Who is the home team in the Super Bowl 2024?
Super Bowl LVIII is played at a neutral stadium, but there's a designated home team. We're here to make it make sense.
"[Patrick], we're not in Kansas any more" – Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Sort of.
To be completely accurate, the Kansas City Chiefs are never actually in Kansas, given their home, Arrowhead Stadium, is actually based in Kansas City, Missouri, as opposed to Kansas City, Kansas.
That's for another article. My head hurts.
The fact remains, the Chiefs have travelled over 1,100 miles from home for Super Bowl LVIII, while their opponents, the San Francisco 49ers, are 500 miles from their own stadium in Santa Clara. (Yep, you guessed it, the 49ers are not even based in San Francisco. Good job, America.)
That said, as per Super Bowl tradition, there must be a designated home team for the big game, determining the order of the teams on the scoreboard and formalising the match-up for a variety of administrative reasons too dull to explain here – but are either the Chiefs or 49ers heading into this as the 'home team'?
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Who is the home team at Super Bowl 2024?
The Super Bowl 2024 home team will be the Kansas City Chiefs.
The AFC Champions will be the first name on the sheet, and while the benefits are minimal, there are two small bonuses that come with the home team status.
The Chiefs get to choose which jersey to wear. They have chosen to wear their red home jersey, as expected, meaning the San Francisco 49ers will don their white away uniform.
Aside from aesthetics, the Chiefs' second bonus is that they will select heads or tails in the coin toss before the game, which effectively determines which team will take possession of the football first.
It's still a 50:50 shout rather than a genuine advantage to have the coin toss pick, mind.
What is the Super Bowl home team curse?
The Super Bowl curse doesn't actually relate to the 'administrative' home team (in this case, the Kansas City Chiefs). Instead, the home team curse revolves around the Super Bowl stadium itself.
Every single team whose stadium had been selected to host a Super Bowl had been eliminated before reaching the big game until the curse was broken in 2021.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first team to play a Super Bowl in their home stadium – and they won, albeit in front of a reduced crowd of just 24,835 fans due to COVID restrictions.
The curse received another crippling blow to its infamy in 2022, as the Los Angeles Rams went on to win Super Bowl LVI in their home stadium.
It means the current record now stands at two out of 58 Super Bowls featuring the team whose stadium hosts the game. Both teams won their games on home turf.
However, that means there's a daunting, deeply unwanted title left on the shelf ready to be reluctantly claimed. Who will become the first team in history to lose the Super Bowl in their home stadium?
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