Cheering, whistles, and football — Oh, and multimillion-dollar commercials to air in between watching football. Capitalism is bizarrely funny when it comes to major sports events.

‘Tis the season for the annual Super Bowl event, while last year’s event rounded up over 91 million viewers in the U.S. alone. What is it about football?

One thing we do know is how sports generate revenue, they require television broadcasting rights, commercial sponsorships and endorsements, spectator fees at events.

Of course, people love sports, but how does this single football event attract not only massive viewership numbers but expensive advertisements and world-famous halftime shows?

A 30 second Super Bowl commercial runs the advertiser $5.6 million, and they are typically by brands and companies we are already aware of. Why do they spend so much money on this type of advertisement production?

We know that people who don’t even care about football watch the Super Bowl for the commercials and the halftime show solely for entertainment.

Sports are a form of entertainment, especially when you have famous artists performing for free during the halftime show, but why do we fund entertainment and sports more than funding charities and people who are in need?

The Olympic Games are another great example of how much funding we invest in sports alone while countries build the Olympic village and practically go bankrupt doing so. 

We understand that in the Super Bowls case, the future Super Bowl locations are determined by cities placing bids for the NFL to evaluate the opportunity of stadium renovations and ability to host. The Olympics have locations picked by ballots placed by active International Olympic Committee (IOC) members.

We can then understand that investing money in sports events is generally about bringing in revenue and attention to that specific city. 

The juxtapositional contrast between the goldmine these sports events produce while people starve and cannot afford basic sustenance for life seems dystopian.

Typically, entertainment events like these seem fun and exciting on paper, but the wealth that contributes to their production is jaw-droppingly eerie.

Perhaps these events offer the average, burnt-out, nine to five working employees a sense of relief from the capitalistic world we live in. It’s a “fun” opportunity to day drink, feast on food, and numb oneself from the responsibilities they are committed to for the next 40 years of their lives.

Sports are one of the highest profiting forms of entertainment, and the income and revenue are always derived from the fans that uphold the importance of “the love of the game.”

Capitalism is all about supply and demand. There are 32 NFL teams, with 11 players drafted at a time, that rounds out to 352 NFL football players. An average NFL football player makes a higher salary than an anesthesiologist. 

An anesthesiologist could possibly play a good game of football, but would an NFL football player know how to decide from general, regional, or local anesthetic?