Super Bowl 2026: Date, Time, Halftime & Trump’s Involvement

The Super Bowl is the annual final game of the National Football League (NFL), the strongest football league in the world. After the regular season, 14 of the 32 NFL teams reach the three-week play-offs. After three rounds, the two winners of the so-called Conference Championships face each other in the grand finale in the USA.

Super Bowl LX, the 60th NFL final according to modern counting, will take place on February 8, 2026 (local time) at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, not far from San Francisco. In Germany, the Super Bowl can be seen on the night of Sunday to Monday (February 9, 2026); Kick-off is at 0.30 a.m. CET. The game usually lasts about three hours. The famous halftime show starts about an hour and a half after kick-off; in Germany that would be around 2:00 a.m. CET. However, this cannot be predicted exactly.

The Super Bowl 2026 will be broadcast live in Germany by RTL and DAZN. In the USA, the broadcasting TV channels change every year. NBC will broadcast Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara.

The Halftime Show is a large and important part of the Super Bowl spectacle. For many fans it is one of the music highlights of the year. In 2026, Bad Bunny, the most streamed musician on the “Spotify” platform last year, will be on stage there. But during the approximately fifteen-minute performances during the half-time break of the football final, prominent surprise guests also appear again and again.

Bad Bunny was born in Puerto Rico and sings in Spanish. In the past, the thirty-one-year-old has repeatedly expressed criticism of the deportation policy in the USA directed against immigrants from Latin America and sees himself as a representative of the Spanish-speaking minority. Bad Bunny wants his appearance at the Super Bowl to be seen as a symbol “for my people, my culture and our history.”

Donald Trump described the selection of the musician for the halftime show at the football final as “ridiculous” weeks ago. Now he followed up in an interview: “I think it’s a terrible choice.” There have been repeated calls for an alternative halftime show that embodies “American values” in recent weeks. 120,000 people signed a petition calling for a performance by 73-year-old country singer George Strait. Bad Bunny collected almost 20 billion streams with his music on Spotify in 2025 alone.

To celebrate the 60th Super Bowl, the NFL is also planning a comprehensive entertainment program before the game. The world-famous Californian rock band Green Day is the main act. But Green Day is also a thorn in Trump’s side. The band around singer Billie Joe Armstrong has never made a secret of their anti-fascist stance in the past, and at concerts they occasionally even led their audience in chants with the line “Fuck Donald Trump”.

And in the song “American Idiot,” a programmatic line was repeatedly rewritten during live performances, such as: “I am not part of MAGA politics.” Trump told Green Day and Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl: “I’m against them. All they do is sow hatred. Terrible.”

Last year, when the Super Bowl took place in New Orleans, Trump became the first sitting US president to watch the NFL final from the stands. Trump’s predecessors had traditionally stayed away from the NFL finale because they wanted to leave the stage entirely to sports and music at the Super Bowl.

But Trump saw things differently shortly after his second election as the state’s first man. He had himself publicly photographed in the arena saluting the national anthem. This year, however, Trump said he did not want to travel to the Super Bowl. Because of Bad Bunny and Green Day? Or because he fears whistles? “It’s just too far away. I would go if it was a little closer,” Trump said.

In addition to the halftime show, there are other singing performances around the Super Bowl. Before kickoff, Charlie Puth will sing the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Brandi Carlile will perform “America the Beautiful” and CoCo Jones will perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

If you want to be in the stadium for the Super Bowl, you’ll have to dig deep into your pockets. And as a rule, the prices increase significantly as the football game gets closer. At the beginning of February, ticket prices on various online platforms were already around 6,000 euros, higher than at this point last year.

VIP tickets cost correspondingly more. Various providers also sell various ticket packages that, in addition to a place in the stadium, also include additional services such as entry to exclusive events. For some of these ticket packages the prices are over 20,000 euros.

The cost of a commercial during a TV broadcast in America reaches new heights almost every year. According to consistent media reports, the TV broadcaster NBC has quoted an average price of eight million dollars (around 6.7 million euros) for a 30-second commercial for the Super Bowl 2026. The Super Bowl commercials are usually produced by companies specifically for the Super Bowl and are very popular in the USA. All available advertising slots were said to have been fully booked three months before the game.

The Super Bowl with original US commentary and American advertising can be seen via the NFL’s so-called Game Pass (charges apply). The “Game Pass” can be obtained in Germany via the streaming provider DAZN. It happens again and again that German-language advertising is fed into the American broadcast. If this happens, there’s a useful trick: use the “rewind” function to jump back 30 seconds and you should be able to see the original US advert for die-hard fans. However, the football final cannot be watched on TV without advertising.

In the USA alone, more than 100 million people watch the Super Bowl every year. According to the league, in 2025 the audience reached its peak to date at around 127.7 million on TV and streams. In Germany, the Super Bowl 2025 attracted an average of 1.31 million people to the screens on RTL and a peak of 1.71 million. The numbers were therefore significantly below those of the previous year.

The New England Patriots have appeared in the Super Bowl the most times of all 32 NFL teams. The team from Foxborough reached the football final for the twelfth time this year. They are followed by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos and San Francisco 49ers with eight participations each. The Patriots and the Steelers have won the Super Bowl most often with six wins each.

Tom Brady, the legendary quarterback of the Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, won the Super Bowl seven times.

The Seattle Seahawks with the surprisingly strong quarterback Sam Darnold and a resurgent defense are considered by most experts to be favorites in the Super Bowl. But the New England Patriots, coached by Mike Vrabel, are also credited with opportunities. A lot will depend on how the 23-year-old quarterback Drake Maye copes with the great pressure in the finale.

Originally, the game now known as the Super Bowl was called the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” in which the two best teams from the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) competed against each other. The AFL and NFL decided to merge into a single league in 1966. The joint final took place for the first time in 1967, and the two leagues were officially unified in 1970.

Hunt said he was never really serious about the name suggestion. In the end, however, it stayed that way, also because the American press immediately adopted the name “Super Bowl” and it was well received by the fans. The game was first called the Super Bowl in 1969 and was officially advertised as a Super Bowl for the first time in 1970; the previously played games in 1967 and 1968 were retroactively named the same way. Super Bowl I, as we count it today, is the 1967 finale.

Important football games have been called “bowl games” since the early 20th century. The origin is considered to be the so-called “Rose Bowl Game”, which was played as part of the “Tournament of Roses” in the stadium in Pasadena, California, called the “Rose Bowl” after its bowl-like shape.