If it can be said that sports is a secular religion, then Sunday's Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals is like Yom Kippur, Christmas and Ramadan rolled into one for the American sporting world.

Yet the biggest event on the American sporting calendar cannot escape this year from the worldly troubles of the nose-diving economy.

Some companies that were once regulars for the ultra-expensive advertising spots that punctuate the game are now too poor, or too sensitive to splash out 100,000 dollar per second on the costly self- promotion.

Consumers who once flocked to electronics retailers to buy gargantuan televisions on which to watch the big game are now making do with merely large televisions, or even worse, their old TV sets.

Even in the Super Bowl town of Tampa, Florida, where Sunday's game will be played, civic leaders are desperately reaching out to media outlets to lure football fans to the city.

It's easy to understand their concerns. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers said the Super Bowl will have about a 150- million-dollar impact on Tampa's economy. That's about 45 million dollars less than the previous two Super Bowls, and only 10 million dollars more than the last Tampa Super Bowl in 2001.

The relative scarcity of fans, combined with the fact that many game sponsors are bringing far fewer guests than usual, helps explain why Super Bowl tickets are readily available this season when usually they are virtually unobtainable.

According to Sean Pate, director of ticket website StubHub.com, tickets for this year's game will be the cheapest in the seven years that his company has been operating.

Cheap, of course, is a relative term. But Pate estimated that there was just a 500-dollar premium on the lowest-priced tickets with a face value of 1,000 dollars.

"It's turning out to be a real bargain," Pate told the website NFL Nation. "You can see a Super Bowl game and Bruce Springsteen in concert (at halftime), probably at about a 1,000 dollar discount from what the average has been the last few years."

The same article quoted a tout in Tampa as saying that he expected to have to drop his prices to near face value in order to get rid of all his tickets by game time.

But don't expect new US President Barack Obama to be snapping up the cheap tickets at the last minute. He has invited several Republican and Democratic lawmakers to a Super Bowl party at the White House, where he'll be rooting for Pittsburgh.

That choice of team is a refreshing change from previous presidents who remained neutral for fear of alienating one set of fans. But if Obama really wants to maintain his image as a man of the people, then White House chefs better have stocked up on spicy buffalo chicken wings, Budweiser beer, chips and guacamole - which are something of a national diet on Super Bowl day.

Politicians, like the ordinary people they represent, could no doubt do with a break. After months in which Americans have been captivated by the dire economy and the implications of a historic election, the Super Bowl ritual offers a welcome escape.

"I'll just be hanging out with friends, drinking a few beers, and forgetting about my troubles while I watch a game that to be honest I don't really care about," said sporting goods salesman Greg Wills, in San Francisco.

But when the final buzzer rings it will be back to normality and another ritual, he adds. "That's the signal for me to start preparing my taxes."