In professional American football, the is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). The game and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday. Over the years it has become the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of the year, and has become likened to a de facto U.S. national holiday.[1] In addition, many popular singers and musicians have performed during the Super Bowl's pre-game and halftime ceremonies. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest U.S. food consumption day, following Thanksgiving.[2]
Television broadcast rights of the Super Bowl are held exclusively each year by only one major network (currently, NBC) in the United States, and the annual broadcast is famous for having the most expensive commercial airtime space of the year. As a result, commercial watching during the Super Bowl has also proceeded to become one of the sub-cultures of the annual event.
The Super Bowl was first played on January 15, 1967 as part of an agreement between the NFL and its younger rival, the American Football League (AFL) in which each league's championship team would play each other in an “AFL-NFL World Championship Game”. After the leagues merged in 1970, the Super Bowl became the NFL's championship game, played between the champions of the league's two conferences: the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Since the NFL season extends into the New Year, the Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather than the year it was held. For example, Super Bowl XLIII, played in February 2009, was actually part of the 2008 season.
