💰 How Much is Bad Bunny Getting Paid to Perform at Halftime?

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I really hate being “that guy,” but I have to be honest with you:

I felt a little rudderless without football this weekend. Embarassing, I know. But it’s hard to “touch grass” when said grass is covered in over a foot of snow, and it hasn’t been above 20°F in over a month. And don’t even get me started on all the ice.

At least we have a great year of sports ahead of us.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Super Bowl LX’s “High Tech” Grass

📉 Biggest Loser: Inside the Cheating Scandal Rocking the Olympics

🏆 Winner’s Circle: How Much is Bad Bunny Getting Paid to Perform at Halftime?

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🗞 The Big Story

Super Bowl LX is about to feature the most high-tech grass ever created, but not for the reason you might think.

Super Bowl Grass: Any time the Super Bowl is played on a natural grass field, the league hires a sod farm to grow the playing surface that it’ll use specifically for its biggest game of the year. This means that after the 49ers played their last regular-season home game, the league’s grounds crew traveled to Santa Clara to rip out the team’s existing grass field and replace it with grass grown specifically for Super Bowl LX.

But why do they do it this way?

Aside from normal wear and tear, this year the league is using a proprietary grass from West Coast Turf called “Ready Play,” which is grown on plastic to make it three to four times stronger than standard sod fields. However, growing the grass isn’t even half the battle.

Transportation: In order to properly transport over 80,000 square feet of real, natural grass, West Coast Turf has to:

• Cut the field into 570 rolls (about 2,000 lbs each)

• Load them onto 32 trucks

• Drive them over 100 miles to the stadium

All while keeping the rolls at the exact right temperature and moisture.

And even though all of this, from cutting to installation, has to be done in less than 24 hours, the actual process of growing the grass that you’ll see during Super Bowl LX actually took 18 months.

Still, it’s not the transportation process or even the proprietary blend that makes this specific grass so “high-tech.” Instead, it’s what happens immediately after the grass is installed.

Keeping the Grass Alive: By the time the game kicks off on Sunday, the field will have been installed for weeks. However, that also means that a team of groundskeepers from the NFL and the 49ers has been working tirelessly around the clock to keep this grass alive through any weather conditions.

To do this, they’ll use massive LED grow lights to keep the field at the correct temperature, as well as a vacuum ventilation system underneath the field to decrease moisture.

However, my favorite part of this process is the two massive machines they use to test their work. One is the Biomechanical Elite Athlete Surface Tester (BEAST), which uses a robotic leg with a cleat to simulate how athletes jump, stop, and cut, ensuring the field is neither overly sticky nor slippery. The other, called the STRIKE, tests the field for firmness.

In total, each machine will test about 60 spots around the field in the lead up to game day, but as we all know, once the game actually kicks off, you never really know how the field is going to respond.

📉 Biggest Loser

The biggest cheating scandal in sports right now is one you probably haven’t heard about, but it might go down as one of my favorite Olympic stories of all time.

Norway’s Skiing History: When you Google “what’s the best country at ski jumping?” you’ll undoubtedly land on Norway. Not only did the country literally invent the sport, but, unsurprisingly, they’ve won the most Olympic medals and hold both the Men’s and Women’s Olympic Records.

However, the country’s reputation as “best in the world” might have just been permanently ruined days before the 2026 Winter Olympics are set to start, and it’s all because of a YouTube channel with 8 subscribers.

Part of the Sport: For as long as ski jumping has been around, coaches, trainers, and athletes have tried to gain any competitive advantage they can to squeeze a few extra meters out of a jump. However, to ensure a level playing field, the International Ski Federation (FIS) has a clear set of rules stating that athletes aren’t allowed to wear jumping suits that are more than 4 centimeters larger than their body surface area.

But what happens when a team breaks those rules?

Caught Cheating: Typically, illegally modifying a jumpsuit results in a minor penalty, like a warning or disqualification. However, last March, three Norwegian Ski Team officials, including their head coach, were secretly recorded sewing in extra material to the crotch of two athletes’ suits just minutes before competition:

For reference, adding even just a centimeter of fabric to the circumference of a suit can increase an athlete’s jumping distance by up to 2.8 meters (9.2 feet) but adding extra fabric to the crotch specifically, can help a ski jumper pick up an extra 5 or 6 meters in length, which in this sport, could be the difference between a gold medal and not even finishing on the podium.

The Consequences: However, the interesting part about this video in particular, is that it was posted to an otherwise inactive YouTube channel with just 8 subscribers, however, it was quickly picked up by the FIS, which launched an 11-month investigation into team Norway which concluded just weeks before this year’s Olympics and resulted in the team’s head coach, assistant coach and suit technician all being given a harsh 18-month suspension.

Because of this incident, the Olympics have decided to beef-up their enforcement of equipment violations, which will now include installing tamper-proof microchips throughout each suit to ensure that they can’t be manipulated leading up to an event.

Who would have thought the best sports drama of the year so far would come from ski jumping?

🏆 Winner’s Circle

Bad Bunny is only getting paid $671 to perform during this year’s Halftime Show, but it’s actually one of the best deals in the entire industry.

History of the Halftime Show: Before 1991, Halftime Shows resembled circus acts more than concerts; however, even as the NFL began booking massively popular artists ranging from Michael Jackson to the Rolling Stones, it still refused to pay musicians their standard fees. In fact, when searching for a performer in 2014, the NFL even suggested to Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Coldplay that they should pay the league for the right to perform during the game, or contribute a portion of their post-performance tour income to the NFL.

But as crazy as it sounds, even that might have been worth it.

Big Budgets: Typically, I don’t think “exposure” is a fair substitute for paying artists, but this is no normal event. For starters, the NFL regularly shells out millions of dollars to put on one of the most visually impressive shows possible. In fact, during Bad Bunny’s 2020 Halftime Show appearance, it was reported that the NFL spent $1M per minute for Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s 13-minute performance.

Not to mention, artists also get access to an estimated 3,000 staffers involved in production, as well as an all-expense-paid trip to the biggest sporting event of the year.

These days, artists are paid the minimum wage guaranteed by a union contract, which is reported to be around $671 for the actual performance, but if they’re smart, they can flip that $671 into hundreds of millions more.

The Potential Upside: For example, last year, Kendrick Lamar’s entire catalog saw a 175% increase in streams the day after his halftime performance, which is estimated to be worth around $500,000 from streaming royalties alone. A boost, which is typically extended to any potential guests that Bad Bunny could be bringing out this year. Still, even half a million dollars in streaming revenue is just pennies compared to the real upside of one of the performances.

Because if you think about the Halftime Show as the world’s most-watched commercial, artists are essentially getting 13 minutes of free airtime in front of more than 100 million people. For reference, that amount of ad-space during the actual game would typically cost $260 million or $10M for every 30 seconds, but these artists are getting that time for free.

Which, in Kendrick and SZA’s case, resulted in them selling 1.1 million tickets and grossing over $256 million during their co-headlined tour that wisely kicked off just a few months after their record-breaking performance.

Talk about a good ROI.

⏱️ In Other News

• 2026 cap space for every NFL team

• The Buffalo Bills’ unique new stadium feature

• Sports media is changing (again), here’s how

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

If you listen to any Bad Bunny song before his Halftime Show, listen to this one.

You don’t need to understand the words to know it’s a banger.