Bad Bunny has dominated headlines following his halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl. Credit where it is due: he delivered what many expected—an unapologetic expression of cultural diversity, historical memory, and solidarity with Latino communities and other marginalized and discriminated voices.
What is discussed far less is a deeper and more consequential question: why did the NFL give him that stage in the first place?
For any activist or social movement, access to a stage of that magnitude is gold. Messages and demands often already exist; what is missing is visibility. Throughout history, the challenge has rarely been a lack of ideas—it has been the absence of spaces where those ideas could appear, resonate, and be shared collectively.
I have written before about the need to move beyond a purely materialist worldview and about the importance of meaning as something more decisive than action alone. Meaning gives coherence and long-term direction to human life. Without it, even the most intense actions dissolve into exhaustion, repetition, and fragmentation.
An unexpected—but revealing—example of this principle can be found in the National Football League.
This is not the first time, and it is not an accident, that the NFL has aligned itself—often with striking accuracy—with the cultural and social tensions of its time, without becoming openly partisan. This capacity was not spontaneous; it was learned over time, through crisis and adaptation.
A decisive turning point came in 1993, when Michael Jackson transformed the Super Bowl halftime show into something more than entertainment. Performing Heal the World and We Are the World, he reframed halftime as a global moral gesture. From that moment on, the Super Bowl was no longer just a sporting event—it became a cultural ritual capable of addressing humanity.
That lesson reappeared with great clarity in 2002, when U2 performed following the September 11 attacks. As the names of the victims scrolled silently behind them, the NFL chose recognition over spectacle. The country did not need distraction; it needed a moment of shared mourning.
Since then, the pattern has continued. Performances addressing racial injustice, historical erasure, and cultural identity have not avoided social tension—they have reflected it symbolically. These moments did not instruct audiences what to think or whom to support; they created a space where they could be seen, felt, and held.
This is where the NFL’s positioning becomes clear. Operating in one of the most polarized societies in modern history, the league must hold together an audience that spans race, class, geography, and political identity. Open partisanship would fracture that audience; total neutrality would empty the ritual of meaning. The NFL has instead learned to allow artists to reflect the historical moment while preserving the shared space itself.
In doing so, the Super Bowl has become one of the last truly collective civic rituals in the United States—one where millions still gather around the same images, sounds, and emotions, even if they agree on little else.
One cannot help but wish that global sporting events such as the World Cup or the Olympic Games would learn from this approach, engaging the historical moment with responsibility rather than simply “taking the money and running.”
There is also a lesson here for progressive and humanist movements. The NFL demonstrates—perhaps unintentionally—that it is still possible to create communion without uniformity, unity without erasing difference, and shared meaning without dogma.
History reminds us that meaning rarely appears by accident. During the European Renaissance, the Medici family in Italy did more than accumulate wealth—they chose to finance artists, thinkers, and cultural spaces that gave direction and coherence to their time. They were bankers, not saints, yet history remembers them for what they enabled. The lesson is simple and enduring: meaning must be supported, staged, and resourced. If a commercial sports league can intuitively understand this today, movements committed to human dignity and social transformation would do well to remember it.
