The Super Bowl started here, and it started quietly. On January 15, 1967, the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in a game then billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship. It remains the only Super Bowl that failed to sell out: fewer than 62,000 people turned up in a stadium built for more than 90,000, and the two networks that carried it, CBS and NBC, broadcast the same game simultaneously. Bart Starr was the most valuable player.

Los Angeles has hosted the game seven more times since, in three different buildings, and each stretch says something about what the region was at the time.

The Coliseum: 1967 and 1973

The Coliseum's second turn produced one of the most durable records in American sport. On January 14, 1973, the Miami Dolphins beat Washington 14-7 to close out a 17-0 season, still the only perfect season in NFL history. Larry Csonka carried the Miami running game and the defense that came to be called the No-Name Defense held Washington to a single score, which arrived on a botched field goal attempt rather than an offensive drive.

Then the game left South Los Angeles for two decades and moved ten miles northeast.

The Rose Bowl: five games, 1977 to 1993

Pasadena became the region's Super Bowl venue, and hosted more of them than anywhere else in Southern California.

  • January 9, 1977: the Oakland Raiders beat the Minnesota Vikings 32-14 for the franchise's first championship.
  • January 20, 1980: the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Los Angeles Rams 31-19, becoming the first team to win four Super Bowls, in front of a then-record crowd of 103,985. The Rams played the game as the visiting team in their own metropolitan area.
  • January 30, 1983: Washington beat Miami 27-17, closing a season shortened to nine games by a players' strike. John Riggins ran for 166 yards, including a fourth-and-one that broke the game open, and was named most valuable player.
  • January 25, 1987: the New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos 39-20 for their first title, behind a Phil Simms performance, 22 completions on 25 attempts, that is still the passing standard for the game.
  • January 31, 1993: the Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills 52-17 in a game defined by nine Buffalo turnovers. Troy Aikman was the most valuable player.

That was the last one for a long time. The Rams and the Raiders both left Los Angeles in 1995, and a region without an NFL team does not get a Super Bowl. The drought lasted 29 years.

SoFi Stadium

The Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016 and opened SoFi Stadium in Inglewood in 2020. Two seasons later, on February 13, 2022, they won Super Bowl LVI there, beating the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20, the second time a team has won the championship in its own stadium.

The game returns to Inglewood next February: Super Bowl LXI is scheduled for SoFi Stadium on February 14, 2027, which will be the region's ninth. It arrives in the middle of a stretch that also brings the region the 2028 Summer Olympics, staged in part at the Coliseum, the building where the first of these games was played to empty seats.