Not Taylor and Travis but the Super Bowl half-time show | Emma John The rest of the world will look on in envy on Sunday as the US blends sport and music in a fashion no one else can match.
Soccer – like most sports – looks on admiringly at the unique engagement the Super Bowl attracts (last year’s event was the most-watched TV programme in US history, with 123.4 million viewers) and the ad-spend it commands ($8m for a single 30-second advert).
“Imagine Dragons play Spurs” is a two-night stop on a world tour, not a thought experiment, and technological improvements in groundskeeping have allowed arena shows to bed down quite cosily within a busy fixtures calendar, from Arctic Monkeys at Old Trafford to Neil Diamond at the Ageas Bowl.
This Sunday, when the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles, we once again bear witness to a perfect American marriage: the country’s biggest sporting event coupled with a live music gig so valuable to its megastar performers that they undertake it for free.
By the early 70s, the half-time shows incorporated stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Andy Williams, and in the 1990s the NFL began promoting them as an event in their own right, harnessing Michael Jackson’s planetary pull to stop casual viewers turning off at the end of the second quarter.
