He may not be playing in it, or even commentating on it, but Sunday’s Super Bowl has still ended up feeling a bit like the Tom Brady show.
Whether it is New England Patriots being back in the biggest game in US sport for the first time since he left the franchise, a row over his refusal to support them against a Seattle Seahawks team he helped deny back-to-back titles following “deflategate”, the comparisons between him and their current quarterback, or it all taking place in his own home city, there is a whole Brady bunch of subplots to this weekend’s showdown in San Francisco.
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The player known as his sport’s “Greatest Of All Time” was always going to loom large over Super Bowl LX after confirming he would be present at the 60th staging of the NFL’s flagship event. He was, after all, its dominant figure for a third of its entire history, making a record 10 appearances between 2002 and 2021, and winning seven championship rings and five Most Valuable Player awards.
Brady celebrates with the Vince Lombardi Trophy after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ victory in the 2021 Super Bowl – Mark J. Rebilas/USA Today Sports
Even after finally retiring “for good” three years ago, Brady has remained synonymous with the stage on which he made his name. Firstly, by signing a $375m (£275m), 10-year contract – dwarfing any he penned as a player – as Fox’s lead NFL analyst, which began last season. That was agreed in 2022 while he was still extending his record for the most touchdown passes in the sport, having reversed a previous decision to hang up his helmet. Secondly, by striking a deal a year later that would eventually see him become co-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders.
While ex-athletes taking jobs as television pundits, and even buying stakes in teams, within their own sport has become somewhat clichéd, what Brady did next was anything but. In August 2023, he became the surprise co-owner of an unfashionable English football club in Championship strugglers Birmingham City.
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The following year, he agreed to take part in a three-hour Netflix live special, The Roast of Tom Brady, in which a parade of comedians and former colleagues took it in turns to make jokes at his expense.
Almost no topic was off limits, including the 2007 NFL “spygate” scandal in which the Patriots illicitly videotaped rival coaches, the team’s use of underinflated footballs in 2015 during the game that got them to the Super Bowl (known as “deflategate”), Brady’s brand ambassador role with a collapsed cryptocurrency exchange that cost customers and investors billions, and even the breakdown of his marriage to supermodel Gisele Bündchen that followed his refusal to retire.
Brady and Gisele Bundchen were married between 2009 and 2022 – Matt Winkelmeyer/MG18/Getty Images
Turbulent media career
The punchlines can only be imagined were it to have emerged back then that he had also invested in a biotechnology company that cloned the couple’s pet dog. The same could be said about what went on to be a debut-season flop in Fox’s NFL commentary box, climaxing in a dismal maiden Super Bowl behind the mic.
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But there is a reason Brady went from 199th pick in the 2000 NFL draft to winning a first championship ring in his second season as a player, and history has duly repeated itself when it has come to his career as an analyst.
Indeed, he will not be commentating on Sunday’s game only because the live broadcast rights for the Super Bowl rotate between Fox, NBC, NBC and CBS. He is nevertheless expected to be part of his own channel’s pre-game coverage. His final live match this season was last month’s NFC Championship game between the Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams, before which he revealed the secret behind his transformation as an analyst.
It has taken time for Brady, pictured with former Tampa Bay Buccaneers team-mate Richard Sherman, to get accustomed to the spontaneous nature of broadcasting – Lindsey Wasson/AP
Blaming what he called “TMI” – too much information” – for his maiden-year struggles, he said he would end up drowning in pre-prepared notes that would hinder his ability to react to what was in front of him. “I used to say, ‘All the stuff I prepared, I could read from start to finish in a three-hour broadcast, and I wouldn’t get through all the information’,” Brady told The Athletic.
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Revealing he subsequently decided to draw upon how he would get ready for a game as a player, he added: “I started to transition this year into, ‘Let me do more of how I did it as a quarterback’, because that’s really where my comfort is. As opposed to, ‘Let me try to prepare as a broadcaster’.”
Any doubts about Brady’s TV future appear to have been dispelled, with Fox NFL producer Richie Zyontz telling Sports Business Journal: “I think he’s long-term for it, for sure. You can’t predict the future and you can foresee unforeseen events. But I would say right now he’s committed to doing this as long as he can and he’s gotten damn good at it.”
Too good, for some, amid accusations of a conflict of interest between his TV work and his five per cent shareholding in the Raiders, who he was cleared to take a stake in back in October 2024, shortly after making his Fox debut. Those working for NFL rights-holders are ordinarily allowed to attend what are known as “production meetings” with coaches and key players from teams they are covering.
Brady has taken to his lead analyst role at Fox after a slow start – Timothy A. Clary/AFP
Typically held the day before a game, these allow broadcasters to gather insights on game plans, injuries, and storylines to enhance their live commentary. Brady’s potential dual role saw restrictions placed on him attending such meetings but these were relaxed this season to allow him to do so virtually. He remained banned from watching practices or setting foot in a team’s training complex. Matters came to a head in September when Brady was seen in the Raiders’ coaching booth during their loss to the Los Angeles Chargers.
