Super Bowl
Why Taylor Swift is worth $331 million to the NFL
Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce and pop star Taylor Swift are a couple. photo
© Charlie Riedel/AP/dpa
Travis Kelce is one of the most important players on the field in the Super Bowl. Before the highlight of the season, many questions for him are not about football, but about his girlfriend: Taylor Swift.
On Wednesday, Travis Kelce sat in a chair in a white cap and his Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl jersey and laughed. He spoke to a large group of journalists just outside Las Vegas for almost 40 minutes – and, as always in recent months, he spent a large part of the time answering questions about his girlfriend Taylor Swift.
What did he think about the bet that they would get married in Las Vegas? What will happen first: Taylor getting a ring (from him) or the 49ers (for winning the Super Bowl)? Is it more strenuous to give a concert for three hours or to stand on the football field? And finally: What does he think about having to answer so many questions about his private life?
“I think that’s fine, we’re all having fun with it, so how could I be upset about it?” Kelce responded to that last question four days before the Super Bowl – and flashed his best grin. The 34-year-old is not only a football professional but also a media professional and knows exactly why he wants answers to the San Francisco before the most important NFL game of the season on Monday night in Germany (0.30 CET/RTL and DAZN). 49ers also elicited so many about his relationship.
Taylor Swift – a gift for the NFL
Taylor Swift is not just any singer in the USA, Taylor Swift is not just any singer worldwide. She is currently the music star par excellence, at the peak of her fame and popularity – and a marketing gift for Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs and the National Football League.
Swift regularly breaks records at awards shows – on Sunday night she won her fourth Grammy for Album of the Year for her record “Midnights.” The 34-year-old has enormous influence among her fans, the Swifties, who are considered to be very loyal and loyal, and has around 279 million followers on the Instagram platform (the NFL, the Chiefs and Kelce together have less than 14 percent of that). Your current Eras tour is considered the most commercially successful in music history. Her net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion. Swift recently landed in fifth place on Forbes’ list of the world’s most influential women. In 2023, Time magazine named her Person of the Year.
The fact that Taylor Swift now regularly appears in football stadiums and enthusiastically cheers Kelce’s touchdowns and other successful actions from a box has very concrete effects. Or, as the football player put it: “Being famous worldwide is a different story than being famous in Kansas City.”
Since Swift first went to the football stadium in September for a game in Kansas City, she has brought more than $331 million in marketing value to the Chiefs and the NFL, according to a study by Apex Marketing Group. “It creates a buzz, it creates another group of young fans – especially young women – who are interested in seeing, ‘Why is she going to this game? “Why is she interested in this game?” said NFL boss Roger Goodell at the beginning of the week.
Is the pop star flying in directly from Tokyo?
73 percent of all American adults want to watch the Super Bowl – that’s 10 percent more than a year ago. And the Chiefs’ win against the Philadelphia Eagles in Phoenix already holds the record for the Super Bowl with the most viewers: 115 million people in the USA.
Whether Swift can be there in Las Vegas has been a huge topic in the US media since the Chiefs qualified for the Super Bowl. The evening before the game she gives a concert in Tokyo. Because of the big time difference of 17 hours and because she has a private jet, traveling is possible. Even the Japanese ambassador to the USA guaranteed this. Whether she can find a parking space for her jet in Las Vegas given the many rich football fans in the city and how much CO2 such a trip would produce was also the subject of articles in even the largest media houses.
Although Swift only appears for an average of 25 seconds in the three-hour broadcasts, for many people the attention paid to the singer goes too far. In Germany and the USA, football purists see it as having nothing to do with the sport. Even NFL Germany boss Alexander Steinforth says: “First of all, I believe that the game and the sport itself are so attractive that you don’t need that to get people excited about it.” But he also admits: “Of course, this is part of our DNA somewhere: We are sport, but at the same time we are also entertainment and in this respect it is additional attention, which of course we don’t complain about.”
That’s how her friend Kelce sees it, who also answered all the questions about his partner: The bets on a wedding are “crazy”, a football game lasting three hours is more strenuous “because it involves contact with the opponent” and beforehand Swift or the 49ers get a ring, he wants to strike for the third time in five years. “I hope to get a ring on Sunday.” Taylor Swift would be happy – and with her a whole lot of fans, whether they’ve been there for years or just a few weeks.