Yahoo Finance Spotlight: The Financials of Super Bowl LV

Yahoo Fianance Editor-at-Large Dan Roberts takes a look at the financial and economic impact of the 2021 Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Bucaneers.

Video Transcript

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DAN ROBERTS: All right, well the financial story, to me, the big headline, is that this was obviously the pandemic season. It had a lot of problems that came along with it. And yet, the NFL got through it. I mean, it's kind of remarkable. No regular season game was canceled outright. A number of games were postponed and rescheduled, but no game was canceled and the NFL got through the season. Now, at the end of the season, they have what I believe is a dream Super Bowl match-up for ratings.

Now let's start by talking about the ratings story. You know, live sports TV ratings were down for all the major sports in summer and fall and the NFL was no exception. Regular season ratings in the end were down an average 8%, but then the championship game weekend happened and the ratings really turned around. The NFC Championship game and the AFC Championship game had huge ratings boost for the NFL. Now, the NFC Championship game between the Packers and the Bucs, Brady and Rodgers, averaged 45 million viewers and it peaked at 53 million views. That's the most watched NFC Championship game since 2017. So, four seasons ago. Now the AFC Championship game on CBS drew around 42 million viewers and that was up just 2% from last year's AFC Championship game. So both of those went very well and they both bode well for Super Bowl ratings.

Now let's talk about the advertising story. Of course, as I mentioned, the pandemic definitely hangs over this season and I think you can expect to see a lot of ads that are very serious, that deal with the pandemic, maybe they're emotional. Now Budweiser, Coke, and Pepsi are not running ads. That's three of the four biggest advertisers from last year's Super Bowl that are sitting out. Of course, Budweiser parent company Anheuser-Busch will still have a number of ads. It's choosing to advertise Bud Light and Michelob instead.

And then there's the price, OK? Viacom CBS is asking $5.5 million this year for a 30-second ad, and that's actually down just slightly from the year before, which was $5.6 million from Fox. Of course, that's a very slight drop. It's basically flat. But it's the first year in many years that the price of a 30-second Super Bowl ad did not go up. Now even though it's negligible and Fox got $448 million total from advertisers last year, we'll wait and find out the final numbers on how much CBS gets.

Now let's talk about the ticket sales part of the story. We know the NFL is allowing 22,000 fans inside the stadium. That's one-third of the stadium's 65,000 seat capacity and that includes 7,500 vaccinated frontline healthcare workers who are getting it for free. So that leaves 14,500 tickets on the open market for regular fans who, of course, will be expected to wear a mask. Once we knew that the match-up was set, average prices for the get-in, or base price as the industry calls it, surged by as much as 180% on some of those resale sites compared to the same day in 2020. Now the lowest get-in price on resale sites was $8,000.

Now, finally, let's talk about the economic impact for Tampa. As we all know, hosting the Super Bowl usually means big economic benefit for the host city because fans come and they eat in the local restaurants, they shop at the stores, and they stay in the hotels. But, pandemic. Now last year, Miami officials pegged the impact at more than $500 million for the city of hosting the Super Bowl. Now I always like to give the caveat that these estimates are wildly ballparked and they're often very exaggerated, but certainly there is a big boost, for sure, to hosting the Super Bowl. Now that said, the city is still going to see an impact it's still going to see a boost because you do have those 14,500 fans. I can imagine it could be as much as just half the usual economic boost that a host city sees, but it's going to be a good thing for Tampa.

So guys, that's the business story here. It was the pandemic year and certainly the NFL's season took a revenue hit from the pandemic. But I always like to remind people that the NFL is the league that is the least reliant on game day ticket sales, on butts in seats. A lot of those other leagues are much more reliant on that revenue. For the NFL, the big money is in broadcast. And all those regular season games still happened, they still went on air, and, of course, the NFL got a dream Super Bowl match-up. So in the end it's going to be just fine, guys.