On conference championship Sunday, we'll learn which two teams will be moving on to Super Bowl LX. On the AFC side, it's the Denver Broncos looking to survive a season-ending injury to Bo Nix while the New England Patriots look to cap off a dream debut season under Mike Vrabel. In the NFC, it's Round 3 between NFC West rivals in the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams.
For fans of the winning teams, it'll be time to start booking flights and making accommodations. But where will they be headed? Here's everything to know about the location of this year's Big Game.
Where is Super Bowl 60 being played?
This year's Super Bowl will be held at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., home of the San Francisco 49ers. Levi's opened in 2014 after the Niners had spent more than four decades at Candlestick Park on the shore of San Francisco Bay.
A state-of-the-art venue with a capacity of just under 70,000, it's since played host to all manner of big-time events across multiple sports, from College Football Playoff games to Wrestlemania 31, and it's already been select as one of the host sites for this summer's FIFA World Cup.
What city is hosting Super Bowl 60?
No, the San Francisco 49ers do not, in fact, play their home games in San Francisco. The city lobbied to keep the team when it began looking to replace the increasingly outdated Candlestick in the late 2000s, but after a protracted bidding war, then-owner John York instead turned to Santa Clara — a city of over 127,000 located in the heart of Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco Bay.
Befitting that location, Santa Clara has long been considered a tech hub; it's currently home to the corporate headquarters of companies like Intel and Nvidia. It's also home to California's Great America, a Six Flags theme park that shares a parking lot with Levi's Stadium. So if you'd like to ride a roller coaster or two before the Big Game kicks off, you're in luck.
Has Levi’s Stadium hosted a Super Bowl before?
The NFL loves nothing more than a shiny new stadium it can use to entice fans to travel, and sure enough, Levi's Stadium was hosting its first Super Bowl just 18 months or so after it opened. The site played host to Super Bowl L in February of 2016, with Von Miller leading the Denver Broncos to a 24-10 win over Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers. Lady Gaga performed the national anthem, with Beyonce and Bruno Mars joining Coldplay for the halftime show (yeah, remember that one?).
And now, a decade later, it's coming back. Levi's figures to be a fixture in the Super Bowl rotation moving forward: It's still among the most modern stadiums in the league, it's located in one of the most populous areas of the country with a massive airport nearby and reasonable weather in February, and that's not even mentioning all the tech money swimming around or how important the 49ers franchise has been in NFL history.
Every Super Bowl hosted at Levi's Stadium or in San Francisco
Shockingly enough, Levi's Stadium's first Super Bowl was just the second Super Bowl ever hosted by the Bay Area. The first was held not at Candlestick but at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, just the third college stadium to host the Big Game (after Tulane Stadium, then home of the New Orleans Saints, and the Rose Bowl).
Stanford played host to Super Bowl XIX in 1984, when the hometown (well, kind of) 49ers dispatched Dan Marino's Dolphins with ease.
Super Bowl (year) | Venue | Final score |
|---|---|---|
XIX (1984) | Stanford Stadium, Stanford, Calif. | 49ers 38, Dolphins 16 |
L (2015) | Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara, Calif. | Broncos 24, Panthers 10 |