The First Super Bowl and Its Origins

By 4Football Staff · October 1, 2026 · 11 min read

Super Bowl I was not called the Super Bowl, did not sell out, and was played because two rival leagues finally agreed to stop fighting over players. Here is how it came about.

If you ask a casual fan about the first Super Bowl, you will usually hear about the score: the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in January 1967. What gets lost is how strange the event was. It was played in a stadium with thousands of empty seats, it was broadcast by two television networks at the same time, and the name on the tickets was not "Super Bowl" at all. Behind the game was a business war that had run for six years and nearly ruined both sides.

Understanding why that first game was played tells you a lot about why the modern league looks the way it does: why there are two conferences, why the draft is shared, and why a champion from each conference meets in a single title game. The Super Bowl did not begin as a celebration. It began as a compromise between owners who had run out of ways to beat each other.

This article walks through the rivalry that produced it, the deal that made it possible, the way the first game was staged, and what it did and did not prove. For the full story of the league fight itself, see The AFL and the NFL: Rivalry, Merger and the Common Draft.

Two leagues and a bidding war

The National Football League (NFL) had been the dominant professional league in the United States for decades when a group of wealthy businessmen, shut out of owning NFL teams, organized a rival. The American Football League (AFL) began play in 1960. It had eight teams, a television contract with its own network partner, and a willingness to sign players the older league wanted.

That last part is what turned a business rivalry into a war. Both leagues drafted college players each year, and a player who was drafted by both could choose the better offer. Salaries rose, and so did the cost of simply keeping a roster together. Over several years the two sides also competed for cities, for coaches, and for television viewers on the same autumn afternoons.

The conflict sharpened in 1966, when a kicker named Pete Gogolak left the New York Giants of the NFL to sign with the Buffalo Bills of the AFL. Teams in the older league had mostly respected one another's contracts, and a player jumping directly from one league to the other felt like an escalation. The NFL's owners responded by considering how aggressively to pursue players from the AFL in return, and both sides began to see that a spiral of raised contracts would hurt every owner involved.

You do not need to settle who "won" the war to see why a deal was attractive. The AFL had survived, which many had not expected, and its teams were drawing real attention. The NFL still had the larger audience and the more established teams. Neither side could end the other, and both were paying heavily for the privilege of trying.

The deal that created the game

On June 8, 1966, the two leagues announced an agreement to merge. It was negotiated largely out of public view between owners, with Lamar Hunt of the AFL's Kansas City club and Tex Schramm of the NFL's Dallas club often described as key figures in the back-channel talks. Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, was named to lead the combined operation.

The announced terms covered the pieces that mattered most to the owners:

Notice what is not on the list. The agreement did not say what the championship game would be called, how it would be staged, or who would broadcast it. Those details were worked out in the months that followed, which is part of why the first game felt improvised.

Congress also had a role. A merger of two competing leagues raised obvious antitrust questions, and the owners sought protection from lawmakers. Later in 1966 Congress passed legislation that gave the combined league the legal cover it needed, and the plan could proceed. Details of that process are well documented in histories of the league if you want to read further.

Getting to the game

The 1966 season served as the qualifying round. In the NFL, the Green Bay Packers, coached by Vince Lombardi, won the league's title game by defeating the Dallas Cowboys on January 1, 1967. In the AFL, the Kansas City Chiefs, coached by Hank Stram, won the AFL championship game against the Buffalo Bills. Those two results set the matchup.

The NFL's pride was on the line in a way the AFL's was not. A Packers loss would have been a public embarrassment for a league that insisted its football was better. Lombardi, by most accounts, understood this and treated the game as a test the NFL could not afford to fail. The AFL, by contrast, had a smaller burden: simply making the game close would confirm that its teams belonged.

That asymmetry shaped the way the two coaches talked about the contest in the lead-up and the way fans on each side watched it. A game between champions of two leagues was not a normal championship. It was a referendum on whether the younger league was real.

The name nobody wanted

The official title of the game was the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. That is what appeared on the paperwork. The name "Super Bowl" came from Lamar Hunt, who said in later accounts that he had been thinking about his children's toy, a rubber ball marketed as a Super Ball, when he suggested the phrase in a conversation. He apparently offered it half as a joke, noting that college football already had a number of "bowl" games and that this one would be bigger.

Rozelle was reportedly not fond of the nickname, and the leagues continued to use the formal title for the first game. Sportswriters, however, picked up the phrase and used it in their coverage, and the shorthand spread faster than any official decision could stop it. By the time of the third game, the leagues themselves were using it. The Roman numerals came later: the numbering system was applied to the games after the fact, which is why the first game is now called Super Bowl I even though nobody called it that at the time.

The trophy, too, has a later origin story. The award given to the winner is now named for Lombardi, but it was named in his honor after his death in 1970, so the winners of the earliest games received a trophy that did not yet carry his name.

Staging the first game

The game was played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a huge stadium that had been built for track events and then used for football. The location was a practical choice rather than a symbolic one. It was a large neutral site, and it was in a major television market.

