Super Bowl 2025: The Internet is furious

Following the conclusion of the AFC and NFC championships, the 2025 Super Bowl was set. This year, the Kansas City Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles. While many are celebrating this news, the internet doesn’t seem to have gotten this memo. Instead? It is filled with rage and outrage.

Through an ever-growing array of jokes, posts and memes, people online are finding creative ways to express their content on Super Bowl Lix and the teams competing for the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

This is an interesting situation to analyze as it shows how social media can dovetail with the sports tribe, despite the fact that performing actually brings swaths of people together, creating a shared experience in a uniquely exclusive environment.

First, though, some context.

Who will play in the 2025 Super Bowl? And when does it happen?

On Sunday, January 26, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills 32-29 to win the AFC Conference Championship and punch their ticket to Super Bowl Lix.

Alongside this, the Philadelphia Eagles won victory over the Washington Chiefs (55-22) to top the NFC Conference Championship and booked their passage to the NFL season finale.

The 2025 Super Bowl will take place in New Orleans at Caesars Superdome—which will be the 11th time the city has hosted the event—Hed Kendrick Lamar provides the halftime entertainment.

Of course, this article is not about sporting results or taking a fine tooth comb to the games leading up to it. Instead, we want to look at how the Internet acted after the Chiefs and Eagles were confirmed in the 2025 NFL Showcase.

The online reaction to Super Bowl lix

It’s safe to say that many on the Internet are both heartbroken and furious about the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles reaching the 2025 Super Bowl.

One of the most common types of posts involved people creating memes about how much they dislike both teams:

Other popular posts include sharing A quote from Christian McCaffrey—A running back for the San Francisco 49ers — where he wants both teams to end up losing:

This theme is continued with other memes referencing popular culture figures, such as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises:

Various people on social media chose to reflect on the current state of mainstream sports and entertainment, drawing parallels between the 2025 Super Bowl and the Oscars, specifically the heavily nominated (and much mocked) Emilia Perez:

There are many other posts in this vein expressing unhappiness at a Chiefs vs Eagles Super Bowl.

So what happens?

Why is social media reacting this way to Super Bowl 2025?

There are, of course, some straightforward explanations. First, the Kansas City Chiefs have been incredibly successful in recent years. The team has reached five Super Bowls since 2020 and won the Vince Lombardi Trophy three times in those appearances.

While the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2017 — and claimed Tom Brady’s New England Patriots — they actually faced the Chiefs (and lost) in 2022.

This creates a sense of uniformity, frustrating many fans. Humans are psychologically oriented towards noveltymeaning they like to have new experiences and for many this repetition of the same old teams is disappointing, causing some of this negative online reaction.

In addition to this, there is an interesting angle of social media that helps engage fans in something like the Super Bowl, even if their team is out of the competition.

One of the big factors in sports is tribalism. Research shows That people who directly follow a team will be loyal to them, meaning they won’t support someone else.

In other words, when the person you follow is out, your engagement with the game drops.

What social media enables is another way to get involved. Fans of other teams can’t really support a Kansas City Chiefs or Philadelphia Eagles, but so what can Get together and create a new team: one that hates these two.

By creating memes and posting on social media, NFL fans whose teams are not represented in the Super Bowl can feel part of it by forming a collective that dislikes the other participants.

In other parts of society this may be a negative, but playful bickering is part of sports culture, and when nothing life-threatening happens, games like football can be a fun sparring ground and repository of passion.

Sure, if people who are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles might not like the vitriolic online reaction, but their teams are in the Super Bowl. They can enjoy it. For everyone else, they can find some satisfaction and entertainment in being angry on social media instead.