The Taylor Swift craze the season the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl helped boost the NFL team’s fan base by 30 percent, said Clark Hunt, the team’s chief executive.
Swift became a fixture at Chiefs games last year after she began dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The pop megastar’s appearance at Arrowhead Stadium, which began at a game against the Chicago Bears in September, confirmed their relationship and sparked a media frenzy.
“I always like to point out how happy I am for Taylor and Travis’ relationship. I’ve seen them together and they make a fantastic couple,” Hunt said in an interview at his Dallas office. At the same time, “the ripple effect has been amazing, the growth of our female fan base in the last year has been amazing.”
When Swift attended her first game, she did not request any special access, choosing instead to walk through the stadium’s main gates, Hunt said.
“Our security people were like, ‘Are you kidding me?'” he said, laughing. “She came to the game and lit up social media and all kinds of media outlets.”
Of course, Swift wasn’t the only factor driving the Chiefs’ growing fan base. Led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the team played in four postseason games and won its second consecutive Super Bowl.
Sales also reflected the success. Mahomes and Kelce ranked third and fourth, respectively, on the year-end list of the 50 best-selling players. The Chiefs also had the chance to win fans abroad, with a regular-season game in Germany.
But Swift’s impact took the NFL by surprise, Hunt said. The league confirmed its tally of rising popularity, without saying how it measures the fan base. The singer attended 13 of the Chiefs’ 21 regular-season and postseason games, including Super Bowl LVIII, which was the league’s most-watched game in history, averaging 123.4 million viewers across all platforms.
“We have celebrities at our games every weekend and we’ve never seen anything like this,” Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social, influencer and content marketing, said last fall.
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