The Super bowl is the biggest television event in the USA and one of the biggest in the world. At its peak, the ratings reached to 115 million people but it should also be mentioned that it was reached during the half time show when superstars took the stage and most expensive advertisements saw the daylight for the first time. Therefore, it can be argued that the super bowl game itself was least important to the people watching. I will bet one ice cold beer on that most of us don’t even know how the game went, but googled it before they read any further.

As if it weren’t enough that this event is the annual festival for football in America but it is also the annual festival for beer, especially American beer. According to sources here, here, here and here, the people of the USA drank 325 million gallons (1.230.258.830 litres) of beer during the event! And probably around 80% of all of that was a neutral and near tasteless ale.

To an unfair comparison „only“ 1.76 million gallons (6.7 million litres) were drunk at Octoberfest in Germany, so why is it an unfair comparison? Because the stage at Octoberfest is much smaller but some would argue that Octoberfest is the one and only annual beer festival. Beer brewers and producers spend about 10 million U$ dollars for only 1 minute of advertisement spot which is more money than the production cost of the most expensive Icelandic television series and, even more, money than some of Hollywood’s blockbusters. Let’s be clear, these 10 million dollars are only for the ad spot and not for the production of the advertisement itself, which is more often than not around the same cost as the ad spot. Then, all this adds up to all of those sponsor deals that beer brewers and producers have made with the NFL. From the year 2009-2013 an unnamed beer producer spent over 149 million U$ dollars in sponsorship deals only for the Super Bowl.

For now, beer and all alcohol advertisements are banned in Iceland and even so, producers and brewers have gotten their way by bypassing the laws but it makes you wonder how the culture would be if beer selling and advertisements would be allowed in Iceland, like in the USA and other countries. For example, did you know that you can’t buy beer on Sundays (on the same day as the Super bowl? and bars aren’t allowed to be open during the game? It is almost physically impossible to drink beer in Iceland while the game is on. Why on earth can’t we drink or advertise beer while a country with 1000 times more citizens can do it? Why doesn’t everything get out of hands in the USA because of beer selling and advertisements? Does Obama have a perfect control over these people or are we in Iceland just hugely misunderstanding?