Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance was ALL about profits, not politics.
If you felt a familiar twinge of déjà vu watching the internet melt down over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show, that’s because this script has been running for decades.
The NFL didn’t stumble into controversy.
It scheduled it.
The idea that Bad Bunny’s performance was some spontaneous political provocation — a stealth lecture on immigration or a partisan cultural flex — misses the point entirely. The halftime show is not an artistic risk accidentally taken. It is one of the most aggressively focus-grouped, monetized, and intentionally provocative entertainment products in American life. The controversy isn’t a side effect. It’s the product.
This didn’t start with Bad Bunny. The modern halftime show pivoted in the 1990s when the NFL realized football alone wasn’t enough to hold viewers through the break. Ever since, the league has chased spectacle, shock, and conversation. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake didn’t “accidentally” change television history in 2004; that moment permanently proved outrage drives attention. Since then, halftime shows have been engineered to sit right at the cultural fault line — edgy enough to trend, safe enough to monetize.
Fast-forward through Beyoncé, Shakira, Dr. Dre, Rihanna — every one of these shows triggered the same cycle: pre-emptive outrage, breathless media coverage, corporate hand-wringing, social media kerfuffle, then record ratings and ad revenue. The NFL learned long ago that nothing glues Americans to their screens like the promise of something they’re supposed to be mad about.
What’s often left out of this conversation is that the halftime show is only one piece of a much larger strategy. At the very same time the league is stoking domestic culture-war skirmishes, it has been steadily exporting the sport itself. The National Football League now plays regular-season games in London, Germany, Mexico City, Brazil, and beyond, with plans expanding year after year. This isn’t charity or cultural exchange. It’s market expansion.
From the league’s perspective, American football is no longer just an American product. It’s a global entertainment brand. That requires international stars, multilingual audiences, and cultural relevance that travels across borders. Seen in that light, Bad Bunny isn’t controversial — he’s logical. He’s global. He’s massively popular. He sings in Spanish. He connects the NFL to audiences the league desperately wants: younger viewers, Latino fans, and international markets where football is still a novelty.
And here’s where the long con becomes obvious.
The same corporations that carefully engineer these moments then feign surprise at the backlash. Suddenly, networks are “responding” to controversy they manufactured. Sponsors are “navigating” tensions they helped inflame. Commentators get to pretend this is an organic national debate instead of a predictable reaction baked into the business model.
Meanwhile, Americans are nudged into hating each other on schedule. Red versus blue. English versus Spanish. Urban versus rural. While viewers argue about symbolism and intent, the league sells ads, boosts global visibility, and signs the next international broadcast deal. The outrage economy hums along, perfectly monetized.
Bad Bunny didn’t use the halftime show to lecture America about immigration. The NFL used Bad Bunny to create a moment people would argue about — at home and abroad. The politics were projected onto the performance by a media ecosystem that profits from polarization, while corporate sponsors float serenely above the mess.
If this feels manipulative, that’s because it is.
The Super Bowl halftime show is not a referendum on national identity or public policy: It’s a multi-billion-dollar advertising platform designed to manufacture cultural friction just hot enough to trend, not hot enough to disrupt the revenue stream.
We don’t have to fight each other on cue every time the league rings the bell.
The only real act of resistance is refusing to confuse a carefully engineered marketing spectacle with something profound — and refusing to let money-grubbing corporations turn cultural difference into a blood sport while they quietly count the profits.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)