Platform:In the early hours of Monday morning, the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots at the University of Phoenix stadium in the Super Bowl XLII, writes Richard Gillis.
Many of the 100 million or so viewers tuning in on Sunday night will be, like me, only marginally interested in the result: the Super Bowl is so much more than a sports event. One of the game's biggest constituencies is Corporate America; tune in and you'll go away thinking all is well, that the subprime credit crunch and impending recession are a figment of the media's imagination.
The sellout 72,000 crowd has paid an average $800 (€540) a ticket, allowing the National Football League (NFL) to reap $57.6 million in revenue for this game alone. The presence in the final of two well-supported teams has fuelled a huge secondary ticketing market, with online sellers offering pairs of tickets for between $4,000 and $8,000.
On the ground and over the internet, the NFL will net about $125 million from Super Bowl merchandise.
The Super Bowl advertising breaks have become an institution and are used as a bellwether indicator of the health of the US advertising industry. Fox, the television network which has the rights to show this year's game, is charging $2.7 million for a 30-second advertisement.
This is a record, and some analysts suggest the Hollywood writers' strike, which has removed a number of ratings hits from the schedules over recent months, is the reason for the bump in value. Total advertising spend with the network could top $725 million when pre- and post-game coverage is factored in.
Beyond the figures, trends in advertisers are studied in detail. American football is a game made for television. Unlike GAA and soccer, the game is a series of individual plays punctuated by time outs, leaving much more time to be sold to advertisers.
A 30-second advertising spot during the second half of the game reaches more people than any other single marketing message. Get it right on Super Bowl Sunday and the brand will be remembered forever.
Apple reignited its image in the mid-1990s with its iconic Orwell 1984 ad spot, and the Budweiser "Wassup" campaign became part of the frat boy college idiom via a Super Bowl appearance.
Who's in and who's not is just as important. The rise and fall and rise again of the dotcom industry can be traced using the Super Bowl as a guide.
Monster.com, the online recruitment giant, added real-world credibility to the web when it took an ad in 1999.
But at the heart of all this naked capitalism are some socialist-sounding principles. Each of the 32 NFL team franchises starts the season with about $100 million from a revenue sharing agreement. This is taken from a pool of money generated centrally, including from sponsorship and TV deals - the NFL broadcast agreement with a group of US networks is the richest sports contract in the world.
Likewise, the college draft system and a salary cap helps spread the playing talent around the league, avoiding the domination of a few rich teams. This has become a theme of English football's Premier League, whose business model is being questioned by a new generation of club owners bred on the ways of the NFL.
For men like Randy Lerner of Aston Villa, George Gillett and Tom Hicks of Liverpool and the Glazer family of Manchester United, American football is how sport should be: guaranteed income, no threat of relegation, money for old rope.
The NFL's influence could be seen clearly even further afield last week. In India, cricket's governing body, the BCCI, has created a new domestic competition, the Indian Premier League (IPL), which borrows heavily from the US.
Eight city-based franchises were sold at auction, raising $720 million. Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, won the most expensive franchise, for Mumbai, the country's commercial capital, bidding $111.9 million.
Vijay Mallya, the Kingfisher beer and airline billionaire, tabled $111.6 million to win Bangalore, the centre of India's IT industry.
Television has gone for the idea in a big way. Sony and World Sports Group, a marketing agency based in Singapore, have paid $1 billion for the rights to the event for 10 years. That's a billion reasons why the Super Bowl is compulsory viewing for students of the sports business.
