Within the event of popular culture—an area more and more obsessive about charts, knowledge, and stat traces—Taylor Swift has, by most measures, already emerged the victor.
In her practically twenty years within the public eye, she has turn into a billionaire by engineering one of the crucial reliable fan bases on the planet: a legion prepared to purchase each vinyl variant for her newest album, The Lifetime of a Showgirl, and generate such collective frenzy at her 149-date Eras Tour that it registered as seismic activity.
Swift has turn into one thing like an establishment, round whom numerous rituals and practices have fashioned, whether or not the exchanging of friendship bracelets or sharing easter eggs with fellow Swifties. In an age of fragmentation, Swift stays one of many final dependable captains of the monoculture inside well-liked music.
Her newest album rollout for The Lifetime of a Showgirl makes clear how intentionally she continues to increase her attain, as she now angles towards new terrain and one of many largest mass audiences on the planet: soccer followers. As with the remainder of her album rollouts, the trouble for her twelfth album has been deliberate meticulously. So it was not for nothing that she introduced the report in August on New Heights, the podcast hosted by her fiancé, Kansas Metropolis Chiefs tight finish Travis Kelce.
Her look grew to become the podcast’s most considered and listened-to episode by an order of magnitude, peaking at 1.3 million concurrent livestream viewers, in contrast with the podcast’s earlier report of 141,821. The crossover continued in her music video for her standout single “The Fate of Ophelia,” which included a sequence of sports-related gestures that may register solely to her ever-attentive followers. She catches a soccer; she mimics Kelce’s landing celebration; and the numbers 13 (for her December 13 birthday) and 87 (his jersey quantity) glide into body. Collectively they complete 100: a tidy metaphor for the merging of sports activities and popular culture.
Swift is now taking eager benefit of this convergence, plugging her personal romance-led narrative into an arguably extra sturdy mass spectacle: NFL soccer. Kelce’s area stays one of many final functioning monocultures in America—apart from Swift—that’s able to reaching tens of hundreds of thousands of houses directly. It’s a chance Swift has little interest in losing.
The pop star attended her first Chiefs sport on September 24, 2023, proper across the time her relationship with Kelce grew to become public information. Instantly after, she acquired consideration from corners of sports activities media that had scarcely coated her earlier than. The NFL itself was smart to take full benefit of the second, briefly updating its Instagram bio to learn: “Taylor was right here.” The alliance helped rating a 20% surge in sponsorships, in addition to greater than a 50% improve in 12- to 17-year-old ladies tuning in to video games.
A lot has been made of those good points for the NFL, however curiously, little consideration has been paid to what the league has completed for Swift. Getting into this sphere has given her entry to a brand new (beforehand Swift-averse) vertical: male, suburban, middle-American, multigenerational households that have a tendency to arrange their week round Sunday broadcasts.
Her common high-profile appearances at Chiefs video games have boosted her personal social media followers and Spotify music streams. Instantly after her first sport look, Swift’s Spotify month-to-month 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 look, with a big inflow of first-time male listeners.
“If I’m Taylor Swift, and I wish to take over the world, then how higher for me to interrupt into the 49% of the inhabitants than by way of sport, which is historically a masculine bastion,” says David Rowe, professor emeritus at Western Sydney College in Australia and writer of Sport, Tradition, and the Media: The Unruly Trinity.
As this occurs, it highlights the rising overlap between sports activities and music, fueled by the identical data-driven logic that now governs fashionable fandom. With music listeners adopting the analytics-driven habits of sports activities followers, and NFL groups embracing social-media storytelling to courtroom youthful audiences, each worlds are collapsing right into a single superfandom-driven leisure financial system. That shift has primed sports activities followers to obtain Swift in another way, and her seen integration into this masculine stronghold has turned her relationship with Kelce into a chance to seize an viewers that after dismissed her.
Music borrows the sports activities playbook
Sports activities and music have a wide range of formal similarities which have lengthy gone underappreciated. Every are shapers of id, with their vary of rituals; units of language, chants, and symbols; and paraphernalia and merchandise—all of which improve a way of neighborhood and belonging.
“One thing that I feel the music trade has tried to undertake over time from the sports activities trade is the power to rally folks round fandom, due to a deep connection to it, and it being a part of who they’re,” says Tatiana Cirisano, VP of music technique at leisure evaluation agency MIDiA Analysis. “In a number of methods, I feel sports activities has completed a greater job of benefiting from fandom than music has.”
Each sports activities and Swift, specifically, encourage a extremely emotional funding that may simply be monetized. “You’ll be able to join them in strategic and arranged methods, as a part of a complete leisure bundle. And by having this convergence, you assist join throughout the gender divide,” Rowe says. Swift and Kelce’s relationship, he provides, “is a elegant marriage in additional methods than one.”
Swift is hardly the one pop star transferring strategically into the sports activities area. For years, artists have carried out through the Tremendous Bowl halftime present free of charge as a result of the publicity is price greater than the test. And in 2025, Beyoncé has turn into a well-recognized presence at System One races, her fandom for the Grand Prix turning into all of the extra seen; Tems joined San Diego FC as a membership accomplice by way of her firm, The Main Vibe; and high-profile musicians together with Ed Sheeran, ASAP Rocky, Jay-Z, and Drake, have all taken stakes in skilled groups to solidify their alliance with the sports activities world.
For these artists, sports activities gives a continuing visibility that the music trade hardly ever facilitates. Seasons are lengthy; video games recur weekly; and broadcasts, stadium screens, and league-affiliated podcasts create extra touchpoints than a typical album cycle. Sports activities organizations additionally sit on huge quantities of viewers knowledge and are largely thought of brand-safe, giving entertainers a managed atmosphere by which to broaden their attain.
