In the tournament of pop culture—an arena increasingly obsessed with charts, data, and stat lines—Taylor Swift has, by most measures, already emerged the victor.
In her nearly two decades in the public eye, she has become a billionaire by engineering one of the most dependable fan bases on the planet: a legion willing to buy every vinyl variant for her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, and generate such collective frenzy at her 149-date Eras Tour that it registered as seismic activity.
Swift has become something like an institution, around whom various rituals and practices have formed, whether the exchanging of friendship bracelets or sharing easter eggs with fellow Swifties. In an age of fragmentation, Swift remains one of the last reliable captains of the monoculture within popular music.
Her latest album rollout for The Life of a Showgirl makes clear how deliberately she continues to extend her reach, as she now angles toward new terrain and one of the largest mass audiences on the planet: football fans. As with the rest of her album rollouts, the effort for her 12th album has been planned meticulously. So it was not for nothing that she announced the record in August on New Heights, the podcast hosted by her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Her appearance became the podcast’s most viewed and listened-to episode by an order of magnitude, peaking at 1.3 million concurrent livestream viewers, compared with the podcast’s previous record of 141,821. The crossover continued in her music video for her standout single “The Fate of Ophelia,” which included a series of sports-related gestures that would register only to her ever-attentive fans. She catches a football; she mimics Kelce’s touchdown celebration; and the numbers 13 (for her December 13 birthday) and 87 (his jersey number) glide into frame. Together they total 100: a tidy metaphor for the merging of sports and pop culture.
Swift is now taking keen advantage of this convergence, plugging her own romance-led narrative into an arguably more durable mass spectacle: NFL football. Kelce’s domain remains one of the last functioning monocultures in America—besides Swift—that’s capable of reaching tens of millions of homes at once. It’s an opportunity Swift has no interest in wasting.
The pop star attended her first Chiefs game on September 24, 2023, right around the time her relationship with Kelce became public knowledge. Immediately after, she received attention from corners of sports media that had scarcely covered her before. The NFL itself was wise to take full advantage of the moment, briefly updating its Instagram bio to read: “Taylor was here.” The alliance helped score a 20% surge in sponsorships, as well as more than a 50% increase in 12- to 17-year-old girls tuning in to games.
Much has been made of these gains for the NFL, but curiously, little attention has been paid to what the league has done for Swift. Entering this sphere has given her access to a new (previously Swift-averse) vertical: male, suburban, middle-American, multigenerational households that tend to organize their week around Sunday broadcasts.
Her regular high-profile appearances at Chiefs games have boosted her own social media followers and Spotify music streams. Immediately after her first game appearance, Swift’s Spotify monthly listeners increased by 2.25%, and she gained a 1.12% follower increase on Instagram—and most significantly, a 5.37% jump on TikTok. Streaming analytics database Streams Charts tracked a 3,000% spike in Swift listenership after her New Heights appearance, with a large influx of first-time male listeners.
“If I’m Taylor Swift, and I want to take over the world, then how better for me to break into the 49% of the population than through sport, which is traditionally a masculine bastion,” says David Rowe, professor emeritus at Western Sydney University in Australia and author of Sport, Culture, and the Media: The Unruly Trinity.
As this happens, it highlights the growing overlap between sports and music, fueled by the same data-driven logic that now governs modern fandom. With music listeners adopting the analytics-driven habits of sports fans, and NFL teams embracing social-media storytelling to court younger audiences, both worlds are collapsing into a single superfandom-driven entertainment economy. That shift has primed sports fans to receive Swift differently, and her visible integration into this masculine stronghold has turned her relationship with Kelce into an opportunity to capture an audience that once dismissed her.
Music borrows the sports playbook
Sports and music have a large range of formal similarities that have long gone underappreciated. Each are shapers of identity, with their range of rituals; sets of language, chants, and symbols; and paraphernalia and merchandise—all of which enhance a sense of community and belonging.
“Something that I think the music industry has tried to adopt over time from the sports industry is the ability to rally people around fandom, because of a deep connection to it, and it being part of who they are,” says Tatiana Cirisano, VP of music strategy at entertainment analysis firm MIDiA Research. “In a lot of ways, I think sports has done a better job of taking advantage of fandom than music has.”
Both sports and Swift, in particular, inspire a highly emotional investment that can easily be monetized. “You can connect them in strategic and organized ways, as part of a total entertainment package. And by having this convergence, you help connect across the gender divide,” Rowe says. Swift and Kelce’s relationship, he adds, “is a sublime marriage in more ways than one.”
Swift is hardly the only pop star moving strategically into the sports arena. For years, artists have performed during the Super Bowl halftime show for free because the exposure is worth more than the check. And in 2025, Beyoncé has become a familiar presence at Formula One races, her fandom for the Grand Prix becoming all the more visible; Tems joined San Diego FC as a club partner through her company, The Leading Vibe; and high-profile musicians including Ed Sheeran, ASAP Rocky, Jay-Z, and Drake, have all taken stakes in professional teams to solidify their alliance with the sports world.
