On Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers will take the field at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada for the biggest game of the season: the Super Bowl. That game will be identified in the historical record by its Roman number: LVIII, or 58. For much, but not all, of the league’s history, the championship game has been tied to its Roman number identifier, leading to a spike each year in interest around how Roman numerals work and how to read the ancient numbering system.
While thoughts of the Roman empire were famously rampant in 2023, there’s likely some of you who haven’t kept up on your history of ancient numericals. For that group, keep reading for a quick overview of how to read Roman numerals in the Super Bowl context and their history in the NFL.
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What number is the Super Bowl this year?
This year’s matchup between the Chiefs and 49ers is Super Bowl LVIII, or Super Bowl 58.
Why does the Super Bowl use Roman numerals?
The generally accepted wisdom around the NFL’s use of Roman numerals for the Super Bowl is that the system came into place to avoid confusion on what year the game took place, since the NFL season starts in the early fall of one year and extends into the next. Using this year as an example, is this the 2023 Super Bowl (tied to the 2023 season) or the 2024 Super Bowl (taking place in 2024)? Problem solved — it’s neither, but instead Super Bowl 58, or Super Bowl LVIII.
As far as the reasoning behind Roman numerals, most sources agree that former Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt suggested them to add drama, excitement and grandeur to the season’s biggest game.
How to read this year’s Super Bowl number
This year’s Super Bowl number, LVIII, can be read as 50 (L) + 8 (VIII), or 50 (L) + 5 (V) + 3 (III). To see how that comes together, here’s a brief overview on how to read Roman numerals.
Roman numerals, unsurprisingly, date back to ancient Rome, and while they’re no longer commonplace, they do still occur outside of the Super Bowl use case: they sometimes appear on clock faces, or attached to the names of royals (think of Charles III, or “The Third”, the current King of England), to name a few examples.
The Roman numeral system is made up of seven characters:
I — One
V — Five
X — Ten
L — 50
C — 100
D — 500
M — 1,000
Those characters are strung together to make additional numbers, so “II” is read as “two” and “III” is read as “three”. To delineate “four” using Roman numerals, you’d write “IV”, which equates to one less than five. Above “V”, or “five”, you’d add one (“VI” is six, “VII” is seven) until you get to nine, where the same “less than” convention applies — so nine is written as “IX” or “one less than 10".
A few examples of how that’s played out in recent Super Bowls: The last time the Chiefs and 49ers met in the big game was in the 2019 season, or Super Bowl 54. That game was written out as fifty plus one less than five, so Super Bowl LIV. Last year, Super Bowl 57 was fifty plus seven, or fifty plus five plus two, so Super Bowl LVII.
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What Super Bowl did not use roman numerals?
In the Super Bowl era, there’s one exception to the Roman numeral rule: Super Bowl 50 decided the champion of the 2015 season, with the Denver Broncos defeating the Carolina Panthers 24-10. “50" in Roman numerals is denoted simply as “L”, not exactly a positive symbol in modern culture (think of the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s 1999 classic All Star). So that game got the moniker Super Bowl 50, and Roman numerals picked back up with Super Bowl LI in the 2016 season.