The Taylor Swift Bump: How the NFL Has Benefited From the Megastar’s Romance With Travis Kelce

According to Nielsen, an average of 17.9 million people have watched regular-season NFL games this season, marking a 7% increase from the previous season and the biggest viewership for regular-season games since 2015. Regular-season games notably saw a 9% boost in female viewership — the highest recorded female viewership since the league began keeping records in 2000. While not all of this gain can be attributed to Swift, who has only attended a handful of Chiefs matchups, her presence has consistently boosted the viewing numbers of Chiefs games this season, particularly among women, lifting the overall average.

Swift’s first appearance at a Chiefs game on Sept. 24 resulted in the highest-rated NFL broadcast of the week and the second-highest-rated of the season up to that point with 24.3 million viewers, despite a lopsided score (the Chiefs trounced the Chicago Bears 41-10). It was also the highest-rated NFL game of the week among women in three different age demographics between 12 and 49, according to FOX Sports. The rise in viewership, particularly among women, has only continued for subsequent broadcasts of Chiefs games attended by Swift. The singer’s second appearance at a Chiefs game, on Oct. 1, averaged 27 million viewers, with viewing among girls and women spiking dramatically: Compared with the first three Sunday Night Football broadcasts of the season, ratings grew 53% among girls aged 12 to 17, 24% for women aged 18 to 24 and 34% for women over 35.

That success has continued in the postseason. This week, CBS Sports announced that the Chiefs’ faceoff with the Buffalo Bills on Sunday (Jan. 21), which Swift attended, was the most-watched NFL divisional playoff game ever with 50.393 million viewers — and the most-watched program on any network since the 2023 Super Bowl.

After it was reported that Swift would attend the Chiefs’ game against the New York Jets on Oct. 1, multiple online ticket marketplaces reported sales spikes for the matchup, with TicketIQ reporting that prices on the secondary market spiked 43% in the 48 hours after the news broke. In the two weeks following Swift’s first appearance on Sept. 24, StubHub reported that Chiefs home games saw a 235% increase in daily average sales and tickets sold on the online platform.

After Swift’s Sept. 24 appearance, the NFL’s social media team was quick to capitalize on the moment. The following day, the league changed the bio on its X (formerly Twitter) account to “NFL (Taylor’s Version)” and its header photo to a picture of her at the game. On TikTok, the league changed its bio to “9/24/23. Taylor was here.”

Clearly, the NFL knew what it had on its hands. The league subsequently reported that Swift’s attendance at the Sept. 24 matchup resulted in record year-over-year week 3 engagement on its social channels, according to The Athletic. Over the same period, the Chiefs grew its social following by 200,000 across accounts, while in the first four days after Swift’s surprise appearance, Kelce gained a whopping 1.3 million followers across his Instagram, X and TikTok accounts, according to UPI (via Socialblade). On Instagram alone, Kelce has gained roughly 2.5 million followers since Sept. 24, according to Socialblade.

Following Swift’s Chiefs game debut on Sept. 24, sports retailer Fanatics (the NFL’s official e-commerce partner) reported a 400% increase in sales of Kelce’s No. 87 jersey throughout its network of websites, including NFLShop.com, adding that his jersey had become one of the top five-selling in the NFL. The Chiefs windbreaker Swift donned at the game also sold out. On Travis and his brother Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast in December, the siblings also claimed that they had the No. 1 and No. 2-selling jerseys, respectively, in the United Kingdom — a country not exactly known for its love of American football. After Jason stated the obvious — that the spike must be due to Travis’ romance with Swift — Travis replied: “It’s gotta be — it’s the only reasonable solution to all this.”

The future of Swift and Kelce’s romance is unclear, but it seems certain that at least some of Swift’s fans who have tuned into or attended NFL games to catch a glimpse of the pop megastar will become lifelong NFL converts. (Not long after Swift made her first Chiefs game appearance, fans even began teaching each other the rules of football on social media.) “You’ve seen the numbers on how the women’s audience increased. There was just so much social media exposure as well about teaching people about the NFL,” Lisa Delpy Neirotti, director of the MS in Sport Management Program and an associate professor at George Washington University, told The Athletic. “I think it was definitely a win for the NFL no matter what happens with this relationship.”