Super Bowl LIX - Minimalist Graphics, Minimal Tom Brady Insight

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First things first, let’s deal with the key debating point from Super Bowl LIX. It’s not how the Philadelphia Eagles managed to blow away the Kansas City Chiefs. It’s the graphics used by Fox. (The Fox feed is taken up by Sky here in the UK so I got to see and hear what Americans saw when the ball was in play.)

The design was… minimalist and I saw A LOT of debate about it. Personally, I liked how it kept all the focus on the pitch, but, as a less informed fan, I’m not sure it was quite giving me all the information I needed all the time. Maybe it’s a me problem, but it took me a little while to keep up with where in the drive we were and so on.

And then there is Tom Brady. I think Andrew Marchand over at The Athletic summed up the GOAT’s contribution to the night pretty well:

Brady told us a lot of what was happening, but we wanted to know from his 4-D mind — why?

It’s been the criticism of him all season – that for someone who clearly has an incredible football brain, Brady doesn’t actually provide all that new. I’ve noticed this a lot in sport, as it happens. There are a few exceptions, but, generally the better the player, the less interesting a pundit they are.

Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show is available on Apple Music:

Super Bowl Sunday in the UK

The Super Bowl has become a big deal in the UK. Free-to-air broadcaster ITV now shows it, as well as Sky Sports, which has the rights to the entire NFL season. Both BBC 5Live and TalkSport have radio commentary too.

We know that American football has never been more popular here. However, while it looks like the Eagles defeat of the Kansas City Chiefs broke records in America, with 135.7 million people tuning in, that was not the case in the UK. ITV put out a press release announcing how many people watched sport on its channels over the weekend. It mentioned the Six Nations and FA Cup. The phrase Super Bowl didn’t appear at all. Rather bizarrely, it mentioned shows like “The Masked Singer” instead of the climax of the NFL season.

I appreciate the timing doesn’t help. The game didn’t start until 11.45 pm on a Sunday night UK time. However, you’d think they might mention that what is probably the biggest sporting event on Earth was part of their clearly succesful weekend line-up.

Overall, Super Bowl Sunday 2025 was clearly a huge media success. It probably helped that the Chiefs made it to New Orleans (Taylor Swift) but also that they didn’t win for a third time in a row. A blowout is never great though. With more international games than ever before on their way in the next regular season, things are only going in one direction as we head towards Super Bowl LX.