EDITOR’S NOTE: Football is America’s sport. Puerto Rico is an American territory. NCS explores the obsession with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl efficiency in a brand new NCS FlashDoc “Bad Bunny and the Halftime Show: Rhythms of Resistance.” Stream the particular now on the NCS app. The hour will premiere Saturday, February 7 at 10pm ET on NCS.
If you’ve spent any time on-line, you’ve in all probability heard the phrase “you don’t know ball” used to level out a lack of awareness.
It appears that a few of these complaining most loudly about Bad Bunny being picked to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime present don’t know ball.
At least, they don’t appear to know that the National Football League just isn’t new to international superstars nor controversy. The Puerto Rican famous person’s choice has include each – however may even deliver extra eyes from round the world onto the sport in a method the league has been craving.
The NFL’s quest to bolster its worldwide fan base has been the driving drive behind having extra video games performed overseas, based on Sam Sanders, host of KCRW’s “The Sam Sanders Show.”
The league has been “seeing what’s happening with FIFA and with the World Cup and the way that soccer is truly an international sport and saying ‘We want that too,’” he informed NCS.
For the 2026 soccer season, the NFL has announced regular season games to be performed in London, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Munich, Paris and Rio de Janeiro.
The six worldwide video games aired in 2025 on the NFL Network — which included video games in Dublin, London, Berlin and Madrid — averaged 6.2 million viewers across television and digital, according to Nielsen figures shared by the league. That’s the highest season common for worldwide video games on report, they added.
But they need extra, and the simplest way to try this? “Have the biggest pop star in the world, who happens to sing in Spanish and is big globally, play your halftime show,” Sanders stated.
To Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo, a historian and creator of “Puerto Rico: A National History” whose historic writings about the territory have been integrated into Bad Bunny’s YouTube content material, it is sensible, particularly given the NFL’s aspirations to develop its fan base past the US.
“I think it was a marketing decision on behalf of the NFL – to have a Spanish-speaking artist that just so happens to be the biggest star in the world,” he informed NCS.
Some conservatives have taken concern with Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, for years, whether or not it was his flirtation with gender fluid vogue or his outspoken criticism of Donald Trump’s administration and its immigration insurance policies.
Online, conservatives have threatened to boycott the Super Bowl and the NFL extra broadly, with influential voices like Newsmax host Greg Kelly and Tomi Lahren overtly criticizing the league for selecting Bad Bunny as the performer.
President Donald Trump not too long ago stated he wouldn’t be attending the sport and criticized the involvement of each Bad Bunny and rock band Green Day, who’re longtime critics of his and scheduled to carry out as a part of a particular tribute earlier than the sport.
“I’m anti-them,” Trump said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.”
It seems somebody forgot to inform NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to be fearful.
During the commissioner’s annual state of the league tackle on Monday, Goodell defended Bad Bunny’s choice, saying he’s “one of the great artists in the world” and “that’s one of the reasons we chose him.”
“But the other reason is he understood the platform he was on, and that this platform is used to unite people, and to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talents, and to be able to use this moment to do that,” Goodell said. “And I think artists in the past have done that. I think Bad Bunny understands that, and I think he’ll have a great performance.”
They didn’t do it alone, in fact. In 2019, the league started a partnership with rapper/entrepreneur Jay-Z’s Roc Nation to assist the league select artists to carry out at video games and convey consideration to social justice points. The performers have since had edge and, at occasions, been controversial, like when Jennifer Lopez had children in cages to reference Trump’s immigration insurance policies, or final 12 months, when Kendrick Lamar’s set was broadly seen as a commentary on the Black expertise in America. Jay-Z’s alternatives have tapped into each the tradition of the second and the zeitgeist.
In 2024, Goodell announced that the partnership with Jay-Z and Roc Nation, can be persevering with, referring to it as “a mutually positive relationship.”
A Morning Consult survey published in 2023 discovered that “in big demographic terms, Latinos were the most excited and loyal fans of the NFL followed closely by Black Americans.” And the league is properly conscious.
For years, the NFL’s “Por La Cultura” marketing campaign, has aimed to highlight Latino contributions to the sport by showcasing the tales of gamers, coaches and workers. In launching this 12 months’s marketing campaign throughout Latino Heritage Month in September, NFL senior vp of world model and client advertising and marketing Marissa Solis famous the league had “more than 39 million Latino NFL fans in the US.”
With that kind of outreach to Latinos residing in the United States, having Bad Bunny carry out “is much better for the NFL than Bad Bunny,” stated Albert Laguna, an affiliate professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University, the place he teaches a course titled “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics.”
Bad Bunny is already one in every of the hottest recording artists in the world, notching 19.8 billion streams last year on Spotify alone.
Last week, he won three Grammys, together with the coveted album of the 12 months award for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.”
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, co-author of” P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance,” additionally sees a possible profit to the firms who purchase adverts throughout the huge sport since US Latinos are a rising demographic “that companies are also often trying to court,” she stated.
“So it’s like a great kind of kill two birds with one stone thing where you can attract a global audience and a local Latino audience,” she stated.
Calvin Watkins, a Dallas Cowboys beat author for the Dallas Morning News, informed NCS he was not stunned that Goodell and the league are all in for Bad Bunny. Nor is he stunned that many aren’t as conscious of the NFL’s aspirations past the US.
“It’s interesting that they’re going to play a game in Mexico City in December, and when you’re doing the research on that game, you discover they’ve had an office in Mexico City since the late nineties,” Watkins stated. “They’ve all the time needed to model their sport globally.
When it involves the Super Bowl, the sport’s attain goes properly past soccer followers, Watkins added.
“For a lot of people who watch this game, this might be the only time they watch a football game. A lot of times some people are just casual watchers of football and the NFL is in the entertainment business,” he stated. “Everyone remembers performances like Prince, Beyoncé, and Michael Jackson playing the halftime show because everyone remembers the halftime shows.”