Unless you were around to see it, you probably wouldn’t recognize the first Super Bowl in history. Under a different name, with teams from two rival football leagues, the game’s prices and attendance were nothing like what we know today.
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The average ticket price was a whopping $12 (equivalent to about $100 today). Compare that to an average ticket price of $8,772 for the upcoming Super Bowl LVI, and you start to realize just how much of a steal those first attendees really got. Not only were the tickets cheap, they didn’t even sell out - roughly a third of them went unsold.
In 1960, the American Football League (AFL) was founded to compete with the National Football League (NFL) before the two merged in 1970. The first “Super Bowl” was actually called the AFL-NFL World Championship.
On January 15, 1967, the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs played against the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Despite a somewhat close first half, the Packers eventually won 35-10.
We don’t know much about the snack or drink prices at that first game in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, but we do know about another major aspect of the Super Bowl: advertising. The cost of a 30-second TV ad was only $42,000 (about $350,000 today). If that sounds expensive, just know that the same 30 seconds of advertising will cost you about $6.5 million for the upcoming Super Bowl.
About 60 million people tuned in to watch the AFL-NFL World Championship on TV. To put that in perspective, over 91 million tuned into last year’s Super Bowl, down from previous years’ averages of over 100 million viewers since 2010.
All in all, low prices and low attendance aren’t exactly selling points of the Super Bowl we know today. To say the least, the Super Bowl has come a long way from its humble beginnings.
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