- Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce have been dating since the fall.
- Swift attended her first Chiefs game this season in September and left a huge impact on the NFL.
- Fanatics, the NFL's top retailer, said sales of Kelce's jersey surged nearly 400% that week.
It is Taylor Swift's world and now even the NFL is living in it.
Swift's high-profile appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games, coupled with the burgeoning relationship with star tight end Travis Kelce, have sparked a surge in viewership along with jersey sales and brought a fresh wave of fans to the already megapopular NFL.
While the singer-songwriter megastar has been to 11 Chiefs games since going public with Kelce, the full impact of Swiftmania on the NFL would be difficult to estimate.
The impact started huge and has only gotten bigger
Fanatics, the NFL's top retailer, told the Associated Press that sales of Kelce's jersey surged nearly 400% on September 24, the first time Swift appeared at a Chiefs game.
Sites like ours even helped Swifties learn about the NFL and football if they were new to the sport.
The most important number for the NFL is how many people are watching the games on TV.
On October 2, the Chiefs played the New York Jets. It was the most-watched NFL game since the Super Bowl in February, with 29 million viewers. According to NBC, viewership among girls aged 12 to 17 was up 53% late in the season compared to before Swift started attending games.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged the impact of Swift on the league during a CBS Mornings interview in November.
"She's an unbelievable artist, obviously, Travis is an unbelievable player, and I think it's great for the league to have that kind of attention — so we welcome it," Goodell told CBS Mornings.
In January, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt discussed the growth of the team's fanbase due to Swift during an interview on CNBC.
"It's been a very interesting, very fun year having the two of them dating, the attention that's been focused on the Chiefs," Hunt told CNBC. "Our female audience has grown leaps and bounds."
Swift is pushing the NFL to new heights
From an NFL perspective, this is big because it felt like the sport had already reached or was nearing saturation in the US. Attendance at games is actually up from pre-pandemic levels. In 2022, nearly 97% of all tickets were sold.
Of the top 100 most-watched shows on TV in 2023, 93 were NFL games.
And then there is the Super Bowl, the ultimate gauge of the NFL's broad appeal. The total television and streaming viewership for that game has remained fairly steady, with the number of people watching typically falling in a narrow window of 110 and 115 million.
Then Swiftmania swept through the NFL.
Ticket prices for the 2024 Super Bowl are already sky-high, with the average ticket being sold for about $11,000 on the first day after the AFC Championship game.
CEO David Steinberg of Zeta Global, an AI-powered marketing cloud, told CNBC this week that the NFL's ratings jumped 7% after Swift attended her first game. They are predicting a record TV audience for this year's Super Bowl, because of her impact.
She even drowned out one of the NFL's biggest annual announcements.
Just a few hours before Swift was spotted at her first game, the NFL revealed that Usher would be performing at the Super Bowl halftime show in February. Usually, that would be the biggest story in the sports and entertainment worlds, but this time, it was off the radar by mid-afternoon.
Instead, the chatter focused primarily on Swift cheering next to Kelce's mother as the cameras panned to her during the game.
This is somewhat ironic, given the NFL reportedly asked Swift to do a Super Bowl halftime show last September, and she rejected them, but I digress.
The NFL has been searching for new fans
So how does a sport that big get bigger? In recent years, the NFL has made a strong push to expand its market overseas, especially in Europe, with the "NFL International Series," a select number of games each year that are played in other countries.
The NFL had already played games in London and Germany, but on the same day Swift attended the Chiefs game, ESPN reported that the league was preparing to play games in Brazil and Spain.
The NFL has even launched an "International Home Marketing Area" program where other countries are divvied up among NFL teams to market in and look for new fans without fighting each other.
That is a lot of effort to find new fans. Of course, it's the NFL, so it will probably work — nearly 800,000 people logged in to the ticket site for the Germany game with 120,000 seats.
Meanwhile, Swift shows up to a game and suddenly there is a surge of TikToks where people explain to their football-obsessed partners that Kelce will become famous now. Sure, it is a gag, but there is a level of truth to it.
@kelleylorraine_ It was way too easy to get him going with this😂 #marriedlife #couplecomedy #taylorswift #traviskelce
♬ original sound - kelleylorraine_
Before Swift's first game, Kelce wasn't even among the top 10 most popular jerseys for sale, according to the NFL. On September 24, he was among the top five. In recent months, his jersey was the top seller in the UK.
The NFL thought they needed to go overseas to get bigger. Maybe they just needed three hours of Swift in the stands.
