Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show is part of long play drawn up by NFL to score with Latin America

Donald Trump, it is fair to assume, will be switching channels during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

The U.S. president has already said that he won’t be attending Super Bowl LX in person, suggesting that the venue, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, was “just too far away.” But the choice of celebrity entertainment planned for the main break – Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny and recently announced pregame addition Green Day – didn’t appeal. “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” Trump told the New York Post.

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell likely didn’t have the sensibilities of the U.S. president in mind when the choice of Bad Bunny was made.

One of the top artists in the world, Bad Bunny performs primarily in Spanish and has been critical of immigration enforcement, which factored into the backlash in some conservative circles to the choice. Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at this year’s Grammy Awards will have only stoked the ire of some conservatives.

But for the NFL hierarchy, this was likely a business decision, not a political one. The league has its eyes on expansion into Latin America; Bad Bunny, they hope, will be a ratings-winning means to an end. It has made such bets in the past. In 2020, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez were chosen to perform, with Bad Bunny making an appearance. The choice then, too, was seen as controversial.

Raising the flag overseas

As a teacher and scholar of critical sports studies, I study the global growth of U.S.-based sports leagues overseas.

Some, like the National Basketball Association, are at an advantage. The sport is played around the globe and has large support bases in Asia – notably in the Philippines and China – as well as in Europe, Australia and Canada.

The NFL, by contrast, is largely entering markets that have comparatively little knowledge and experience with football and its players.

The league has opted for a multiprong approach to attracting international fans, including lobbying to get flag football into the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Playing the field

When it comes to the traditional tackle game, the NFL has held global aspirations for over three-quarters of a century. Between 1950-1961, before they merged, the NFL and American Football League played seven games against teams in Canada’s CFL to strengthen the relationship between the two nations’ leagues.

Developing a fan base south of the border has long been part of the plan.

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The first international exhibition game between two NFL teams was supposed to take place in Mexico City in 1968. But Mexican protest over the economy and cost of staging the Olympics that year led the game, between the Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles, to be canceled.

Instead, it was Montreal that staged the first international exhibition match the following year.

In 1986, the NFL added an annual international preseason game, the “American Bowl,” to reach international fans, including several games in Mexico City and one in Monterrey.

But the more concerted effort was to grow football in the potentially lucrative, and familiar, European market.

After several attempts by the NFL and other entities in the 1970s and ’80s to establish an international football league, the NFL-backed World League of Football launched in 1991. Featuring six teams from the United States, one from Canada and three from Europe, the spring league lost money but provided evidence that there was a market for American football in Europe, leading to the establishment of NFL Europe.

But NFL bosses have long had wider ambitions. The league staged 13 games in Tokyo, beginning in 1976, and planned exhibitions for 2007 and 2009 in China that were ultimately canceled. These attempts did not have the same success as in Europe.

Beyond exhibitions

The NFL’s outreach in Latin America has been decades in the making. After six exhibition matches in Mexico between 1978 and 2001, the NFL chose Mexico City as the venue of its first regular season game outside the United States.

In 2005, it pitted the Arizona Cardinals against the San Francisco 49ers at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Marketed as “Fútbol Americano,” it drew the largest attendance in NFL history, with over 103,000 spectators.

The following year, Goodell was named commissioner and announced that the NFL would focus future international efforts on regular-season games.

The U.K. was a safe bet due to the established stadium infrastructure and the country’s small but passionate fan base. The NFL International Series was played exclusively in London between 2007 and 2016.

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But in 2016, the NFL finally returned to Mexico City, staging a regular-season game between the Oakland – now Las Vegas – Raiders and Houston Texans.

And after the completion of upgrades to Latin America’s largest stadium, Estadio Azteca, the NFL will return to Mexico City in 2026, along with games in Munich, Berlin and London. Future plans include expanding the series to include Sydney, Australia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2026.

The International Player Pathway program also offers players from outside the United States an opportunity to train and earn a roster spot on an NFL team. The hope is that future Latin American players could help expand the sport in their home countries, similar to how Yao Ming expanded the NBA fan base in China after joining the Houston Rockets, and Shohei Ohtani did the same for baseball in Japan while playing in Los Angeles.

