In professional American football, the Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). The game and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday. Over the years it has become the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of the year, and has become likened to a de facto U.S. national holiday. In addition, many popular singers and musicians have performed during the Super Bowl's pre-game and halftime ceremonies. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest U.S. food consumption day, following Thanksgiving.
The Super Bowl was first played on January 15 1967 as part of the merger agreement between the NFL and its younger rival, the American Football League (AFL) in which each league's championship team would play each other in an "AFL-NFL World Championship Game". After the completion of the merger in 1970, the Super Bowl became the NFL's championship game, played between the champions of the league's two conferences: the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Since the NFL season extends beyond New Year's Eve, the Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather than the year it was held. For example, Super Bowl XLII, played in February 2008, was actually part of the 2007 season.