Information makes music into sports activities
The similarities between sports activities and music are solely persevering with to blur within the age of algorithms and datafication.
Whereas analytics have been as soon as top-down, now they’ve turn into accessible to everybody—which is why they’ve turn into so central in music fandoms in the present day. “Now, due to real-time streaming dashboards, chart-tracking accounts, and analytics websites that replace hourly, on a regular basis listeners can see these numbers in a method that was unimaginable a decade in the past.” says Nicole Santero, a fan tradition researcher and PhD candidate on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Sports activities betting, Cirisano says, has infiltrated popular culture, too. “Now followers are betting on who they assume will win the Grammys,” she says. (Because of the August 30 cutoff date, Swift’s newest album, launched in October, is ineligible for the upcoming Grammys. At press time, Kalshi betters have been 40% behind Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos to win album of the yr.)
This pretty current fan concentrate on knowledge and analytics was pioneered within the early 2010s by Okay-pop artists and fandom, who’ve more and more impressed Western pop acts, Swift included. “Okay-pop confirmed that being a fan can really feel lots like being a part of a workforce,” UNLV’s Santero says. “As an alternative of simply listening to music, followers get pulled into a complete system the place their actions matter. When a gaggle has a brand new album or tune, it isn’t only a launch; it’s virtually like sport day. Followers make streaming schedules, coordinate worldwide voting pushes, and preserve observe of charts the best way sports activities followers preserve observe of stats.”
In contrast to sports activities, music as soon as had no victor. Now, with a keener concentrate on metrics and statistics, a quantifiable winner emerges. Swift regularly smashes information, persistently beating out her rivals. “Fandom in sport and in music has at all times been outlined by what you don’t like as nicely,” says Rowe of Western Sydney College. “It’s structured into sport. You will have the enemy, the opposite groups.” And there has at all times existed an identical dynamic in well-liked music: Beatles versus the Rolling Stones, Blur versus Oasis, East Coast versus West Coast rap, amongst many others. Tribalism and anti-fandom has solely elevated on this age. It’s a rivalry Swift has at all times made a effective level of in her music, whether or not her references to Katy Perry in 2014’s “Unhealthy Blood” or Charli XCX in Lifetime of a Showgirl’s “Really Romantic.”
What’s new about this second, and which has heightened the convergence between sports activities and music, is a essential cross-pollination throughout types. “We’re at this level the place the competitors for consideration has reached an all-time excessive. And should you’re an artist, you’re not simply competing with different artists; you’re competing with the most recent present on Netflix or a sports activities broadcast,” says Cirisano of MIDiA Analysis.
Soccer followers open their thoughtss
Swift’s efforts to develop her viewers by way of her visibility inside sports activities are coinciding with sports activities leagues embracing the strategies by which the remainder of tradition is constructing its viewers—shareable content material.
[The NFL] was as soon as outlined by conventional broadcasts and spotlight reels, nevertheless it’s now remodeled right into a full-fledged digital leisure machine,” Santero says. “Groups now deal with social media platforms like their very own storytelling studios. They share a ton of mic’d-up moments, behind-the-scenes footage, and even meme-able posts that really feel designed for TikTok and Instagram.”
This crossover has opened the door for sports activities followers to satisfy Swift midway, priming them to obtain her in another way as she strikes into their territory. Alex Folck, a die-hard Denver Broncos fan and former Swift hater, admits he’s modified his tune since Swift’s sport and New Heights appearances.
“I discovered how bizarre she is, and it made me like her lots. Her authenticity doesn’t really feel pressured,” Folck says. Swift has charmed many beforehand Swift-skeptical males together with her bashful, self-deprecating, and—what they interpret as—authentically unguarded demeanor throughout her sports-related appearances.
On digicam, she appears relaxed and unrehearsed. “If there’s one factor male sports activities followers wish to see of their areas, it’s extra of me,” she joked on New Heights. That angle has persuaded a number of male followers to rethink her.
Author Kasey Symons, a lecturer of communication at Deakin College in Australia, believes it’s somewhat extra calculated: “Swift is extremely sensible concerning her positioning and understanding her place in tradition as a lady, irrespective of if that’s pop music or sport,” she says. “And she or he is extremely conscious of her affect in sport, and will likely be strategic about how she makes use of it.”
That technique is resonating with followers like Folck. “I undoubtedly had a unfavourable opinion of her beforehand, so I feel seeing her in an NFL context had a constructive impact,” he says. A part of his change in angle stems from the sense that “she appears to be like like she’s genuinely actually into it” when she attends video games. His preferences are emblematic of a well-recognized American male demographic: detached to pop music and deeply invested in sports activities. “I comply with video games just like the information,” he says. Final yr, he and his pals even threw a Swift-themed Tremendous Bowl social gathering.
Sports activities and music followers are actually starting to converge round Swift in ways in which upend acquainted gendered assumptions about every fandom. Girls are becoming a member of fantasy soccer leagues at a lot larger charges, usually selecting Swift-referential workforce names. Males, in the meantime, are putting Swift-themed bets: If the Chiefs win, rival followers should write elaborate essays about Swift and her music. Folck himself was subjected to this ritual after the Chiefs beat his workforce for the sixteenth consecutive time; he has since produced 200 pages on Swift this manner.
With males lastly on board—begrudgingly or not—Swift is inching nearer to complete media ubiquity, and soccer followers are inching towards masculinity (Taylor’s model). “Guys nonetheless rolling their eyes at Taylor Swift are the identical dudes who can’t get pleasure from an appletini or an ice cream cone,” Folck says. “As soon as the performative limitations come down, there’s a lot to get pleasure from that used to really feel off-limits.”
