Superbowl. A game of American Football. So called to differentiate it from soccer, which the rest of the worlds plays. Actually mostly watches. Comparing the numbers of people that play a sport and those who watch it shows that most people watch.
Play is for the young anyway. Animals that survive by means of their physical skills (think lions) have a play phase in their development. It is just better to create these much needed skills in the practice of game play rather than to put this information into genes.
Football has its roots in such play. It features specifically human additions: Rules and a roundish object. Humans act as groups. Thats when we are strongest. Coordination of a band of people is something all cultures train. Regardless if it is dance or hunt. People need to learn how to coordinate.
A round object like a ball seems to be an ideal proxy to coalesce the objectives towards a common goal of action. Usually to drive the roundish object to a specific target on the edge of a defined field.
A field that is equally divided among two defined teams. In meat space there are not really any games with 3 teams or multiple balls. Virtually all team sports adhere to this simple pattern. Chess or Golf are different. So are athletic competitions. In the later ones one measures how well a human completes a specific task. Which can be as ‘natural’ as running or as arbitrary as triple jump or falling from a tall tower into water while moving the body controlled in mid air.
Measuring these tasks is either scientifically precise, or utterly subjective. Which does not get questioned: Enough people adjust their entire life around the world of, lets say, figure skating. Among them you’ll find no longer any children who call the emperor naked. They are still there, but nobody listens to them. What is your future if you are a figure skater? Become a judge at figure skating competitions of course. So why would you question the system that will keep you somewhat involved and relevant in the future? And for us who look at it from the outside it seems logical and relevant enough. We don’t understand all the nuances, so we assume that there are valid rules and logic at force.
If you’d filter belly smacks and other apparent failures then 99% of the audiences watching olympic diving competitions would not be able to discern the performances that got their athletes the first or last place in the performance. Fit bodies they all have. Fast they all move. Gravity pulls them in the same direction.
That is easier with team sports. Over a given time both teams try to bring the round object into a specific place. If they did they get what is called a point. Basically those events get counted, and compared in the end. The side who has more wins.
Sports are also defined by their rules. Rules in sport are a proxy to laws in life. While there are judges applying the rules there are referees in team sports. Judges have, luckily, a higher standing in real live. Referees often are identified by the fans of a loosing team as the real culprit and the actual cause for how things unfolded earlier. They are often the most hated person in a given town. For a day, since such fan wrath towards these individuals luckily lasts not for long. In contrast to Fan Feuds than can sometimes span over generations in European soccer.
Teams sports are a proxy for war. War was the business of men, young strong man were most helpful when war still meant direct physical contact. Tools were always part of the story. Even Chimpanzees already hurl stuff. Monkey warfare is too gruesome to write about. Certainly no rules or honor there. War and rules are a strange story anyway: On one side both parties are out for maximum harm, on the other they try to do so within some constraints. WW2 did not see any gas use on the battle field like WW1 did. All sides had the capability. Germany used it in factories built to kill millions of civilians people of all ages, men and women alike. Yet, even as the cause of the Reichswehr became desperate they did not make any attempts to use gas as a defense against the winning US and soviet armies. The US killed more people in Hiroshima with one device than perished over 4 gruesome years of fighting from gas during WW1. There are no rules for nuclear war. Because you can’t do that one right.
Team sports has its roots in war. Yet it is very far away from it. Yes, fans sport colors. There are martial male rituals around the whole affair. But in comparison it is tame. One could consider the roman Circus as a stepping stone: A mix of reality TV, celebrity cult and snuff film. Some say we simply replaced Panem et Circenses with stimulus checks and Netflix.