A Spanish Señorita at the Super Bowl: 'The best part? The adverts!'
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Story by
Estefi
Translation by:
Darren Thompson
The greatest event in American football has little cause to envy its European counterparts: showbiz steals the limelight from sport, seconds are worth a fortune, and tapas are replaced by nachos with cheese. The opinion of a Spanish girl in the States
The Pittsburg Steels beat the Arizona Cardinals at last year’s Super Bowl, but if you asked an American now, they’d struggle to remember exactly what transpired. That’s because in reality, the outcome is not the important part provided that you’ve had a good time, and the Americans are experts at making sure that happens. Being Spanish, I imagined that the Super Bowl would be like a Real Madrid-Barcelona match for the title, but with nachos with cheese instead of the tapas and beer. However, as you enter a bar, you quickly realise that’s not the case. The local radio broadcasting from the bar and year’s supply of chicken wings being given away for free; meanwhile a group in the corner chanting at a guy who had just ordered the spiciest sauce on offer – and if he’s able to clean his plate in three minutes, it’s on the house. As you can see, everything becomes a show.
The best part: the adverts
After stealing myself a table close enough to one of the more thirty giant screens that are all over the bar, and after the patriotic opening ceremony began with the National Anthem sung by Jennifer Hudson, the best bit starts. This, for me and many others, is not the match itself, but the adverts, which
NBC charged 100,000 dollars per second for adverts. What happened to the credit crunch?
are anticipated with the same expectation as the New Year’s Eve adverts in Spain. Companies pay scandalous amounts to advertise during the Super Bowl, and they offer their best ideas to the viewers at home. Last year, NBC charged 100,000 dollars per second for adverts. What happened to the credit crunch? In my opinion, the best and funniest adverts were Doritos, Pepsi and Budweiser, each of which had three different adverts during the match. Totalling up, I´d run out of fingers pretty quickly trying to count the number of zeros on the cheque that each one will have paid to appear on screen.
After Arizona exerted a bit of passion to a game which was heading the Steelers´ way from the start, we got to the break, where Bruce Springsteen was swamped with cheers and applause from everyone during his 15 minute performance.
In the end Pittsburg won 27 to 23, and the Cardinals lost their first attempt to win the prestigious trophy. All in all, that’s why it’s not winning the Superbowl that counts, it’s the participation – and if you manage to eat some nachos and wash them down with a couple of beers at the same time, all the better.
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Translated from Una española en la Super Bowl: “Lo mejor del partido, los anuncios”