Taylor Swift is a singer-songwriter, fourteen-time Grammy winner, and one of the most famous musicians in the world. Depending on who you ask, she also ruined football.
On Sept. 24, Swift attended her first NFL game to support her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who is a celebrated tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Swift proceeded to watch numerous other games, including the Super Bowl, which the Chiefs won. Despite typically appearing on screen for less than 25 seconds during these broadcasts, backlash against Swift—who doesn’t control when or how often she is shown on-screen—was emphatic and rapid. While Swift has flaws that warrant criticism (i.e. her giant carbon footprint), simply existing at NFL games is not one of them.
Some NFL fans took to social media to claim Swift is destroying the league and football itself. The fury even led to conspiracy theories: some Trump-aligned MAGA supporters insisted that the Chiefs would win the Super Bowl so Swift could endorse current president Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign.
Why did Swift’s brief appearances on TV generate such upheaval and angst? The answer is simple. Swift represents femininity, sensitivity, and emotional expression—a raging contrast to the masculine culture surrounding the NFL. She’s built a massive fortune and impressive career by embodying qualities that are often viewed as weak in a patriarchal society, which makes people wildly uncomfortable.
Swift’s success is often downplayed. It’s common to hear someone claim that her music is all horrible or that her songs are trivial because they discuss love and relationships. However, the music itself isn’t the problem: the fact is that seeing a feminine, expressive woman in a position of power scares people. We’re used to seeing men at the head of the table—the U.S. has never even had a female president. According to a study from LinkedIn, women comprise 47% of the United States workforce yet only hold 37% of leadership positions. Swift may be leading the music industry as the most popular recording artist in the world, but people still try to discount her success because our society still isn’t fully comfortable with powerful women.
In Swift and Kelce’s relationship, Swift undeniably holds more widespread influence, which makes some uncomfortable (just scroll through TikTok and look at the bitter reactions of men who are told Swift put Kelce on the map). While Kelce is an NFL standout and accomplished athlete, Swift has reached incredible levels of ubiquity. Just compare his 6.4 million Instagram followers to her 283 million: she is the one with broader recognition. After she attended a Chiefs vs. Chicago Bears game, his followers jumped by over 300,000: more than he gained after winning the 2022 Super Bowl.
Swift didn’t just elevate Kelce’s popularity, she drew a new demographic of young women to the NFL. Intelligence company Morning Consult reported that a record-high 64% of Gen-Z and Millennial women had a favorable view of the NFL in Dec. 2023. The biggest gain in Super Bowl viewership this year was with young women aged 18-24, whose numbers jumped from 3.18 million viewers in 2023 to 3.95 million in 2024 for a 24% increase according to SportsMediaWatch. The “Taylor Swift Effect,” as her influencing power has been dubbed, is bringing women into a historically male-dominated bubble.
So who’s angry about Swift and the demographic of young women who have followed her? Certainly not the NFL; after all, they’re gaining new demographics of fans. Not Kelce, who’s comfortable enough in his masculinity to be unshaken by Swift’s power. The unhappy people blasting off online are, in Swift’s words, “dads, Brads, and Chads.”
Their issue isn’t that Swift is distracting from football games. NFL games are never just about football anyway—there are always storylines at play. The problem is that she’s a woman with a gargantuan level of fame and a successful career built off of femininity and openness that opposes the NFL’s rock-hard masculinity. Let’s hope that the football fans bashing Swift for existing don’t treat their mothers, wives, daughters, and friends the same way.
This piece was originally published in Zephyrus’ print edition on April 18, 2024