For these artists, sports offers a constant visibility that the music industry rarely facilitates. Seasons are long; games recur weekly; and broadcasts, stadium screens, and league-affiliated podcasts create more touchpoints than a standard album cycle. Sports organizations also sit on vast amounts of audience data and are largely considered brand-safe, giving entertainers a controlled environment in which to expand their reach.
Data makes music into sports
The similarities between sports and music are only continuing to blur in the age of algorithms and datafication.
While analytics were once top-down, now they’ve become accessible to everyone—which is why they’ve become so central in music fandoms today. “Now, thanks to real-time streaming dashboards, chart-tracking accounts, and analytics sites that update hourly, everyday listeners can see these numbers in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.” says Nicole Santero, a fan culture researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Sports betting, Cirisano says, has infiltrated pop culture, too. “Now fans are betting on who they think will win the Grammys,” she says. (Due to the August 30 cutoff date, Swift’s latest album, released in October, is ineligible for the upcoming Grammys. At press time, Kalshi betters were 40% behind Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos to win album of the year.)
This fairly recent fan focus on data and analytics was pioneered in the early 2010s by K-pop artists and fandom, who have increasingly inspired Western pop acts, Swift included. “K-pop showed that being a fan can feel a lot like being part of a team,” UNLV’s Santero says. “Instead of just listening to music, fans get pulled into a whole system where their actions matter. When a group has a new album or song, it isn’t just a release; it’s almost like game day. Fans make streaming schedules, coordinate worldwide voting pushes, and keep track of charts the way sports fans keep track of stats.”
Unlike sports, music once had no victor. Now, with a keener focus on metrics and statistics, a quantifiable winner emerges. Swift continually smashes records, consistently beating out her rivals. “Fandom in sport and in music has always been defined by what you don’t like as well,” says Rowe of Western Sydney University. “It’s structured into sport. You have the enemy, the other teams.” And there has always existed a similar dynamic in popular music: Beatles versus the Rolling Stones, Blur versus Oasis, East Coast versus West Coast rap, among many others. Tribalism and anti-fandom has only increased in this age. It’s a rivalry Swift has always made a fine point of in her music, whether her references to Katy Perry in 2014’s “Bad Blood” or Charli XCX in Life of a Showgirl’s “Actually Romantic.”
What’s new about this moment, and which has heightened the convergence between sports and music, is a necessary cross-pollination across forms. “We’re at this point where the competition for attention has reached an all-time high. And if you’re an artist, you’re no longer just competing with other artists; you’re competing with the latest show on Netflix or a sports broadcast,” says Cirisano of MIDiA Research.
Football fans open their minds
Swift’s efforts to grow her audience through her visibility within sports are coinciding with sports leagues embracing the methods by which the rest of culture is building its audience—shareable content.
[The NFL] was once defined by traditional broadcasts and highlight reels, but it’s now transformed into a full-fledged digital entertainment machine,” Santero says. “Teams now treat social media platforms like their own storytelling studios. They share a ton of mic’d-up moments, behind-the-scenes footage, and even meme-able posts that feel designed for TikTok and Instagram.”
This crossover has opened the door for sports fans to meet Swift halfway, priming them to receive her differently as she moves into their territory. Alex Folck, a die-hard Denver Broncos fan and former Swift hater, admits he’s changed his tune since Swift’s game and New Heights appearances.
“I learned how weird she is, and it made me like her a lot. Her authenticity doesn’t feel forced,” Folck says. Swift has charmed many previously Swift-skeptical men with her bashful, self-deprecating, and—what they interpret as—authentically unguarded demeanor during her sports-related appearances.
On camera, she seems relaxed and unrehearsed. “If there’s one thing male sports fans want to see in their spaces, it’s more of me,” she joked on New Heights. That attitude has persuaded several male fans to reconsider her.
Writer Kasey Symons, a lecturer of communication at Deakin University in Australia, believes it’s a little more calculated: “Swift is incredibly smart regarding her positioning and understanding her place in culture as a woman, no matter if that is pop music or sport,” she says. “And she is incredibly aware of her impact in sport, and will be strategic about how she uses it.”
That strategy is resonating with fans like Folck. “I definitely had a negative opinion of her beforehand, so I think seeing her in an NFL context had a positive effect,” he says. Part of his change in attitude stems from the sense that “she looks like she’s genuinely really into it” when she attends games. His preferences are emblematic of a familiar American male demographic: indifferent to pop music and deeply invested in sports. “I follow games like the news,” he says. Last year, he and his friends even threw a Swift-themed Super Bowl party.
Sports and music fans are now beginning to converge around Swift in ways that upend familiar gendered assumptions about each fandom. Women are joining fantasy football leagues at much higher rates, often choosing Swift-referential team names. Men, meanwhile, are placing Swift-themed bets: If the Chiefs win, rival fans must write elaborate essays about Swift and her music. Folck himself was subjected to this ritual after the Chiefs beat his team for the 16th consecutive time; he has since produced 200 pages on Swift this way.
With men finally on board—begrudgingly or not—Swift is inching closer to total media ubiquity, and football fans are inching toward masculinity (Taylor’s version). “Guys still rolling their eyes at Taylor Swift are the same dudes who can’t enjoy an appletini or an ice cream cone,” Folck says. “Once the performative barriers come down, there’s plenty to enjoy that used to feel off-limits.”