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My first high school boyfriend, a star running back and a player in more ways than one, tried. He sketched out the rules of football on a piece of looseleaf paper in my den, probably in the candy-colored glow of TRL. He promised to score a touchdown for me, too—and when you’re 15, to approximate Taylor Swift, you’re gonna believe him.
My marginal interest in the game fizzled along with the relationship—which is to say, quickly. In the 27 years since, no man has succeeded in wooing me into gridiron fandom. But this past NFL season, Swift did.
Yes, after a lifetime of apathy (and some vocal antipathy) toward the NFL—which I still stand by—I started watching the Kansas City Chiefs once Swift began VIP golf-carting into Arrowhead in support of her boyfriend, Travis Kelce. The Super Bowl champion and probably Hall of Fame–bound tight end, as the entirety of the population now knows, shot his shot with her on his podcast, New Heights, a move that not only worked, but was later deemed “metal as hell” by Swift.
“She’s there!” my husband would call from the other room, or one or both of my parents would text me on any given Sunday, and my almost 10-year-old daughter and I knew exactly who (Swift) and where (the Chiefs game) they meant. There, indeed, was the reigning queen of the monoculture, cheering in retro-chic merch (and an immaculate red lip) alongside Donna “Mama” Kelce, or emphatically raising her plastic cup at MetLife with Antoni Porowski, among other friends; swaying to “Swag Surfer” behind frosty boxes, sipping healthy pours of white wine, and generally doing exactly what she wanted without apology or concession. We were, and remain, riveted down to the chicken finger. We relish every “87” on that custom Kristin Juszczyk puffer!
The appearances represented another frontier in the Swift metaverse. Last year, thanks to the all-consuming magic of the Eras tour, the glittering wonder of the Eras tour movie, and my daughter’s contagious obsession, I graduated from a fan of Taylor’s bops (who once had the pleasure of interviewing her on a red carpet when she was still a pre-debut teen) to entry-level Swiftie. I discovered in earnest the breadth of her talent as a writer and storyteller; the way she gives life to the everygirl experiences of love, intense heartbreak, alienation, and out-and-out striving. I’d seize any chance to watch her on live television, including via the dubious ceremony of the Golden Globes. The reason Swift was engaging with football—to show up for Kelce, as he later would at her tour stop in Argentina—added to the glow. No matter what I privately think about Kelce’s outfits, it’s a love story…you know the rest. But after my daughter and I started tuning in for Taylor, we kept on watching the games.
The presumption that Swifties are a monolith who didn’t previously care about or comprehend the NFL is both dim and reductive, but it was essentially true of me. My seven-year-old son’s nascent interest in flag football and the NFL helped, as did our family’s collective obsession with Netflix’s Quarterback, the Peyton Manning–produced docuseries that followed Chiefs QB and Kelce intimate Patrick Mahomes, among others, through the physical and mental rigors of the position. Their backstories—always my chief interest—led me to the strategy and intricacy and technique (Mahomes’s off-platform throws, wow) of the game. It is, in its way, not unlike a dive into the captivating, Easter-egg-filled Swift canon.
Four months later, I am not only aware of the existence of the playoffs, but actually invested in them, clearing my schedule for Sunday’s Chiefs vs. Buffalo Bills matchup and unsettled by the threat of a road game against Josh Allen. Do I care if more seasoned fans of both Swift and the NFL think this is ridiculous? Definitely not. It’s been a glorious source of family bonding: I spent New Year’s Eve with my kids at Blondies, the legendary New York sports bar, watching three different games simultaneously, football cards splayed among our tenders, and there was absolutely nowhere else I’d rather be.
Meteoric ratings for Swift-attended games suggest my children and I are not the only ones who are new here. Swift is, too, though the Pennsylvania native was raised a de facto Eagles fan. “Football is awesome, it turns out,” she said “playfully” in her Time Person of the Year interview. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.”
My friend Martha, a 41-year-old Swiftie turned new NFL fan in New Orleans, “grew up with erudite New Yorker parents who would’ve rather flown to the moon than taken me to a football game,” she says. She’s since educated herself not just on Kelce, but on his elder brother, Jason, too—the Eagles center poised for an emotional retirement—and his wife, Kylie, a former field hockey player whom he met on Tinder. The couple and their three young daughters starred in the Prime Video documentary Kelce. “You get invested in these people’s stories,” Martha says. “And what are Swifties? We are people who love stories.”
Kevin Van Valkenburg, editorial director of golf media company No Laying Up, covered the NFL for ESPN for 11 years, but for his 14-year-old daughter, Molly, football “just never resonated until the Taylor stuff,” he tells me. The Swift/NFL mashup has inspired an ongoing dialogue between the two, including 20 minutes analyzing Swift’s cheeky lyric change for Kelce in Buenos Aires: “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs / coming straight home to me.”
“I like being a girl dad a lot,” Van Valkenburg says, “and I like talking to them about stuff that’s a crossover between our worlds.”