Heading south of the border

The NFL’s strategy has gained the league a foothold in Latin America.

Mexico and Brazil have become the two largest international markets for the NFL, with nearly 40 million fans in each of the nations.

Although this represents a fraction of the overall sports fans in each nation, the raw numbers match the overall Latino fan base in the United States. In recent years the NFL has celebrated Latino Heritage Month through its Por La Cultura campaign, highlighting Latino players past and present.

Latin America also offers practical advantages. Mexico has long had access to NFL games as the southern neighbor to the United States, with the Dallas Cowboys among the most popular teams in Mexico.

For broadcasters, Central and South America offer less disruption in regards to time zones. Games in Europe start as early as 6:30 a.m. for West Coast fans, whereas Mexico City follows Central time, and Brasilia time is only one to two hours ahead of Eastern time.

The NFL’s expansion plans are not without criticism. Domestically, fans have complained that teams playing outside the U.S. borders means one less home game for season-ticket holders. And some teams have embraced international games more than others.

Another criticism is the league, which has reported revenues of over US$23 billion during the 2024-25 season – nearly double any other U.S.-based league – is using its resources to displace local sports. There are also those who see expansion of the league as a form of cultural imperialism. These criticisms often intersect with long-held ideas around the league promoting militarism, nationalism and American exceptionalism.

Bad Bunny: No Hail Mary attempt

For sure, the choice of Bad Bunny as the halftime pick is controversial, given the current political climate around immigration. The artist removed tour dates on the U.S. mainland in 2025 due to concerns about ICE targeting fans at his concerts, a concern reinforced by threats from the Department of Homeland Security that they would do just that at the Super Bowl.

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But in sticking with Bad Bunny, the NFL is showing it is willing to face down a section of its traditional support and bet instead on Latin American fans not just tuning in for the halftime show but for the whole game – and falling in love with football, too.

Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Geoffrey Propheter, University of Colorado Denver

Broncos say their new stadium will be ‘privately financed,’ but ‘private’ often still means hundreds of millions in public resources

The Denver Broncos announced in early September 2025 their plan to build a privately financed football stadium. The proposal received a lot of attention and praise.

Across the five major sports leagues in the U.S. – the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and MLS – only 20% of facilities are privately owned.

I’ve studied the intersection of state and local public finance and pro sports for two decades. This experience has led me to approach claims of private financing with suspicion.

Private dollars are often masked as public dollars in these arrangements. https://www.youtube.com/embed/zwv34Lpo0ec?wmode=transparent&start=0 A Fox31 Denver news report aired in November 2025 about the Broncos’ plans for a new stadium.

Private vs public dollars

In theory, what counts as private or public dollars is uncontroversial. Dollars are public when government has a legal claim over them – otherwise, they are private.

The public versus private dollar distinction matters when accounting for who is contributing how much to a sports facility. When public dollars are allowed to count as private dollars, a project proposal looks more enticing than it is, in fact.

For instance, lawmakers regularly allow team owners to count public dollars as private dollars. The Sacramento City Council agreed to let the NBA’s Sacramento Kings count their property tax payments for the city-owned arena as private contributions to the overall cost of financing the arena. But property taxes are public dollars that in other instances go toward public services like schools and road repairs.

Team owners building private facilities also typically receive public dollars through tax breaks, which is government spending in disguise. Property tax exemptions, sales and use tax exemptions on materials and machinery, and income tax credits are common forms of government givebacks to sports team owners.

I’ve estimated that property tax exemptions alone, among facilities in the five major leagues, have cost state and local governments US$20 billion cumulatively over the life of teams’ leases, 42% of which would have gone to K-12 education.

Rental payments spent on facilities are not private dollars

Many facilities and their infrastructure are funded through public debt secured in part by team rental payments. Lawmakers, media and consultants often view projects secured by rents as privately financed, in part or whole.

However, rental income in exchange for use or operation of public property should not be counted as private dollars.