Several things set the first game apart from the modern version:

• Two networks aired it. The NFL's broadcast partner, CBS, and the AFL's broadcast partner, NBC, both carried the game at the same time, each with its own announcers and production crew. Fans in 1967 could choose which broadcast to watch.
• It did not sell out. The Coliseum had enough room for tens of thousands more people than attended, and many seats were empty. The organizers had not had much time to promote an event that had not existed a year earlier.
• The leagues used different balls. Each league had its own ball supplier, and according to accounts of the game, each team used its home league's ball when it had possession. If this detail matters to you, it is worth confirming against a dedicated source, since it is the kind of thing that is easy to misremember.
• There was no template. There was no two-week buildup, no established halftime spectacle, and no set of rituals. The Super Bowl as a national holiday came from decades of later growth.

The mix of oddities is a useful reminder that big sporting traditions often begin as awkward first drafts. If you watch footage from the first game today, the pace of the broadcast, the look of the stands, and the lack of ceremony all feel closer to an ordinary big game than to what the event later became.

What happened on the field

Kansas City stayed with Green Bay for much of the first half. At halftime the Packers led 14-10, and the AFL champions had reason to believe they belonged. The Packers' first touchdown, a pass from quarterback Bart Starr to receiver Max McGee, was also the first touchdown in Super Bowl history. McGee had been a reserve and entered the game only because a starter was hurt, which made the play one of the best-known footnotes of the contest.

The turning point came early in the third quarter. Packers safety Willie Wood intercepted a pass and returned it deep into Kansas City territory, which led to a score and swung the momentum. From there Green Bay's defense and running game controlled the rest of the afternoon. The final score was 35-10, and Starr was named the game's most valuable player.

It is worth being careful about what that result means. The Packers were an exceptional team, one of the best of their era, and they were the champions of the league that most observers believed to be stronger. Beating the Chiefs was what most people expected. The scoreboard did not mean the AFL's teams could never compete; it meant that on that day the best NFL team was clearly better than the best AFL team.

You can see the full history of results, and check how the game's winners have been recorded since, on the scores page and through the team pages under teams. The standings page shows how each season's race is shaping up on the way to the title game.

What the game did and did not settle

At first the result reinforced the NFL's belief in its superiority. The Packers won the next year's game as well, and a casual observer might have concluded that the AFL was a lesser league for good.

Then the pattern changed. In January 1969, the New York Jets of the AFL defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Colts of the NFL in Super Bowl III, an upset that is still remembered as one of the most important results in the sport's history. A year later the Kansas City Chiefs, the same team that had lost the first game, won Super Bowl IV. Those results ended any serious argument that the AFL was inferior, and they came just before the full merger in 1970.

When the merger took effect, the NFL reorganized into two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The ten AFL teams were joined in the AFC by three NFL clubs: the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers. That arrangement is the source of the conference structure fans know today.

If you are curious how the league is divided now, our explainer on NFL divisions and conferences covers the reasoning and the details.

Why the first one still matters

It is tempting to treat the first Super Bowl as a curiosity, but it set several things in motion.

First, it established the principle that the best team in one half of the sport should meet the best team in the other half, and that the winner would be the undisputed champion. That idea carried over to the conference structure after the merger.

Second, it showed the commercial power of a single national event. Television carried the game to a huge audience, and the sponsors and networks noticed. The size of the audience helped drive the later growth of the event into the largest annual sporting spectacle in the country.

Third, it demonstrated how quickly a league's reputation can change. The AFL went from being dismissed to being respected in the space of a few seasons, and the Super Bowl was the stage where that shift became visible.

To see how the event is run today, from the choice of host city to the trophy presentation, read The Super Bowl: How the Game Is Organized, From Host City to Trophy.

Common misconceptions

A few ideas about the first game circulate widely and are worth correcting.

1. "The game was called the Super Bowl from the start." It was officially the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The nickname was used by the press and later adopted by the leagues.
2. "It was a sellout." It was not; the stadium had many empty seats.
3. "The Roman numeral was part of the original name." The numerals were added later, and Super Bowl I is a label applied in hindsight.
4. "The AFL was clearly weaker." The first two games were won by Green Bay, but the AFL won the next two of its meetings, and the league's quality was never as low as its critics claimed.
5. "The trophy was always the Lombardi Trophy." It received that name only after Lombardi's death.

Another common mistake is to read the result as proof that the game was a mismatch. A 25-point margin looks lopsided, but the game was close at halftime and turned on a handful of plays in the third quarter. Scores can hide the texture of a contest, which is true of football in general.

The short version

• The first Super Bowl was played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with the Green Bay Packers beating the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.
• It exists because the AFL and NFL announced a merger agreement in June 1966, after years of competing for players and television audiences.
• The game was officially the AFL-NFL World Championship Game; "Super Bowl" was a nickname suggested by Lamar Hunt that caught on.
• Two networks, CBS and NBC, broadcast it simultaneously, and the stadium did not sell out.
• The AFL's wins in Super Bowls III and IV showed that the younger league belonged, just before the full merger in 1970.
• The Lombardi Trophy was named for the Packers' coach after his death in 1970, so it did not carry his name for the first game.
• The common draft, the two-conference structure and the single championship game all trace back to the 1966 agreement.