The Super Bowl has, like almost everything in American sports, its extra-sports rituals: getting together with friends to watch the National Football League (NFL) final, eating chicken wings and drinking beer, commenting on the advertisements for which brands pay millions, criticizing the musical performance during the intermission and betting. Bet a lot.

It is indeed estimated that as much as $1.5 billion,a record that will be broken around the game that takes place this Sunday at the San Francisco 49ers stadium. What’s new this year is also that the question of whether the Seattle Seahawks or the New England Patriots (Boston team) will win is not only asked in (let’s say) conventional digital betting houses, but also in those prediction websites that are experiencing a true golden age in this country. They speculate about when the president,Donald Trump,plans to attack Iran,and also about the outcome of the moast followed sporting event of the year in the United States,with an audience of some 130 million that continues to grow around the world.

Polymarket users,perhaps the most popular of those home futures markets,gave this Friday night (San Francisco time,nine more in mainland Spain) a probability of victory for the Seahawks of 69% compared to 31% for the Patriots.

It doesn’t matter that the latter have custom: Sunday’s match will be their twelfth final. If they win, they will become the most triumphant franchise in NFL history, with seven titles (to six for the pittsburgh Steelers).In 2015, they won the fourth Lombardi Trophy of their record against… the Seattle seahawks. They were losing by 10 with less than eight minutes left, but they ended up winning (28-24), in a last play that went down in dizzying history.

Those were Tom Brady’s Patriots at the position of quarterback and Bill Bellichick as coach. Today, with Brady becoming a television commentator with a frozen smile and Belichick in college football, these are the Patriots of Drake Maye, a 23-year-old boy who this Sunday knocks on the doors of the legend in the Super Bowl, even though this week he lost the vote for player of the season by one point against another quarterbackof the Los Angeles Rams, Justin Herbert. (And if this details seems superfluous,remember that a Pasapalabra contestant won,also this week,the 2.7 million euro jackpot by guessing who won that honor in 1968: Earl Morrall).

Opposite, and in the same position, Maye will have Sam Darnold, quarterback of those from Seattle. He is 60 minutes away (the regulation time for a final that, between one thing and another, can last four hours) from crowning an unusual season, in which the Seahawks have recorded 14 wins and three losses (and hence they are the favorites). If he succeeds, he will also be the protagonist of one of those redemption stories that animate the mythology of American sports: that of a player who a few years ago was shelved as a broken promise and who, as he said this week, learned this year to rise “above his mistakes.”

unexpected crossing

Perhaps because almost no one would have bet on this Super Bowl crossing when the season started, the pre-game sports morbidity has been largely surpassed by attention to the second course: the intermission performance, for which the NFL chose the Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny. The decision angered Trump and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, who consider that a Latin urban music artist who will speak in Spanish and who has shown fickleness queer in the past is not American enough to conquer the most coveted place by the music industry in this country.

Those attacks (and the tantrum of organizing a show parallel with unmemorable white country artists, led by, ahem, Kid Rock) have put all the pressure on Bad Bunny, whose contribution is still an unknown.

You can guess more or less what the repertoire of the 13 minutes will be in which he will be placed at the center of all eyes of what, for better or worse, is the most publicized musical event of the year in the united States. Who will be your guests? Will there be any political references during the performance? And, above all…Will Trump’s immigration police, the feared ICE, appear in the vicinity of the stadium where the game is played to hunt down the irregular immigrant?

Both the NFL and the Trump Administration have promised that there will be no raids, although that has not prevented local organizations in defense of migrants from training an army of volunteers to respond to that eventuality. Nor,that Bad Bunny’s music plays at full blast from the cars that circulate these days through the center of San Francisco like the defiant melody of a city that for the moment has escaped Trump sending his immigration police to them.

Although the final is held one hour from San Francisco, at Levi’s Stadium, near San José, it is the large city in the middle of the bay of the same name that has carried the weight of the Super Bowl week celebration. All previous events have been scheduled at the Moscone Convention Center.

So the tens of thousands of fans coming from all over the country – and the entire world – will have no choice on Sunday but to sing Dionne Warwick’s old hit <```html