Super Bowl, the USA’s biggest annual sporting event, kicked off to a boring start, with NFL fans moaning about a defensive struggle between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, which saw not a single touchdown in the first half of the game.
But if there was little excitement in the game, there were plenty outside the playing field. America’s most-watched television event is not just about sports, it’s about culture, and the 2026 Super Bowl once again captured the country’s zeitgeist.
Here are some of the non-sporting highlights of the world superpower’s one-night ode to competition, capitalism and entertainment.
Bad Bunny proves not so bad
The top Super Bowl cultural moment is never a rabbit-out-of-a-hat act, and this year, it was a pre-announced big bunny.
Puerto Rican superstar Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, aka “Bad Bunny”, took the stage at the Levi’s Stadium on Sunday exactly a week after he delivered his searing Grammy-winning speech blasting ICE and the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Read moreBad Bunny’s 2026 Grammy Awards triumph becomes protest against ICE
But at the Super Bowl, the 31-year-old superstar opted for far more subtle messaging. Instead of calling out the Republican president’s xenophobia, Bad Bunny delivered a triumphant celebration of diversity, love and above all, a tribute to his self-governed Caribbean home that is part of US “commonwealth” territory.
Politics of subtility was on full display as Bad Bunny belted out “El Apagon” (Blackout), a song that underscored the hypocrisy of the term “commonwealth” since Puerto Ricans still face Third World problems of an unreliable energy grid – which powers their displacement to the mainland.
Bad Bunny holds a Puerto Rican flag during the Super Bowl halftime show © Patrick T. Fallon, AFP
On Sunday, Bad Bunny’s surprise star guests included Lady Gaga, whose Latin-inflected version of her hit “Die with a Smile” featured the only English lyrics in the show.
Read moreBad Bunny brings Puerto Rico pride to Super Bowl, angering Trump
The historic all-Spanish act earned President Donald Trump’s ire. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” said Trump on his Truth Social account, putting himself at odds with more than 41 million Americans who speak Spanish. The show, he noted, was “an affront to the Greatness of America”.
Green Day has had its day politically
California punk-pop vets Green Day took the pre-game stage this year to render a tribute to the Super Bowl’s 60th edition.
Green Day lead singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong has been around since the 1980s and is not one to mince his political words. The expectations were high, particularly since Armstrong, at a San Francisco event just days before the Super Bowl, called on ICE agents to “quit their shitty jobs”.
But on Sunday, Green Day opted to omit their political hard-hitters – much to the delight of Fox News. “Trump critics take issue with Green Day’s Super Bowl LX performance,” read a Fox headline above an explanatory, “Trump critics wanted Green Day to criticize the president on the Super Bowl stage”.
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong performs at Super Bowl LX. © Josh Edelson, AFP
When the group launched into “Holiday”, Trump opponents were on alert for the group’s most political bridge, which begins with the line “Sieg Heil to the President Gasman”, a dig at former President George W. Bush, who was president when the song was released in 2004.
But on Sunday, the band just skipped the controversial bridge and wrapped up the song.
“Disappointing show,” said one fan on X. “Pretty cowardly if you ask me. I expected real protest from them.”
For those outside the US awaiting a mass national mobilisation against Trump – and watching the rollover of much of corporate America instead – it was a fitting statement of the current times in the land of the free.
Mad for the ads
The second Sunday of February draws millions of Americans to their TV sets to watch the ads, an important part of the Super Bowl cultural package. In 2025, a record 127.7 million US viewers watched the game across television and streaming platforms, which means advertisers are willing to cough up millions for a Super Bowl spot.
This year’s Super Bowl ads cost an average of $8 million per 30-second unit, but a handful of spots sold for a record $10 million-plus, Peter Lazarus, who leads advertising and partnerships for NBC Sports, told AP.
Super Bowl ads generate headlines, data, expert commentary as well as debates about what they say about consumers and markets today.
AI vs. AI
The business pundits were in agreement even before kick-off on Sunday: Artificial Intelligence (AI) would dominate this year’s Super Bowl.
They were not wrong.
Super Bowl 2026 sparked an AI advertising war when Anthropic aired a pair of commercials pointing out that Claude, its chatbot, doesn’t have ads.
Humour and wit are important components of American ads and the Anthropic commercial ticked all the boxes in its 30-second spot. The ad features a nerdy young man struggling with pull-ups while a muscular bystander watches. The sweating young man asks the brawny man about achieving “six-pack abs”. But the bystander instead delivers a plug for a product – delivered in soulless, robotic style and content.
The skinny man looks disappointed with the reply before the kicker line fills the screen: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the whiz behind ChatGPT, hit back at his competitor. In a long post on X, Altman said Anthropic was “clearly dishonest” and employed “doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads”.
Altman’s objections, alas, were not well received, with commentators on X noting that the Anthropic boss didn’t like the taste of his “own medicine” and that his reaction was “the digital equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum”.
Who’s afraid of…Amazon
Amazon this year struck a nerve with an ad starring actor Chris Hemsworth that pokes fun of people’s fears of AI. The ad ticked all the Super Bowl boxes, including a celebrity poking fun at technological anxiety.
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But it didn’t go down well since it came days after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos fired journalists at the Washington Post, which he also owns, in addition to laying off 16,000 corporate workers, some of whom may be replaced with AI.
“I suspect this is meant to be funny,” Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University, told AP. “But it might reinforce some people’s very real concerns about AI.”