My own Chiefs fandom does not discount valid criticism of the NFL and its treatment of domestic abuse and racial and social justice and CTEs, to cite just a few issues. Unfortunately, there are few American institutions that aren’t rotten with patriarchy, including Hollywood and the US government, but I still watch movies and participate in elections. And in this context especially, I believe new-to-the-NFL Swifties are a force of overwhelming good, even a promise of evolution. We’re a new swath of advertising eyeballs, merch consumers, and ticket buyers, not to mention unflappable dedication, attention to detail, and deftly produced montages marking what may be Jason Kelce’s final NFL game.
“Does the NFL welcome new fans, particularly fans who come from demographics they have not been historically successful in courting? Absolutely,” Nora Princiotti, who covers the NFL for The Ringer and Swift on the podcast Every Single Album, tells Vogue. “They’re doing cartwheels.”
There are nevertheless loud, male voices bristling at Swift’s very presence, branding her a Siren-like “distraction” and complaining about frequent cutaways to her on game days (blame the evil marketing geniuses at the networks). “That’s the thing that’s disenchanting people with sports now,” former Colts coach turned commentator Tony Dungy recently opined when asked about the so-called “Swift Effect.”“There’s so much on the outside coming in. Entertainment value and different things. Taking away from what really happens on the field.” As if entertainment value—sometimes to barbaric effect—hasn’t always been synonymous with the game.
The misogyny of blaming wives and girlfriends for players’ foibles is evidently still happening too, with members of the NFL media maligning Swift, like Jessica Simpson and Gisele Bündchen before her, for Kelce’s and the Chiefs’ struggles. (Still, they managed to win their division and advance to the second round of the playoffs.) On X, ESPN’s Mike Greenberg floated “all the Taylor stuff” as a possible explanation for the Chiefs’ close game (which they ultimately won) against the lowly New York Jets in October. Former senior Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted a joke that failed to land following a loss to the Las Vegas Raiders on Christmas Day: “At some point it has to be asked: Is Taylor Swift killing the Chiefs?” And after the Chiefs’ latest game against the Miami Dolphins, an NFL draft analyst pointedly noted that Kelce, who dropped three passes, had done so “in only one game his entire career prior to dating Taylor Swift.” Others have predictably invoked Yoko Ono and claimed that Swift has “ruined the NFL.”
These takes are almost too tired to dignify, and yet I can’t resist. For one thing, “Travis is a grown man who performs at an elite level at his highly competitive job. The idea that he can’t have a girlfriend without falling apart is so funny,” says Princiotti, author of the forthcoming book Please Don’t Stop the Music, about early-aughts, female-driven pop. Kelce could be underperforming due to fatigue, his elevated profile—or, sure, mad love; a friend’s (and fellow Chiefs fan’s) husband confessed that he floundered at work when they first became involved. “It’s not crazy to think that someone who all of a sudden went through a bunch of life changes… could have other parts of their life suffer,” Princiotti acknowledges, “but if that s happening, that is his fault.”
Overall, the bile seems to be coming from the delicate egos of gatekeeping men who can’t stomach the prevalence of Swift—a woman who singularly boosts economic growth and inspires congressional monopoly hearings; a woman whose power and influence rival the NFL itself—in their staunchly male arena. Or, as Swift deemed this contingent of fans to Time: “the dads, Brads, and Chads.”
These sexist curmudgeons are missing out on the unfiltered joy—both on and off the internet—of the Swift/NFL crossover event. “It’s like watching a Mad Lib come to life,” Princiotti says of her worlds colliding. “There was a tweet I saw once that was like, ‘I hope Taylor and Travis get married because I like the idea of Andy Reid meeting a Haim sister.’”
Van Valkenburg is celebrating the season of Swift and Kelce. He had a tweet go viral this week in which he pities “the Brads, Chads and Angry Dads who spent the year complaining” about Swift, while he “spent the season trading Swift/Kelce memes with my 14-year-old daughter…which is freaking awesome?”
The pop cultural exchange has worked both ways in his family, with Molly introducing her awed dad to Swift’s lyrical genius. “‘All Too Well’ is unbelievably good,” he subsequently told her. “The details in this song are literary.” Dropping Molly off at the Eras tour movie, “I remember watching her run through the rain in her 1989 outfit and I started tearing up,” Van Valkenburg says. “My girl’s growing up, and this person speaks to her…of course I should listen to this music, because it’s a way for me to understand my own kid better.”
As a new Swiftie and new Chiefs fan, I’d never purport to know it all—not all the remixes of “Willow,” nor the reason for every flag (of which there are definitely too many). I can appreciate that the die-hards may have no patience for the likes of me right now. (“If we have two entities of monoculture left, they’re Taylor Swift and the NFL,” Princiotti says. “Gatekeeping is a ridiculous concept in either case, but people still try.”) What matters most to me is that sharing this interest with my kids, trash-talking and Tommy Cutlets–mimicking with them, fills my heart with glee, as did my son asking on New Year’s Day, within earshot of at least one perplexed stranger: “Can we go back to the bar?”
