Super Bowl is the championship game in the National Football League (NFL). It is played between the winners of the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The Super Bowl regularly attracts tens of thousands of spectators to the stadium where it is played and millions of television viewers across the United States and in other countries where the game is broadcast.
The Super Bowl is played in early February. The game is played in a different city each year and has become one of the biggest events of the annual American sports season. The Super Bowl was the outcome of a merger, begun in 1966, between the American Football League (AFL) and the NFL. Initially, the end-of-season game was known as the AFL-NFL final, but it was renamed the Super Bowl at the suggestion of Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, a team that played in the AFL. The first Super Bowl game was played on Jan. 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers beat the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10. After the two leagues completed their merger in 1970, the new NFL split into the present-day AFC and NFC, and the Super Bowl continued as an end-of-season game between the two conference winners.
The most successful teams in the Super Bowl so far have been the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots, who each have won the title six times. The Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers each have won the title five times. From 1991 to 1994, the Buffalo Bills played in four successive Super Bowls but failed to win any of them. The Minnesota Vikings lost all four of their Super Bowl games from 1970 to 1977. The Denver Broncos lost five Super Bowls but won the title three times, in 1998, 1999, and 2016. In 2019, the New England Patriots played in the Super Bowl for a record tenth time.
See also Football.