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Addressing the controversy in his weekly newsletter, he branded his critics “paranoid and distrustful”, writing: “I love football. At its core it is a game of principles. And with all the success it has given me, I feel I have a moral and ethical duty to the sport; which is why the point where my roles in it intersect is not actually a point of conflict, despite what the paranoid and distrustful might believe. Rather, it’s the place from which my ethical duty emerges: to grow, evolve, and improve the game that has given me everything.”
Bizarre Birmingham venture
Brady’s input at the Raiders has so far failed to transform the team’s fortunes. They sacked their head coach last year for finishing bottom of the AFC West and fired his successor – former Super Bowl winner Pete Carroll – last month for doing the same. That has, however, given them first pick in April’s NFL draft.
The first season of Brady’s 3.3 per cent shareholding in Birmingham was equally calamitous, with the club appointing Wayne Rooney as manager only to sack him after just 83 days before being relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time in three decades.
Brady watches Birmingham City play Wrexham with David Beckham – Alex Pantling/Getty Images
They immediately bounced back with a record points total of 111 and are comfortably mid-table in the Championship this season.
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In August, they became the latest English football club to be the subject of an Amazon Prime Video documentary, Built in Birmingham: Brady & the Blues, the highlight of which saw their co-owner openly question Rooney’s “work ethic”.
Brady was also front and centre in November when the club unveiled radical plans for a new £1.2bn, 62,500-seater stadium – the Birmingham City Powerhouse – in a Peaky Blinders-inspired video.
Brady’s travails as a team owner have mirrored those of the Patriots since he left in March 2020. They were forced to watch on from the sidelines the following season when he won the Super Bowl for a seventh time in his first year with the Glazer family-owned Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Having made the play-offs almost every season he was with the Patriots, they qualified just once between 2020 and 2024, costing legendary coach Bill Belichick and his successor, Jared Mayo, their jobs.
Head coach Bill Belichick (right) oversaw a dynastic Patriots team with Brady at its heart – David J. Phillip/AP
That they are back in the Super Bowl is down to the appointment of Mike Vrabel, a former team-mate of Brady, who is on the brink of becoming the first man to lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy for the same team as a player and a coach.
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The Brady-era parallels do not end there, with Patriots quarterback Drake Maye aiming to emulate the 48-year-old by triumphing in his second season in the NFL, as well as by becoming the youngest starting quarterback to do so, at the age of just 23.
Maye’s performances have been all the more impressive given that, just days after he joined the Patriots on a four-year contract, he was forced to watch them induct Brady into their Hall of Fame and announce they were to retire his number 12 shirt and build a statue of him. Asked this week about similarities between the pair, Vrabel said: “Never be another Tom Brady. I’m not into comparisons.”
‘No dog in the fight’
Having spent two decades at the Patriots and winning six of his Super Bowls there, half of them alongside Vrabel, Brady’s allegiances on Sunday might have appeared to be obvious. But despite declaring himself “so happy” for his former team-mate last month, he said this week: “I don’t have a dog in the fight in this one.”
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He added on the Let’s Go! SiriusXM podcast with Jim Gray: “May the best team win. In terms of the Patriots, this is a new chapter in New England, and I’m glad everyone’s embraced the Mike Vrabel regime, all the amazing players that have worked so hard to get their club to this position. We did it for 20 years. There was a little bit of a hiatus in there, but the Patriots are back and it’s a very exciting time for everyone in New England.”
Starring for the Patriots, Brady became the first starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl in his 40s in 2019 – Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Brady, a boyhood San Francisco 49ers fan whose Raiders team are expected to hire Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak as their head coach after Sunday’s game, added: “I think there’s always different chapters in your life and you have different chapters and moments that you go through where you’re affiliated with a certain team.
“And, now, in a different phase in my life, I really root for people and the people I care about, the people who I know the work that goes into what they’re trying to accomplish. So I really want to sit back as a fan and enjoy the game, enjoy the moment.”
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The comments did not go down well with Patriots diehards, including some of his own former team-mates. “That’s bullc–p, Tom,” said Vince Wilfork, who played with Brady in two of his Super Bowl triumphs.
Wilfork told Boston radio station WEEI: “It ain’t political, what it is. Raiders ain’t in it. Say what it is, what you see. At the end of the day, if you’re a Patriot for life, you know what it is. Don’t give me that political bullc–p. That’s just what it is. If you don’t think we’re gonna win, just pick Seattle then. Don’t straddle the fence.”
Current Patriots linebacker Robert Spillane added: “Personally, it makes me sick … He has a dog in the fight. For him to say that, it is what it is. But, at the end of the day, he’s an owner of the Las Vegas Raiders now. So he has to do what’s best for him.”
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Even Brady’s former right-hand man at the Patriots, Rob Gronkowski, weighed in, telling NFL show Up & Adams: “He probably wants to be the quarterback. He’s that competitive. He probably wants to be the guy in the Super Bowl right now.”
