(This article was written in response to a previous editorial published by The Harbinger: Swift Impact – Why the NFL has bit off more than it can chew with the “Taylor Effect.”)
Taylor Swift has been in the limelight for most of her life. An instant success, she signed her first record deal at age 14 and immediately gained traction following the release of her first album two years later. However, with the limelight also comes intense public scrutiny. Due to this success coming so early on in her career, much of her life has been spent hyper-analyzed by strangers on the internet, judging her for every career, music and romantic decision she has ever made.
One of the most recent events in her life that has made it to front news headlines everywhere is her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs football player, Travis Kelce. Their romance started when Kelce attended one of her concerts during the Eras Tour. He expressed on a podcast that he was exchanging friendship bracelets and had written his phone number on one of them, hoping to give it to her after the concert. While he never got a chance to give it to her, his presence at the concert did not go unnoticed. A couple close friends set them up and shortly later, they began publicly dating.
The romance has been a huge success: not just for Taylor and Travis, but also for the NFL. From a marketing standpoint, their relationship is a godsend. With millions of new sales in football merch and skyrocketing viewership, Taylor and Travis have made the NFL $331.5 million to be exact. A common complaint about the popularity of their relationship is that the cameras seemed trained on Taylor for supposedly “half of the game.” Football fans got so upset about her presence at his games that they started booing her when she would appear on screen. One Twitter video taken after the Chiefs game against the Ravens even shows a fan yelling at Taylor about how she is ruining the sport.
However, according to the Sports Business Journal, Taylor was only on screen during the Super Bowl for a grand total of 55 seconds. Out of a four hour and eighteen-minute broadcast, this is practically nothing. It is natural for cameras during sporting events to pan over to its celebrity viewers; this happens during Wimbledon tennis matches, NBA basketball games and other major sporting events. It simply makes sense that the NFL would acknowledge Taylor’s presence at the Super Bowl considering that one, she is one of the biggest pop stars of our time, and two, she is dating a well-known football player. Moreover, many of the NFL’s new viewers are fans of Taylor’s, so of course the camera will pan to her throughout the game occasionally.
In the Harbinger’s previous article, it was argued that this publicity could potentially be harmful to the NFL in the future. However, this is blatantly incorrect. In fact, their relationship has greatly benefited the future of the NFL. The organization released information regarding the salary cap for 2024 at the end of February, revealing that it increased $30 million from the previous year, coming to a grand total of $255.4 million. This has even been jokingly nicknamed the “Taylor Swift surplus” by an NFL executive.
Moreover, if the worst comes to worst and they break up, the NFL will just lose the viewers that only watched in the first place because of Taylor. Swifties do not have the power to riot and single handedly take down the NFL; if they did, that would, quite frankly, be extremely impressive. The most they could do would be to express their opinions on social media. Jake Gyllenhaal is a prime example of this. For example, a few of Taylor’s breakup songs on her Red album are about him, and while Jake Gyllenhaal did receive a lot of backlash from Swifties, at the end of the day, he is still a much beloved, A-list actor. There is not much damage Swifties could actually wreak besides being irritating on the internet. The NFL is not affiliated with Taylor and Kelce’s relationship at all; they are merely reporting on it for marketing and publicity purposes. There is no loss that the NFL could possibly incur from the publicity of their relationship. For them, it is a win-win situation.
The Harbinger article then goes on to explain how her long history of exes means that her current relationship with Kelce is destined to fail. Many people criticize her for this, yet no one ever has the same outcry when male celebrities, such as Pete Davidson or Justin Timberlake, do the same. In fact, most male celebrities are celebrated for it or looked at in awe (Pete Davidson is a prime example of this). Moreover, it is strange to be anticipating the demise of a relationship between two people you have never met before only because the publicity is annoying. And, with the Chiefs taking home the Super Bowl victory, you simply can’t hate on a winner. Taylor seems genuinely happy, and people should not be so quick to judge her for her love life.
