Charlie Sheen thought Bad Bunny wasn’t the right fit for the Super Bowl halftime show.
He said so in October 2025 on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, months before the big game.
By the time Super Bowl Sunday arrived, that clip had aged like milk left out in the sun.
Because between October and February, Bad Bunny didn’t just prepare for his halftime performance — he rewrote the record books.
What Sheen Actually Said
During his appearance on Maher’s podcast, Sheen argued that the NFL needed to “figure out the halftime show” and deliver “something that the diehard fans really want, as far as musically.”
When Maher asked if that was a dig at Bad Bunny, Sheen didn’t hold back.
Yeah. I mean, there’s bands, there’s acts, there’s just people that I think are more germane to the experience of the game, of that moment, of that particular game. It’s the biggest game in the universe.
Maher, 70 years old at the time, chimed in with his own take.
I’m sure Mr. Bunny is wonderful. I mean, it’s a reflection on me that I don’t know his work as well as I can, but I’m of a different era. I was hoping the halftime show would be Eddie Rabbit.
Eddie Rabbit passed away in 1998.
Then Bad Bunny Went on a Historic Run
In November, Bad Bunny’s album Debí Tirar Más Fotos won Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys. That achievement made it the first album ever to win that category at both the Latin Grammys and the regular Grammys.
Spotify named him the most-streamed artist on the planet for 2025, with 19.8 billion streams. It marked his fourth time holding that title — more than any other artist in history.
On February 1, 2026, he stood on the Grammy stage and became the first artist in 68 years to win Album of the Year for a Spanish-language record.
His acceptance speech hit hard.
ICE out. We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.
Days later, he headlined Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California — the first solo Latino artist and the first Spanish-language performer to do so, performing for an estimated 130 million viewers worldwide.
Who Are the ‘Diehard Fans’ Anyway?
Sheen’s entire argument hinged on serving “diehard fans.” But the NFL’s own numbers tell a very different story about who those fans actually are.
In 2024, NFL Senior Vice President Marissa Solis revealed that the league has over 39 million Latino fans in the United States alone — one of its largest and fastest-growing demographics.
She went further, stating that future growth is “mathematically impossible without Latinos.” The NFL’s “Por La Cultura” campaign, launched in 2021, specifically targets this audience through Spanish-language broadcasts and cultural partnerships.
Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s recent concert tours sold over 2.4 million tickets and grossed $435 million. His 2022 world tour set the record for the highest-grossing tour in a single calendar year.
He has had four albums debut at number one on the Billboard 200 — all of them entirely in Spanish.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the selection twice publicly, calling Bad Bunny “one of the greatest artists in the world.” Jay-Z dismissed opposition to the choice as astroturfing.
The Political Backlash
Sheen and Maher weren’t alone in questioning Bad Bunny’s selection. Conservative commentator Benny Johnson called him a “massive Trump hater” and criticized that he performs primarily in Spanish.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson suggested Lee Greenwood as an alternative, claiming Bad Bunny lacked “crossover appeal to the critical mass of Americans.”
Turning Point USA announced Kid Rock as counter-programming. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced ICE agents would be present at the Super Bowl.
Bad Bunny addressed all of it during his Saturday Night Live appearance back in October, right after the controversy first erupted.
If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.
The Most Revealing Part
What makes the Sheen-Maher clip so striking isn’t that they criticized Bad Bunny’s selection. It’s that both openly admitted they don’t know his music — and then confidently declared he doesn’t belong anyway.
Sheen is 60. Maher is 70. Between them, they have zero familiarity with the work of the most-streamed artist on Earth.
From that position of complete ignorance, they concluded he wasn’t “germane” to an event the NFL specifically designed to reach the exact audience Bad Bunny dominates.
Sheen spent his October questioning whether a 31-year-old from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, had earned the biggest stage in American entertainment.
Bad Bunny spent his February proving — beyond any doubt — that he had.