The NFL Told You Why It Booked Bad Bunny
The league's own executives explained the strategy, on the record, for years. Conservative media pretended it wasn't happening.
Last night, Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl LX halftime show. He walked through a recreated sugarcane field at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, past guys playing dominoes and a piragua cart and a couple getting actually married on stage. He brought out Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. The scoreboard read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” He closed by saying “God Bless America,” naming countries across the hemisphere one by one, and holding up a football that read “TOGETHER, WE ARE AMERICA.”
Conservatives lost it.
Donald Trump posted that the performance was “an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence” and called it “a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country.” Megyn Kelly wrote “Nah, I like my half time shows in English from ppl who love America.” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that “having the halftime show for your biggest game of the year in a language almost none of your lifelong fans can understand, while waving the flags of countries that none of them are from, is the biggest fuck you to your own audience.” He also admitted he hadn’t actually watched the performance. Right-wing filmmaker Robby Starbuck compared it to “playing the national anthem in Chinese at the World Series or replacing hot dogs on the 4th of July with tofu.” And the account “Catturd” — a person who types the word “catturd” into the internet on purpose, for a living — declared that he would “never watch a NFL game again as long as I live. Not one second.”
The complaint, if you can call it that, boiled down to: Bad Bunny performed in Spanish, in America, at an American football game, and this was somehow an attack on the country.
Turning Point USA, not to be left out, had been planning for this since October. The organization announced an “All American Halftime Show” to counter-program Bad Bunny’s set. The headliner was Kid Rock. They couldn’t get licensing to stream it on X, so they put it on YouTube, where it peaked at around 6 million viewers. Bad Bunny, for reference, has 90.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Kid Rock has 5.3 million. But sure, this was the real America speaking.
But none of these people want to talk about why the NFL booked Bad Bunny in the first place.
Roger Goodell didn’t go woke. The NFL booked the single most-streamed artist on the planet — an American citizen, by the way, born in Puerto Rico — for the same reason it’s now playing regular-season games in Madrid and São Paulo and Melbourne. The same reason it spent $32 million on a flag football league timed to the 2028 Olympics. The same reason it runs 75 Spanish-language broadcasts a season.
Money. Growth. New markets.
The NFL told you why they did this. Its own executives have been saying it, on the record, for years. But that’s not a story that works for the people who need everything to be about the culture war, so they pretended it wasn’t happening.
“It’s mathematically impossible for the league to grow without Latinos.”
That’s not me editorializing. That’s Marissa Solis, the NFL’s senior vice president of global brand and consumer marketing, talking to CNBC in October 2024. The person whose job it is to figure out how the NFL grows its audience, explaining, on the record, exactly how the NFL plans to grow its audience.
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