The National Football League (NFL) is preparing to ring in the 2024-2025 season, and the organization is using without-a-doubt their most influential new fan in order to get viewers hyped.
On Monday, Sept. 2, the league's official X account posted a promotional video on the platform, formerly known as Twitter, showing highlights from last year's history-making season in month-by-month clips that, surprise surprise, featured Taylor Swift...four times.
Clips of the superstar showed her in the stands, dressed head-to-toe in Kansas City Chiefs garb, cheering on her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. In two clips, Swift is seen celebrating next to and smiling at her beau's mom, Donna Kelce, and in another she is seen walking through a stadium tunnel wearing a custom-made Kansas City Chiefs jacket.
The last clip of Swift, of course, shows her kissing her boyfriend Kelce after his team won the AFC title and bought themselves a ticket to the Super Bowl (which the team later went on to win against the San Francisco 49ers).
FOOTBALL IS BACK THIS WEEK 🏈 🚨 pic.twitter.com/YVR8kbZnfmSeptember 2, 2024
Shortly after Swift started publicly dating the three-time Super Bowl champ and attending his games in-person, the NFL saw a spike in viewership, especially among women.
For example, last year’s NFL divisional playoff round averaged 40 million viewers, the highest since 1988, and Swift brought in the highest regular-season viewership among women since tracking began in 2000.
In addition, ticket sales and NFL merchandise—most notably Kelce's jerseys—also increased exponentially after the pair went public with their romance. In September 2023, when Swift attending a game between the Chiefs and the Chicago Bears, StubHub representatives saw a nearly 3x increase in ticket sales in just 24 hours. At the same time, Kelce jersey sales increased 400% and the tight end had one of the NFL’s top-five selling jerseys.
But Swift isn't just a supportive partner—according to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, she's also an avid fan who has even conjured up a few football plays of her own.
"She's really interested in football, she asks a lot of great questions. She's already drawing up plays so we might have to put one in," Mahomes, a close friend of Kelce's, said in a recent NFL on NBC interview with Chris Simms.
"(Attention) went up another level," he explained. "I think it's been cool to see the girls and the women that have really embraced watching football. I know being a girl dad how cool it is for me... to see these little girls, these daughters and how much they're loving spending time with their dad watching football."
