The Long Game: How the Super Bowl Halftime Show Signals NFL's Global Future

The NFL is doubling down on international games, Latino audiences, and youth-focused flag football as it eyes long-term worldwide expansion.

Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl halftime show Sunday was watched by 128.2 million people, the fourth-most-watched halftime show of all time despite nearly the entire 13-minute performance being in Spanish. But Bunny’s ratings between 8:15 and 8:30 EST were also 7% lower than the Big Game’s peak audience, 137.9 million in the second quarter from 7:45-8, the largest peak audience in the Super Bowl’s 60-year history.

The selection of Bad Bunny’s show and the run-up to it caused outrage and protests among millions of angry Americans. More than 6 million of them tuned in to Turning Point USA’s “All American Halftime Show” on Sunday on YouTube as a safe-space, Bunny-free alternative. On Truth Social, President Trump called Bad Bunny’s performance one of the worst ever and an affront to the greatness of America. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” he added, “and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World.”

Despite the backlash the NFL received from its halftime show selection, the league was and is more than willing to piss off millions of its fans with its eyes on a larger prize: international expansion, global domination, and a push for football to be played by younger demographics, boys and girls, around the world. To close his show, Bunny shouted out all the countries in North and South America, and that was no coincidence. The NFL wants to reach all these places, too.

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Last week, the NFL signed a three-year contract to bring an annual regular-season game back to Mexico City. After playing in São Paolo, Brazil, to begin last season, it’s bringing its most famous and valuable team, the Dallas Cowboys, to Rio de Janeiro in 2026. And after playing its first-ever game in Madrid last season at the modern, renovated Santiago Bernabéu stadium, the league signed a multi-year deal to continue playing games in Spain.

As part of its “Por La Cultura” campaign to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the NFL said that it has more than 39 million Latino fans in the U.S., a number that’s only going to grow over time, especially after Bad Bunny’s performance. The league is betting that it attracted more fans from a 13-minute performance en Español than it drove away.

The NFL also proclaimed that the halftime show received more than 4 billion social media views, likely skewing toward younger demographics. And in the 72 hours after Bunny’s performance, the YouTube video of the show received 69 million views, dwarfing the 50 million views Kendrick Lamar‘s record-breaking halftime show got over a similar time period.

This push toward younger fans and games in more cities worldwide coincides with the NFL’s ambitious initiative to bring flag football to boys and girls across the globe. The International Federation of American Football boasts 74 national member federations and said that 2.4 million Americans under 17 are playing organized flag football. It was no accident that the annual Pro Bowl game is now a flag football game, in addition to the celebrity flag game during Super Bowl Week streamed on YouTube, featuring stars that appeal to younger audiences like Druski, J. Balvin, Benson Boone, Jesser, and Deestroying.

As men’s and women’s flag football gets set to make its debut in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the first-ever Fanatics Flag Football Classic will air live on Fox on March 21 from Saudi Arabia. Kevin Hart is hosting, NFL coaches Kyle Shanahan and Sean Payton are coaching, and Tom Brady, Saquon Barkley, CeeDee Lamb, Christian McCaffrey, Sauce Gardner, Myles Garrett, Brock Bowers, Maxx Crosby, Tyreek Hill, Odell Beckham Jr., and Rob Gronkowski are among the superstars slated to play.

“When I’m asked what the next 100 years looks like when you look at football, not professional football, it’s flag,” Troy Vincent, the senior vice president of NFL football operations, said on the league’s website.

As sports marketing expert and consultant Jordan Rogers pointed out following Bad Bunny’s performance, the NFL is going after the markets and demographics it wants, not the ones it already has. If it loses some fans in the U.S. offended by the lack of an English-speaking Super Bowl concert, the league seems willing to trade that for young fans obsessed with one of the two most popular artists on the planet.

As it looks to take America’s most popular sport and make it appealing and cool around the world, the NFL is playing the long game and looking at the big picture entering the second half of the 2020s and beyond.