The Taylor Swift effect is real.
Since Swift begun dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, she has made the National Football League a billion dollars, according to data provided to MarketWatch from Apex Marketing.
Per the report:
It’s unclear when Swift and Kelce officially started dating, but Swift began attending Chiefs games in September 2023. And from Sep. 24, 2023, to Jan. 28, 2024 — the date of that year’s AFC Championship game — Swift created $366,753,290 in total equivalent brand value for the NFL, according to data provided to MarketWatch from Apex Marketing, a company that specializes in advertising and branding services. This equivalent brand value metric measures value across all social media, TV, radio, digital news and print news.
In the year since, Swift has helped the NFL even more, according to Apex, creating an estimated $634,304,163 in equivalent brand value from the day after the 2024 AFC Championship through Jan. 27, the day after the 2025 AFC Championship.
In total, Swift has added nearly a billion dollars’ worth of brand value —$992,361,912, to be exact — to the NFL since fall 2023, according to Apex’s estimates.
Her influence on the NFL has been seen across social media. The number of Kelce’s Instagram followers jumped from 2.7 million to 5.39 million during the Chiefs’ playoff run in 2024 and has continued to rise, sitting at 6.7 million going into this year’s Super Bowl. As for the NFL, while the changes to follower count for its social-media accounts on specific dates are not currently known, the league said that female fans accounted for nearly half of its new followers on TikTok in 2024.
While Swift has wide-ranging appeal, she is particularly popular among women and girls, and that is the group that propelled NBC and “Sunday Night Football” to such lofty viewership heights during primetime games the singer attended.
“Viewership among teen girls (age 12-17) spiked 53% from the season-to-date average of the first three weeks of [“Sunday Night Football”], while the audience among women aged 18-24 was up 24%, and women 35+ increased 34%,” NBC said about the 2023 Chiefs-New York Jets primetime game, at which Swift was featured several times. “The collective growth resulted in an approximate viewership increase of more than 2 million female viewers.”
Viewership peaked at an estimated 29.4 million viewers, which was higher than the average 19.9 million viewers that watched “Sunday Night Football” games in the 2022 season, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. While comprehensive ratings for this year have yet to be released, Zeta estimates that female viewership for the 2024 NFL regular season among girls age 12 to 17 was 8.1% higher than in the previous season.
Following the Chiefs’ Super Bowl 59 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, the future of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce came into question as the 35-year-old Kelce is contemplating retirement. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the NFL is probably hoping Kelce keeps playing so Swift and her Swifities and continue to show up and watch games.
