Last updated: 6 August 2026. Refreshed each February once the game is played.
How It Works, Who Plays and When It’s On
The Super Bowl is the NFL’s championship game: one match, winner takes the title, played at a neutral venue picked years in advance. It’s contested by the champions of the league’s two halves, the AFC and the NFC. The next one, Super Bowl LXI, is on Sunday 14 February 2027 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
What the Super Bowl actually is
It’s a final. One game, no second leg, no aggregate score. Whoever wins is the champion for that season, and they get the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
That’s worth saying plainly because the format catches British and European readers out. There is no league table that crowns a winner at the end of the season, the way the Premier League does. The regular season decides who gets into the playoffs and in what order, and then a knockout tournament decides everything else. The Super Bowl is the last game of that tournament.
It is also, by some distance, the biggest single television event in the United States, which is why the halftime show and the adverts get discussed as much as the football. More on that below.
How the two teams get there
Thirty-two teams start the season. Two reach this game.
The two conferences
The NFL is split into two halves, called conferences: the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC (National Football Conference). Sixteen teams in each. Each conference is then split into four divisions of four teams, named by geography: North, South, East and West.
A team plays a seventeen-game regular season from September to early January. Then the playoffs start.
The Super Bowl is the AFC champion against the NFC champion. That’s the whole reason there’s only ever one final and never a semi-final in the way you might expect: the two halves of the league run separate knockout tournaments, and the two winners meet.
The playoffs in one pass
Fourteen teams make the playoffs, seven from each conference. In each one, that’s the four division winners plus three more, called wild cards, which go to the best remaining records in that conference.
Those seven are then ranked one to seven, called seeding. The top seed gets a bye, meaning it skips the first round. Everyone else plays: the second seed hosts the seventh, the third hosts the sixth, the fourth hosts the fifth.
Three rounds follow, each one straight knockout. Wild card weekend, then the divisional round, then the conference championship game. Win that and you’re in the Super Bowl.
The bit that surprises people
Winning your division beats having a better record.
The four division winners take seeds one to four automatically, whatever their record. A wild card team can finish the season with more wins than a division winner and still be seeded below it, which means travelling to play a team it finished above.
That is not a quirk anyone forgot to fix. It’s the point: the league wants winning your division to mean something, so it’s rewarded ahead of raw record. It does produce results that look unfair on paper, and if you’ve ever watched a good team get knocked out at a worse team’s stadium, that’s why.
If you want the deeper version of this, how the standings are actually calculated and what happens when teams finish level, that’s a guide of its own and it’s coming. In the meantime, how team stats work covers why a team’s record on its own tells you less than you’d think.
Why the Roman numerals
Because the season and the game happen in different years, and the league wanted to avoid the confusion that creates.
Super Bowl LX was played in February 2026, but it decided the 2025 season. Call it “the 2026 Super Bowl” and you’re right about the date and wrong about the season; call it “the 2025 Super Bowl” and it’s the other way round. A number that belongs to the game rather than to either year sidesteps the whole problem.
It also means the numeral never matches the year, which trips people up constantly. LX is the sixtieth Super Bowl, not one played in any year ending in sixty.
One exception: Super Bowl 50, in February 2016, used the digits. The league decided “Super Bowl L” looked wrong on a poster and dropped the numerals for a single year, then went straight back to them for LI.
When and where the next Super Bowl is
Super Bowl LXI. Sunday 14 February 2027. SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, in the Los Angeles area.
Since Super Bowl LVI in 2022 the game has settled on the second Sunday in February, which followed the regular season expanding to seventeen games. Before that it was usually the first Sunday.
LXI has two things going for it beyond the football. It’s the first Super Bowl played on Valentine’s Day, and it’s the first ever shown by ESPN, and the first on ABC since 2006.
The kickoff time hasn’t been confirmed. If it holds the recent slot, that’s 11:30pm in the UK and half past midnight in Spain and Germany. How to watch the Super Bowl has the full time table, the channels country by country, and where to watch it with other people.
