The Super Bowl Emoji Playbook: Texting Through the Big Game

On the first Sunday of February, about a third of the country gathers around the same piece of furniture, yells at the same men, and texts the same group chat. The Super Bowl is the largest synchronized couch event on the planet, and somewhere between the first snap and the confetti, the average viewer will send more emoji than they send the rest of the weekend combined. This is the game-day playbook: what to send, when to send it, and which combos read as dialed-in versus which read as your dad discovering 🏈 for the first time.

Super Bowl LIX kicks off six days from now on February 9, with the Eagles and Chiefs meeting in New Orleans and Kendrick Lamar headlining the halftime show. The post below is evergreen, meaning any February the ball gets kicked off, this playbook still works. Every section is tied to a moment that happens in every Super Bowl: the kickoff, the flag, the halftime act, the ad break, the heartbreak missed field goal. Your team will change. The group-chat rhythm will not.

Why the Super Bowl is an emoji event

The numbers are stacked on every side. An estimated 127.7 million Americans watched Super Bowl LVIII in 2024, the most-watched US broadcast of all time at that point. 73% of Super Bowl viewers use a second screen while the game is on, which is the industry euphemism for “everybody is on their phone.” In the 2017 game alone, fans posted more than 28 million tweets, and that was before X rebranded, before threads existed, and before every group chat averaged twenty people.

The American football emoji 🏈 was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and shipped to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, which means every modern phone has had the glyph ready to go for the last ten Super Bowls. The trophy 🏆, the goat 🐐, the fire 🔥, and the megaphone 📢 all predate the iPhone era. Unicode accidentally built the Super Bowl a dedicated vocabulary years before brands figured out how to use it.

The tailgate text stack

Every Super Bowl party group chat starts the same way. Someone confirms the host, someone asks what to bring, and someone opens with a volley of food and hype emoji. This is not creative work. It is ritual. The stack below is the baseline, the thing you send on Saturday night to lock in the vibe.

The serving-size numbers for these emoji are biblical. Americans are projected to eat 1.47 billion chicken wings during Super Bowl LIX, the equivalent of roughly five wings for every person in the United States. Over 12.5 million pizzas move on Super Bowl weekend, and pizza places routinely double their normal Sunday sales. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest food consumption day in the US, after Thanksgiving. Whatever combo you send, somebody is actually eating it.

Every February owns the football emoji

Google Trends doesn’t measure emoji use directly, but the rhythm of a Super Bowl cycle is visible in searches for “super bowl” and “halftime show” alone. For eleven months of the year, the interest is flat near zero. Then January ramps and February explodes. The chart below covers three full cycles, indexed so February 2024 (the Chiefs vs. 49ers overtime thriller) reads at 100.

The halftime show line climbed from a peak of 11 during the 2022 Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, and 50 Cent SoFi Stadium blowout, softened in 2023 while Rihanna sang on her floating platform, and climbed again through 2024 as anticipation for Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 solo headline slot built. It turned out to be worth the anticipation: Lamar’s 2025 show would go on to draw 133.5 million viewers, the most-watched halftime performance in history, edging Michael Jackson’s 1993 show by 100,000 people.

The group-chat playbook by game moment

Here is the core of the playbook. Pick a moment from the dropdown and an intensity from the tabs: mild for texting your boss’s spouse, hype for your normal group chat, unhinged for the friends who will forgive a screaming 🗣️📢 at 10pm. Everything is tap-to-copy. The full logic behind why each combo works is in the sections that follow.

A few notes on the categories. “Unhinged” is not shouting at your coworkers in the office Slack. Unhinged is the chat with three people who have seen you cry about a missed extra point. The 💀 skull emoji, which Gen Z has repurposed to mean “I’m dead laughing”, does heavy lifting in every unhinged tier, because most Super Bowl moments that warrant a reaction are either so good or so bad that only a metaphorical death will do.

Halftime show emoji kit

The halftime show is a 13-minute window where everyone stops yelling about football and starts yelling about choreography, costume changes, and guest appearances. The history is rich. In 2004, Justin Timberlake tore a piece of Janet Jackson’s costume on live TV for 9/16ths of a second, coined the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” triggered the largest FCC fine in history up to that point, made Janet Jackson the most-searched term of 2004 and 2005, and directly inspired the founding of YouTube, whose co-founders were frustrated they couldn’t easily find a video of it.

