With Super Bowl LIX in the books and the NFL world having migrated out of New Orleans, attention shifts to the Bay Area, which will host Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium on Feb. 8, 2026.

The biggest difference between the Big Easy and next year’s host locale is the lack of proximity for Super Bowl events: Levi’s Stadium, which previously hosted Super Bowl 50, is in Santa Clara, more than 40 miles south of downtown San Francisco.

“There’s things that we have to plan for. It’s not a walkable city,” Bay Area Host Committee president Zaileen Janmohamed said during an interview with Front Office Sports at Radio Row in New Orleans. “You’re not going to walk from San Francisco to Santa Clara.”

There will be a big push to promote public transportation—the Bay Area includes 27 transportation agencies—to ease the increased traffic flow with fans and the onslaught of media members and celebrities coming to town.

“A lot of people ask us about transportation, and the stadium being far from San Francisco,” Janmohamed said. “But it’s actually not just San Francisco and the Bay Area that has to deal with it. Inglewood has a stadium a long way from L.A. It happens in a lot of NFL markets.”

League Without Borders?

SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, which Janmohamed referenced, is hosting the 2027 Super Bowl, and Atlanta in 2028. 

The NFL has yet to name host cities beyond that. But last week in New Orleans, the idea of an international Super Bowl gained steam after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said it could be a possibility at his annual state of the league press conference.

That idea is “really interesting” to 49ers president Al Guido. “This is for Roger,” he said. “Do we ever take the biggest game that we have and not host it here in the U.S.?”

The 49ers ownership group also owns second-division English soccer club Leeds United, and the franchise is one of seven with some U.K. rights in the NFL’s Global Markets Program. London, which has hosted more NFL games than any other non-U.S. city, would be an obvious choice for a Super Bowl outside of the league’s home borders.

“I understand all the issues with it around the performance side and how far it might have to go,” Guido said of an international Super Bowl, emphasizing that game quality must remain high as international expansion continues. “And if it just so happens that we can figure out schedule-wise where we can play somewhere else, and the fan bases really want it, then why not?”

As the NFL considers Super Bowl hosts for 2029 and beyond, any international bid will have competition from Nashville, with the Titans planning to open a new stadium in 2027, and popular host cities like Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Houston, among others, looking to return to the rotation.

Order is being restored following an MLB uniform controversy that was a major storyline in the 2024 season.

After new, Nike-designed uniforms with a more sheer and oft-derided look dominated last year’s spring training, team camps are opening this week with players finding largely a return to how uniforms were before 2024. Consistent with reforms first announced by the league last May, the changes for this year’s uniforms include:

• Larger numbers and letters for player names on jerseys
• Individualized tailoring on uniform pants, instead of placing players into one of four preset fits
• Heavier fabric for road uniforms, with home ones to follow in 2026
• Better wicking of sweat on road grays, as well as improved color matching of gray pants and jerseys

Jayne Kamin—Oncea-Imagn Images

Before the shifts, the Nike Vapor Premier designs had a wide range of problems, including a see-through nature to the pants, the pooling of sweat on some players’ uniforms, names that were harder to read, and pants that ripped more easily after sliding on the base paths.

Solving a Problem

MLB and Nike initially defended the Vapor Premier design last year, touting the lightness and breathability and insisting that it would soon become widely favored across the league. Not only did that not happen, but the uniform issue quickly became a national punchline, including on late-night talk shows. 

The situation quickly grew so fractious that Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin—whose company had been producing the Nike designs as essentially a subcontractor—said last year, “We’re doing everything as we’ve been told, and we’re getting the shit kicked out of us. So that’s not fun. [The] biggest thing I probably learned is if we’re involved in something, we need to make sure that everybody better be on board. … They got certain players on board, not all players on board.”

The MLB Players Association then applied additional pressure to help make the changes happen. Ultimately, the entire saga represented a somewhat rare instance across the sports industry in which mistakes were publicly acknowledged with little qualification and substantive corrections made.

MLB, meanwhile, is also returning this year to players wearing their own team uniforms in the All-Star Game, which had been done for more than 80 years before another widely criticized shift in 2019 to custom American and National League uniforms. That prior shift for the All-Star Game helped lead to the Vapor Premier design now being corrected. 

The NBA is bringing a tournament-style format to the All-Star Game for the first time Sunday, one that has received a ton of backlash from fans and players alike. But 11-time All-Star Steph Curry was one of the people who helped bring the new format to life.

Speaking to The San Francisco Standard’s Tim Kawakami on The TK Show, Curry said he visited the NBA offices last summer and spoke with commissioner Adam Silver. Curry didn’t know beforehand that he was going to speak to Silver about the All-Star Game, but he said Silver asked for his input, particularly because the Warriors were hosting the weekend festivities this year.

“He didn’t have any ideas at that time, and my advice was it’s not a bad thing to change it up entirely and try something new, knowing you can always come back to the traditional format if whatever you decide doesn’t work,” Curry said. 

He suggested shortening the game and creating different scenarios that may bring out players’ competitiveness. The league landed on a four-team format with eight players per side and three total games. Each game will be won by the first team to score 40 points.

The 2022 All-Star Game MVP said he’s satisfied with where Silver and the league landed.

“It comes down to the players, whether you play or not, but I like where it’s at. It’s going to be different, it’s going to be critiqued, and that’s kind of what you want,” Curry said.

Silver said at the press conference ahead of the Paris Games last month that he spoke to many “perennial All-Stars” about the format. He also told Kawakami in a separate interview that he worked with National Basketball Players Association executive director Andre Iguodala, who is also Curry’s former teammate, on the format changes.

The commissioner has acknowledged numerous times that the league’s All-Star Game has issues. This stems from the league’s top stars showing limited effort during the game. Last year, with the NBA playing its usual regulation game between East and West All-Stars, the teams combined to score a record 397 points.

Fans are also turning away from the showcase as a result. Last year’s game averaged 5.4 million viewers, the second-least-watched All-Star Game in history, behind only the previous year’s game. 

Prize Money

This year’s game also includes a $1.8 million prize pool, with the players from the winning team each bringing home $125,000. The runners-up win $50,000 each, while the two teams that miss the final will take home $25,000 per player. These are relatively small sums, as nearly every All-Star is on or has signed a deal worth tens of millions annually (only third-year player Jalen Williams has yet to ink his second contract). 

The fourth team in the All-Star tournament will be the winning team from the Rising Stars Challenge, which will be composed of first- and second-year players who may find the monetary incentives more appealing.