Growing up a football fan, I used to look forward to the Super Bowl every year even if my favorite team wasn’t in it. I also grew up an art fan. So, whenever my team wasn’t in it to win it, which was often, I would look forward to the Super Bowl ticket art that the NFL would release and also make into a poster to promote the game.
Over the years, Super Bowl ticket art evolved from basic informational stubs with the game’s date, time, ticket price and other related data depicted along with the game’s logo to fancier concoctions that would include imagery often tied in with whatever city was hosting that year’s game. With this weekend’s Super Bowl LVI being 100% digital and its tickets being touted as a nonfungible token (NFT) asset, I thought I’d give my picks for the Top 5 classic paper Super Bowl tickets:
1. Super Bowl XXXII – My choice for the best Super Bowl ticket of all time was this one for the 1998 Big Game in San Diego. The ticket art played off that city’s world-famous zoo, with the Lombardi Trophy surrounded by such animals as a lion, an ape, a polar bear and a giraffe. It’s a great collectors’ item for both sports fans and animal lovers! The game itself was pretty great, too, with John Elway outdueling Brett Favre to win his first Super Bowl as the Denver Broncos topped the Green Bay Packers 31-24.
2. (tie) Super Bowls X and XXXVI – It’s hard to beat the pure red-white-and-blue patriotism displayed on the tickets for these two classic Super Bowls. The first of the two games was played in January 1976, kicking off America’s Bicentennial year. The Pittsburgh Steelers narrowly topped the Dallas Cowboys, with Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann turning in an MVP performance. The second was played in January 2002, less than five months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Fittingly, the Patriots won on a last-second field goal. Well played, NFL. Well played.
3. Super Bowl XIV – Ah, 1980. It was the year the Super Bowl went Hollywood. Well, Pasadena to be exact. But the Super Bowl montage ticket art for that year included such images as the Hollywood sign, the iconic Capitol Records building and other famous Southern California landmarks.
4. (tie) Super Bowls IX and XV – Several Super Bowls have been held in New Orleans, but the tickets to those first two really captured the Crescent City’s jazzy soul. The former depicted a trio of jazz musicians performing their tunes with a steamboat, the Superdome and the city’s skyline in the background. The latter, meanwhile, depicted the Lombardi Trophy surrounded by a collection of musical instruments like the trumpet, the trombone and the clarinet heard most nights on Bourbon Street. These tickets have made for great collectors’ items for both football fans and music aficionados.
5. Super Bowl XLVIII – A New York City Super Bowl? If the Big Game could make it there, it could make it anywhere. OK, sure, the 2014 game was actually held at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just outside of the Big Apple. But that didn’t stop the NFL’s promotions department from designing a ticket that featured a King Kong-sized Lombardi Trophy with Manhattan’s famous skyline in the background.
Runners-Up: Super Bowl XIX, featuring a ticket that paired the Lombardi Trophy and the Golden Gate Bridge (the game was played at Stanford Stadium); Super Bowl XXX, with desert-themed ticket art thanks to the game being played at Arizona’s Sun Devil Stadium; and Super Bowl XVIII, one of the busiest Super Bowl ticket designs with all sorts of Florida imagery to commemorate the game’s Tampa setting.
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