You can feel there is an energy in the air in the United States for this year's Super Bowl. The 2021 game in Florida had a reduced capacity because of pandemic rules.
Sunday's match between the LA Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals will be played in front of 70,000 spectators at the SoFi stadium, a new $5 billion (€4.4 billion) arena in Los Angeles, California. Local heroes Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar will serve up a halftime show.
On paper, the Super Bowl is ready to deliver. In a world of pandemics, culture wars and geopolitical uncertainty, it should provide a few hours of respite to our complicated lives.
Yet Sunday's game will be played under some enormous low-hanging social clouds.
Accusations of institutional racism in the NFL
Firstly, just days ago in a New York court, Brian Flores, a former National Football League coach, filed an action lawsuit accusing the NFL of racist hiring practices. The complaint centered around what Flores called a "sham" interview to satisfy an affirmative action policy and equated the NFL to a "plantation." There have been 500 head coaches in NFL history, 24 of them have been Black and Flores is one of them. He's a highly rated coach with a lot of success and his accusations are incendiary and depressing.
It's worth reading this passage from his complaint in full:
"The owners watch the games from atop NFL stadiums in their luxury boxes, while their majority-Black workforce put their bodies on the line every Sunday, taking vicious hits and suffering debilitating injuries to their bodies and their brains while the NFL and its owners reap billions of dollars."
Millionaires in the city of homelessness
Flores is right to highlight the wealth of the NFL's billionaire owners. That reveals the next glaring issue facing this year's Super Bowl: sickening social inequality.
Sure, it is not the first time that sport has played host to rich people at the expense of the poor. The Olympics in London and Rio or the upcoming football World Cup in Qatar immediately come to mind. But does that mean it should be ignored?
What makes this year's Super Bowl an agonizing event is its location. As a result of a complete lack of affordable housing, Los Angeles faces a shocking homelessness crisis. Just a short drive from the SoFi stadium is Skid Row, an infamous neighborhood of homeless people stretching around 60 blocks. A recent poll found that more than one-third of people in LA County have personally experienced homelessness or know someone who has, showing the volume of people touched by this predicament.
With that in mind, digest the fact that the average ticket price for Sunday's game is nearly $9,000 (Є7,900) and there are more than 1,500 private jets expected to arrive for the game. Sources in the private jet industry told DW that these people bring valuable money to the local economy, but the image of VIPs passing LA's homeless neighborhoods in their tinted windows is a foul one.
Enjoy the game, but don't ignore the problems
All the while, human-made climate change casts its shadow over the game. For the first time in California's history, heat advisories have been issued in February and Super Bowl LVI could be the hottest on record. As the millionaire spectators soak in the SoFi stadium's atmosphere, the engines of their private jets will barely have time to cool before they make the trip home for work on Monday. The impact of these lifestyles upon the environment should not be ignored.
Alongside Sunday's game there are concerning racial, social and environmental issues to be addressed. To emphasize: This is not a call for a boycott, nor is it a wish to cast shade on those attending the game. But Super Bowl LVI fans should be aware that it is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, it sits right in the middle of some of the US's most defining crises and acts like a magnifying glass on each one of them.