The NFL’s Taylor Swift Era: Who Wins the Most?

While the summer of 2023 had a blockbuster with Barbenheimer, fall is in the nascent stages of its own phenomenon. Call it: Football (Taylor’s Version).

This NFL season has been anything but ordinary thanks to superstar Taylor Swift, who has attended two Kansas City Chiefs games after being linked with the team’s All-Pro tight end, Travis Kelce. The effect has been immediate and noticeable, both on and off air. Broadcasts of the two games on Fox and NBC repeatedly cut to shots of her with Kelce’s mother, Donna, and famous friends Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. The NFL’s official apparel partner, Fanatics, saw a 400 percent spike in sales of Kelce jerseys on Sept. 24, the day Swift attended her first Chiefs game, a company spokesperson said, while Kelce has gained half a million new followers on Instagram.

The NFL said it saw no appreciable effect on TV ratings for the Sept. 24 game at Kansas City. But the following week, when the Chiefs visited the Jets, NBC noted a big increase in viewing among women compared with the season’s previous three Sunday Night Football telecasts. The bump among women ages 18-24 and over 35, the network said, resulted in an increase of more than 2 million female viewers.

On social media, the league has seen some 200 million video views on content related to Swift and Kelce, says Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vp social, influencer and content marketing. “The sentiment was also very, very strong — positive sentiment,” he says. 

The Swift phenomenon comes as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has made it a top priority to expand the league’s fan base to include more kids (see recent team-ups with Nickelodeon, Disney+ and Dude Perfect), women (who make up 47 percent of the TV audience and are getting more into coaching, refereeing, etc.) and people outside the U.S.

Swift helps check off all three boxes. 

Music is already a centerpiece of that strategy, with the NFL leveraging its Super Bowl halftime show to attract viewers, whether or not they watch football. “That brings in a new audience,” Goodell told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview ahead of this season. “What we see is ratings continue to climb in anticipation of halftime, and then they keep a large percentage of that new audience. They’re now experiencing football in a different way. That’s what we want to do. We want people to have the opportunity to experience the game on a global basis.”

While Goodell and the NFL are often accused of scripting outcomes, Trombetta emphasizes that the league did not orchestrate the Swift-Kelce pairing. “We only learned about two hours before the [Sept. 24 Chiefs-Bears] game that she was going to be there,” he says. “She was there with Donna Kelce, and obviously the [Fox] broadcast picked her up. We had some fun throughout the game window and into the week, primarily just trying to be welcoming to the Taylor Swift fans who were engaging in NFL content, sometimes for the first time.”

There has been some backlash from a segment of NFL fans who beef that the TV coverage (controlled by the network that’s showing the game, not the league office) and the NFL’s social team have focused too much on Swift and not enough on the on-field action. Trombetta notes that the NFL has cut back on Swift-Kelce content on its social channels — the league does have 31 other teams and hundreds more players to spotlight, after all. 

“The Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce-specific content accounted for less than 3 percent of our total volume,” he says. “As we go forward, we’re always listening to our fans and watching the engagement numbers, and we pivot accordingly.”

Should the Swift-Kelce NFL media amalgamation continue, the singer will have a chance to reap the rewards as well. Her Eras Tour concert film comes to theaters Oct. 13, one day after Kelce’s Chiefs host the Broncos on Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. It’s a platform that could prove to be ripe promotional ground for Swift’s movie. She also has a new album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), set for release Oct. 27.

Swift, meanwhile, has partnered with Amazon a number of times in the past; her songs were featured on the Prime Video series The Summer I Turned Pretty and Wilderness over the summer.

Whether the NFL converts some Swifties into loyal football fans remains to be seen, but there’s a potential end date to the singer-songwriter’s NFL attendance: The Eras Tour starts up again in early November in Buenos Aires. 

“This initial wave of excitement and conversation I’m sure will slow,” Trombetta says. “We’ve certainly begun that process of toning things down on the social side of things. We’ll see where the road takes us. But it’s been a lot of fun.”