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Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose state lawmakers allocated the rent paid for use of campground sites in a state park to pay for new campground bathrooms. Are the bathrooms privately funded?

The flaw in concluding “yes” arises from a failure to appreciate that lawmakers, through policy, create legal claims over certain dollars. All dollars start as private dollars, but through the tax system, lawmakers transfer ownership of some dollars to the public.

It is the government landlord’s choice, a policy decision, to spend the rental income on the rented property, a choice available to them only if they own the rental income in the first place.

Yet lawmakers regularly allow teams, both professional and minor league, to count rental payments as private contributions. This accounting makes sports subsidies look less generous than they actually are.

Looking beyond construction

Facilities not only need to be constructed but also operated, maintained and eventually upgraded. Roads, sewer lines, overpasses, game-day security and emergency response and public policies to mitigate gentrification caused by a facility are all common taxpayer-funded touchpoints. In addition, facilities have preconstruction costs such as land acquisition, soil remediation and site preparation, as well as later costs such as demolition and remediation for the land’s next use.

Focusing on privately financed construction and ignoring all other aspects of a project’s development and operation is misleading, potentially contributing to lawmakers making inefficient and expensive policy decisions.

By way of example, the Council of the District of Columbia approved a subsidy agreement last year with the NFL’s Commanders. The stadium would be financed, constructed and operated by the team owner, who would pay $1 in rent per year and remit no property taxes. In exchange for financing the stadium privately, the owner receives exclusive development rights to 20 acres of land adjacent to the stadium for the next 90 years.

The stadium is expected to cost the owner $2.5 billion, with the city contributing $1.3 billion for infrastructure.

But the city also gives up market rental income between $6 billion and $25 billion,depending on future land appreciation rates, that it could make on the 20 acres.

In other words, the rent discount alone means the city gives up revenue equal to multiple stadiums in exchange for the Commanders providing one. It is as if the council has a Lamborghini, traded it straight up for a Honda Civic, and then praised themselves for their negotiation acumen that resulted in a “free” Civic.

The Broncos’ proposed stadium

As of January 2026, Denver taxpayers know only that the Broncos stadium construction will be privately financed and that public dollars will be spent on some infrastructure.

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Being enamored with such a proposal is similar to being offered a $1 billion yacht at a 75% discount. In my experience, there are two types of public officials: one will want to spend $250 million to save $750 million, while the other will ask whether $250 million for a yacht is an appropriate use of taxpayer resources given existing needs elsewhere.

My hope is that lawmakers better appreciate the many ways government participation in sports facility development, including privately financed ones, imposes serious risks and costs for current and future taxpayers. What is the expected total cost of the stadium project over its life? How much of the life cost would public resources cover? Could public resources generate greater benefits in an alternative use? How much will it cost to mitigate or compensate those affected by a project’s expected negative side effects, such as gentrification, congestion, pollution and crime?

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Geoffrey Propheter, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

John Affleck, Penn State

When I first heard about the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones in connection to federal investigations involving illegal gambling, I couldn’t help but think of a recent moment in my sports writing class.

I was showing my students a clip from an NFL game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs. Near the end of play, Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw a perfect pass to receiver Brian Jones Jr. to secure a critical first down. Out of the blue, a student groaned and said that he’d lost US$50 on that throw.

I thought of that moment because it revealed how ubiquitous sports betting has become, how much the types of bets have changed over time, and – given these trends – how it’s naive to think players won’t continue to be tempted to game the system.

The prop bet hits it big

I’ve been following the evolution of sports gambling for about a decade in my position as chair of Penn State’s sports journalism program.

Back when legal American sports betting was mostly confined to Las Vegas, the standard bets tended to be tied to picking a winner or which team would cover a point spread.

But ahead of the 1986 Super Bowl between the Chicago Bears and the overmatched New England Patriots, casinos offered bets on whether Bears defensive lineman – and occasional running back – William “Refrigerator” Perry would score a touchdown. The excitement around that sideshow kept fan interest going during a 46-10 blowout.

Perry did end up scoring, and the prop bet took off from there.