In 2013, Beyoncé brought back Destiny’s Child. In 2020, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez co-headlined the first Latin-led show. In 2023, a pregnant Rihanna performed on a floating platform suspended above the field. Every one of these is a specific emoji vocabulary.

A short history of Super Bowl emoji moments

Twelve years ago today, on February 3, 2013, during a blackout at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the Oreo social media team posted a picture of a cookie on a darkened background with the caption “You can still dunk in the dark.” It collected 15,000 retweets and 20,000 Facebook likes in 24 hours and an estimated $525 million in earned media. What looked like lightning was actually preparation: Oreo had a social media war room running throughout the game, staffed by brand and agency people who had been rehearsing real-time responses for months. “Dunk in the Dark” is the founding myth of modern Super Bowl content marketing, and it is now old enough to drive.

The genre escalated. In 2020, Planters killed off Mr. Peanut in a teaser commercial featuring Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh, then aired a funeral during the game where Mr. Clean and the Kool-Aid Man wept over a grave, out of which a Baby Nut sprouted. The campaign was then partially recut out of respect for Kobe Bryant, who died the week before. The combo for this kind of moment is 🫡🥜⚰️.

In 2022, Coinbase aired 60 seconds of a QR code bouncing on a black screen, like a DVD screensaver. Scanning it offered $15 in Bitcoin. The ad drove 20 million hits to Coinbase’s landing page in one minute, boosted app installs by 309%, pushed the app from #186 to #2 in the App Store, and crashed the Coinbase servers for about an hour. Coinbase paid roughly $7 million for the 60 seconds. The subsequent week-over-week jump in crypto app downloads across the category was 279%.

Then there is the branded emoji era. In 2016 alone, Pepsi’s Super Bowl hashtag that triggered a custom can-and-musical-note emoji was tweeted 431,000 times by over 235,000 Twitter users. Bud Light’s emoji pulled 62.3 million impressions. Verizon paid the same amount for a branded emoji and got 440 tweeters. The Super Bowl branded emoji has one job: show up in the group chat. When it works, the brand becomes an inside joke. When it doesn’t, you just bought the world’s most expensive typo.

Super Bowl emoji bingo

This is the part of the post you actually take with you to the party. The bingo card below has 25 tiles based on things that happen in every single Super Bowl: the Clydesdale ad, the cowboy in the insurance spot, the celebrity in the crowd, the military flyover, the flag on the two-yard line. Tap a tile when you see it. Five-in-a-row wins the group chat.

Card state saves in your browser so you can close the tab and come back. Share the card at any point and it’ll render as a green-and-white grid, perfect for the chat. This is a direct lift of the Super Bowl commercial bingo format that has been a quiet staple of Super Bowl parties since the early 2000s, reformatted for how people actually watch the game, which is to say: with their phone open.

Ready-to-send game-day messages

Sometimes a combo isn’t enough and you need full sentences. These are the messages for the awkward pockets: the person whose team just lost, the group chat after the trophy lift, the friend whose team is blowing a 28-3 lead. Each is copyable whole.

🏈 across platforms

The football emoji is one of the more consistent emoji across vendors, partly because an American football has a simple, iconic silhouette and partly because it has been in the set for over a decade. Apple’s version, shown in Emojipedia’s reference grid, angles the ball toward the upper right with visible white laces. Samsung’s is rounder and almost friendly. Microsoft’s used to be flat and is now 3D. The trophy 🏆 and goat 🐐 are where the variance shows up. Compare a few platforms directly:

AppleGoogleSamsungMicrosoftWhatsAppFacebookTwitterJoyPixelsToss FaceMozillaEmojidexLGHTCHuaweiFxEmojiMutant StandardEmojiTwoOpenMojiFluent 3DMS TeamsSoftBankSony PlayStationEmojiOneEmojiOneDocomoAU KDDINoto EmojiSerenityOS

AppleiOS 18.4

GoogleAndroid 15

SamsungOne UI 6.1

MicrosoftWindows 11

WhatsApp2.24

What not to send during the game

The Super Bowl group chat has its own etiquette, mostly unwritten, learned by getting muted at least once. A short taxonomy of the avoid pile.

Most of this post is about what to send. The last rule is about what to receive: be gentle with the person whose team just lost. The rest of the chat is celebrating and their team just blew it in front of 127 million people. 🫂🏈 covers it. They’ll read it tomorrow.