around the world will take the telecasts (in many cases to fill screen time) or, as in the UK, broadcast it on a minority channel at a very unsociable hour.