Where the Super Bowl gets played
At a neutral venue, chosen years ahead by the league. Cities bid for it, and the warm ones and the covered ones win most of the time, for the obvious reason that early February in Chicago is not a television spectacle.
The concentration is striking. Two metro areas have hosted eleven Super Bowls each: New Orleans and the Miami area. The Los Angeles area has had eight, Tampa five. By state, Florida has hosted seventeen of the sixty and California fourteen. Between them, two states have staged more than half of them.
| Venue | Times hosted |
|---|---|
| The Superdome, New Orleans (under all its sponsored names) | 8 |
| The Orange Bowl, Miami | 5 |
| The Rose Bowl, Pasadena | 5 |
Compiled from Pro Football Reference’s Super Bowl history. Current through Super Bowl LX.
The exception that proves the rule is Super Bowl XLVIII, played outdoors at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in February 2014. It worked, the weather held, and the league has not tried it again since.
The neutral-venue rule, and the two teams who got round it
For fifty-four years, no team played a Super Bowl in its own stadium. Then it happened twice in a row.
Tampa Bay reached Super Bowl LV in February 2021 at Raymond James Stadium, which is their home ground. They won. The following February, the Los Angeles Rams reached Super Bowl LVI at SoFi Stadium, which is theirs. They won too.
Both were coincidences of a venue booked years earlier and a team that happened to be good enough that season. But it’s a decent reminder that “neutral venue” is a rule about who chooses the stadium, not a guarantee about who’s at home in it.
What happens on the night
If you’ve never sat through one, here’s the shape.
The game is four quarters of fifteen minutes each, so an hour of clock. A Super Bowl usually runs three and a half to four hours, because the clock stops constantly, there are more advert breaks than a normal game, and halftime is extended for the show.
Before kickoff there’s a fixed sequence: performances, the American national anthem, then the coin toss to decide who gets the ball first. Halftime comes after the second quarter and runs to twenty or thirty minutes, which is where the musical performance goes. Then two more quarters, then the trophy presentation.
The adverts are genuinely part of it in the United States. A thirty-second slot is one of the most expensive in television, and the ads themselves get made specifically for the night and discussed the next day.
If you want to follow the football itself rather than just the occasion, the NFL rules guides cover scoring, overtime and the penalties you’ll see most often, and the NFL stats guides explain the numbers the commentary throws at you.
The rest of the Super Bowl guide
Everything in this section, including what isn’t written yet.
| Guide | What it covers | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Every Super Bowl winner | All sixty results from 1967, plus every franchise’s record and the teams still waiting | Live |
| Super Bowl records | Biggest, closest, highest-scoring, the MVP list and the individual records | Live |
| How to watch the Super Bowl | Kickoff times by country, channels, watch-alongs and watch parties | Live |
| Super Bowl by the numbers | Sixty years of results, made interactive | Guide coming soon |
| Halftime show history | Every performer, and how the slot became what it is | Guide coming soon |
Common questions
What is the Super Bowl?
The Super Bowl is the NFL’s championship game, the single match that decides the American football season. It’s played between the champions of the league’s two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, at a neutral venue chosen years in advance, and the winner takes the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Why does the Super Bowl use Roman numerals?
Because the season and the game fall in different calendar years, so a year-based name would be ambiguous. Super Bowl LX was played in February 2026 but decided the 2025 season. A numeral belongs to the game itself and avoids the confusion. Super Bowl 50 in 2016 was the one exception.
When is the next Super Bowl?
Super Bowl LXI is on Sunday 14 February 2027 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, in the Los Angeles area. The kickoff time hasn’t been confirmed. Since 2022 the game has been played on the second Sunday in February.
Why is the Super Bowl always on a Sunday?
Because Sunday is the NFL’s main match day and has been throughout the league’s history, so the championship game follows the pattern of the season that precedes it. Every one of the sixty Super Bowls played has been on a Sunday.