Prop bets are wagers that depend on an outcome within a game but not its final result. They can often involve an athlete’s individual performance in some statistical category – for instance, how many yards a running back will rush for, how many rebounds a basketball center will secure, or how many strikeouts a pitcher will have. They’ve become routine offerings on sports betting menus.

For example: As I write this, I am looking at a FanDuel account I opened years ago, seeing that, for the Green Bay Packers-Pittsburgh Steelers game currently in progress, I can place a wager on which player will score a touchdown, how many yards each quarterback will throw for and much, much more. As the game progresses, the odds constantly shift – allowing for what are called “live bets.”

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Returning to my student who lost the bet on Lawrence’s pass completion: It’s possible he’d placed a bet on Lawrence to throw fewer than a set number of yards. Or he could have been part of a fantasy league, which is also dependent on individual player performances.

Either way, a problem with prop bets, from an anti-corruption perspective, is that an individual can often control the outcome. You don’t need a group of players to be in on it – which is what happened during the infamous Black Sox Scandal, when eight players on the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.

In the indictment against him, Rozier is accused of telling a co-defendant to pass along information to particular bettors that he planned to leave a March 2023 game early – a move everyone involved knew meant he would not reach his statistical benchmarks for the game. They could then place bets that he wouldn’t hit those marks.

In baseball, meanwhile, Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians was placed on leave during the 2025 season and is under investigation for possibly illegally wagering on the outcome of two pitches he threw. MLB authorities are essentially trying to determine if he deliberately threw balls as opposed to strikes in two instances. (Yes, prop bets have become so granular that you can even bet on whether a pitcher will throw a ball or a strike on an individual pitch.)

An exploding market with no end in sight

The popularity of prop bets feeds into a worldwide sports gambling industry that has experienced explosive growth and shows no sign of slowing.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that states could decide on whether to allow sports betting, 39 states plus the District of Columbia have done so.

The leagues and media are more than just bystanders. FanDuel and DraftKings are official sports betting partners of the NBA and the NFL.

In the days after the Supreme Court ruling, I wondered whether journalists would embrace sports betting. These days, ESPN not only has a betting show, but it also has a betting app.

According to the American Gaming Association, sportsbooks collected a record $13.71 billion in revenue in 2024 from about $150 billion in wagers. A study released in February 2025 by Siena and St. Bonaventure universities found that nearly half of American men have an online sports betting account.

But those figures don’t begin to touch the worldwide sports betting market, especially the illegal one. The United Nations, in a 2021 report, reported that up to $1.7 trillion is wagered annually in illegal betting markets.

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The U.N. report warned that it had found a “staggering scale, manifestation, and complexity of corruption and organized crime in sport at the global, regional, and national levels.”

Who’s the boss?

In early October 2025, I attended a conference of Play the Game, a Denmark-based organization that promotes “democratic values in world sports.” Its occasional gatherings attract experts from around the world who are interested in keeping sports fair and safe for everyone.

One of the most sobering topics was illegal, online sportsbooks that feature wagering on all levels of sport, from the lowest levels of European soccer on up.

It sounded somewhat familiar. This summer at the Little League World Series, which my students covered for The Associated Press, managers complained about offshore sportsbooks offering lines on the tournament, which is played by 12-year-old amateurs.

And with so much illegal wagering in the world, the issue of match fixing was bound to come up.

One session screened a recent German documentary on match fixing. Meanwhile, Anca-Maria Gherghel, a Ph.D. candidate at Sheffield Hallam University and senior researcher for EPIC Global Solutions, both in northern England, told me how she had interviewed a professional female soccer player for a team in Cyprus. The player described how she and her teammates were routinely approached with lucrative offers to throw matches.

Put it all together – the vast sums of money at play and the relative ease of fixing a prop bet, let alone a match – and you cannot be surprised at the NBA scandal.

I used to think that gambling was just a segment of the larger sports industry. Now, I wonder whether I had it exactly backward.

Has sports just become a segment of the larger gambling industry?

John Affleck, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society, Penn State

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.