How many franchise members and employees usually get a championship ring?

Imagine the feeling: your team has just made history by winning one of the world’s biggest sporting competitions, there’s chaos all around you, your teammates are celebrating wildly…but you don’t get a medal – or in the case of the Super Bowl - a ring, for one reason or another. Ahead of Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs, we’ve seen social media clips of the San Francisco 49ers flying out more than 800 members of staff, family and friends to Las Vegas, almost all of whom will end up empty-handed in the team wins.

In the Premier League in soccer, for instance, only players who made a minimum of 10 appearances for a league-winning team received a winners’ medal up until 2012. A change was then made to hand clubs 40 medals that they could distribute as they pleased, with players who made at least five appearances obliged to be given one (under those rules, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah missed out when playing for Chelsea in 2013-14 as he only played three times).

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40 medals, of course, wouldn’t be enough to cover a Super Bowl-winning roster but thankfully the NFL adopt a similarly common-sense approach when it comes to dishing out championship rings to the one (finally) shown by the Premier League. So, who gets one?

How many championship rings can Super Bowl winners order?

Well, beyond some obvious recipients, the honest answer is “it depends”. There are no official rules as to who does and doesn’t receive a ring. The only rule that exists concerns how many rings the Super Bowl winners can order, which is 150. From the moment the rings are received, teams can hand them out as they see fit.

Who gets a Super Bowl ring?

There are, of course, a huge number of individuals who are guaranteed a ring, unless something really bizarre happens. All 53 members of the playing roster – offense, defense, special teams – will obviously get one, as well as all members of the coaching staff. The exact number will vary depending on who does what in each individual team but the Head Coach, Assistant Coach, Defensive and Offensive Coaches, Defensive and Offensive Line Coaches and Special Teams Coordinators can all expect to take one home.

Practice squad, executives, injured players

After that, it will depend on how many are left and who is judged to have deserved one. Most commonly, practice squad players often get one of lesser value than the ‘main’ one (an incentive to step up their game?). A number of team executives will also likely get a (real) ring, such as the Team Owner, General Manager and CEO.

One potential grey area could surround players who didn’t feature in the Super Bowl because of injury. If they made a significant contribution earlier in the season, the likelihood is that they’ll get one, like Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz in the 2017 season.

And another concerns players who were traded away from the team before the Super Bowl. Again, if it’s felt that they played an important role at some stage – and that they didn’t rub anyone up the wrong way prior to leaving – they may well get one too, as was the case for New England Patriots’ running back Kenjon Barner in the 2018 season.