With the end of the Super Bowl comes the end of the NFL season, but as the banter dies down temporarily, let’s acknowledge the most talked-about theme of this year’s NFL season: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Whether you prefer their couple’s name to be Tayvis or Traylor (Traylor is my personal favorite) or are already tired of this article, the couple has taken the country’s news and sports coverage by storm over the past 6 months.
The Swiftie Effect on the NFL was in full force this past season. Swift showed up at 13 games this season to support the Kansas City Chiefs and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce. Kelce and Swift’s relationship has caused some good karma for both the Chiefs and the NFL. CBS released articles stating that within the first month of their relationship going public, Kelce’s jersey and merchandise sales skyrocketed up 300%. By the end of the NFL season, StubHub reported that Kelce’s jersey sales went up by 400%, placing him in the top five selling jersey sales in the NFL.
NFL viewership also received a massive and swift boost. Lending Tree reported that 20% of millennials and 24% of Gen Z’ers said Swift’s “influence” is making them care about football. Sports fans reported having more family engagement with football because of Swifties watching football with their families for the first time. StubHub reported an almost tripled jump in ticket sales for Chiefs home games. Some experts labeling the jump in viewership as the “Swift Bump” have reported a 20 percent increase in sponsorships. The NFL’s surge in female viewership cut across different age demographics. Among teenage girls, NFL viewership has increased by 53 percent. Among the 18-24 age demographic, there has been an increase of 24 percent.
However, Forbes reports that NFL games with Swift sightings were not always the most viewed games of the week. Swift still had to contend with marquee matchups that would get more viewership than the Chiefs walloping the Chicago Bears 41-10, 34-0 at halftime. Therefore, Swift’s explosive viewership bump is not necessarily a fool-proof cheat code to another “most-viewed game in NFL history.”
For the Super Bowl, though, this cheat code couldn’t have been more applicable, and it is not remotely surprising. The Proxy Report wrote that:
“The Feb. 11 Super Bowl in Las Vegas between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers shattered television records, bringing in 123.7 million viewers – the highest number of people to watch the same broadcast in the history of television, according to Nielsen. This eclipsed the previous record by nearly eight million viewers – Super Bowl 57 between the Philadelphia Eagles and Chiefs, which had 115.1 million viewers.”
Sports viewership is constantly growing year after year. Every championship is getting more viewership than the previous championship, and these games are shattering the records set by the previous games. With the introduction of the Taylor Swift effect this year, we can expect a massive jump between this year and last year while also promising continued growth, as long as America still loves Travis and Taylor.
