Lifestyle
The Swift-Kelce romance sounds like a movie. But the NFL swears it wasn't scripted
Fans hold up signs during the NFL game between Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs in Germany in November.
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
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Fans hold up signs during the NFL game between Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs in Germany in November.
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Boy meets girl while she’s in the midst of a record-breaking world tour. Girl falls for boy, showing up to his football games and driving TV ratings, attendance and merchandise sales in the process. Boy’s team overcomes a bumpy season to win the AFC championship game. And the two, wearing matching bracelets, steal the spotlight with their embrace on the field.
Now boy’s team is headed to its fourth Super Bowl in five years. And people are betting not only on who will win, but how often girl — who has since been named Time person of the year — will be shown in the stands (assuming she can get there in time).
The romance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood movie — not to mention a huge win for the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL itself. It’s created a legion of new football fans while also fueling PR stunt accusations and right-wing conspiracy theories, including that the league scripted their relationship to boost views.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell laughed off the notion at his pre-Super Bowl press conference on Monday, replying that “I don’t think I’m that good a scripter, or anybody on our staff.” But he was quick to acknowledge the positive impact Swift has had on the season.
“Obviously, it creates a buzz. It creates another group of young fans, particularly young women that are interested in seeing, ‘Why is she going to this game? Why is she interested in this game?’” Gooddell said. “Besides Travis, she is a football fan, and I think that’s great for us.”
The numbers say so too. Swift’s association with Kelce has generated an equivalent brand value of $331.5 million for the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL, as of late January, according to Apex Marketing Group.
President Eric Smallwood told NPR that the figure is likely to grow, since it’s from before the Chiefs’ championship victory — which drew more than 55 million viewers to become the most-watched AFC title game in NFL history.
While there have been influential celebrity sports couples before, Smallwood says he’s never seen anything like this.
“It’s taking entertainment and mixing it with the top sport in the U.S., now with the top event of the year, viewing audience-wise,” Smallwood said. “It’s a phenomenon. It’s the Taylor effect for sure.”
Swift’s star power draws more female football fans
Taylor Swift watches a game between the Chicago Bears and the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri on September 24.
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Taylor Swift watches a game between the Chicago Bears and the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri on September 24.
Jason Hanna/Getty Images
Fans started speculating about Swift and Kelce’s budding relationship over the summer, as the first U.S. leg of Swift’s Eras Tour was in full swing.
The tour has grossed a record over $1 billion so far, selling out stadiums and boosting local economies along the way. Average attendance at a U.S. Swift concert in 2023 was over 71,000, versus more than 69,000 for regular season NFL games, according to Smallwood.
“She’s filled more football stadiums than any football team has this year, if you think about it,” he added.
Nora Princiotti, a football writer for The Ringer and a Swiftie, called the Eras Tour the pop culture event of the year.
“And midway through the first big leg of it, she starts dating Travis Kelce … the star tight end of this budding Kansas City dynasty,” Princiotti told NPR last month. “So you have these two elements of our last bits of monoculture sort of coming together, and it really created this phenomenon.”
Swift attended her first Chiefs game in late September, then 11 more. Her presence in the Kelce box, usually alongside family members and famous friends, thrilled fans watching on TV and social media.
The Chiefs-Jets game she attended on Oct. 1 averaged 27 million viewers — including 2 million women — making it the most-watched Sunday show since last year’s Super Bowl, according to NBC. By the end of the regular season, the NFL had seen its highest ratings since 2015, and the highest-regular season viewership among women since it started tracking the statistic in 2000.
Football is the most-watched sport in the U.S., and one of the most profitable, despite its myriad of issues involving race and diversity, concussions and other safety concerns, and its handling of athletes’ misconduct allegations off the field.
Women make up just under half of the NFL fanbase, but more than half of Swift’s. And it’s a demographic that the NFL has long struggled to reach, Princiotti said — until now.
“You see it in the numbers. You see it in the merchandise sales. I see it in my group texts with a lot of friends who do not normally follow football,” she explained. “They don’t have, suddenly, hot takes about the Jets’ defensive line, but they know what’s going on in a way that is different from before this started to happen.”
Candy Lee, a professor of journalism and integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University, says while some Swifties may be driven by a passion for the game, many are driven by “heart’s passion.”
“We all enjoy rooting for the ‘win,’ even if it’s our team, the romance, the celebrity,” she told NPR over email. “In this case, it brings sparkle to the game for a group of fans of entertainment, which is what both [the Eras Tour] and football season have in common.”
The path to Las Vegas wasn’t necessarily direct
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift celebrate after the Kansas City Chiefs win AFC Championship Game at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on January 28.
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Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift celebrate after the Kansas City Chiefs win AFC Championship Game at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on January 28.
Patrick Smith/Getty Images
A lot of things had to go right this season for Swift, Kelce and the Chiefs to end up where they are now, as Smallwood pointed out.
“I don’t think you can write the script for this,” he said.
The two were able to travel to each others’ events — and generate buzz — despite their jam-packed schedules. Swift was able to travel to Chiefs games from her South America concerts, while Kelce used the team’s bye week to attend one of Swift’s concerts in Argentina.
The defending Super Bowl champs had a rocky season on the field, marked by offensive struggles and injuries, including Kelce’s. Smallwood says that the majority of Super Bowl ad spots were sold in November, at which point no one could have predicted the Chiefs would be one of the teams on the field.
“A lot of things have to happen and it happened,” Smallwood said. “It happened for the benefit of the NFL, the benefit of the Super Bowl, and the benefit of the Chiefs — not to mention the [San Francisco] 49ers.”
The surge in viewership definitely helped the NFL sell advertising around its games, Smallwood says. It also means new advertisers, particularly in the health and beauty industries, may be getting in on the Super Bowl action to try to reach the growing female fan base.
The Super Bowl is already one of the most popular TV events each year. Last year’s Chiefs vs. Eagles matchup — which pitted the two Kelce brothers against each other — was the most-watched U.S.-based telecast of all time, drawing an average of 115.1 million viewers across all platforms.
This year’s could draw even more viewers, thanks in large part to Swift.
The “Taylor Effect” is poised to make the Super Bowl even bigger
Coasters from Westside Storey commemorating Swift and Kelce’s relationship are displayed in Kansas City, Mo., on Monday.
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Nick Ingram/AP
Coasters from Westside Storey commemorating Swift and Kelce’s relationship are displayed in Kansas City, Mo., on Monday.
Nick Ingram/AP
A Seton Hall Sports Poll released Wednesday found that 72% of Americans plan to tune into the Super Bowl, up from 66% last year.
When asked if they thought Swift had anything to do with that decision, or that of anyone in their household, 21% of respondents said yes. That number was almost twice as high for 18-to-24 year-olds.
“From a marketing perspective, the NFL and its advertisers couldn’t do any better,” marketing Professor Daniel Ladik, chief methodologist for the poll, said in a statement. “The viewership for this game is on a seemingly inexorable march toward more viewers, and this year Taylor Swift may be playing the role of drum major — at least for 18-34 year olds, a market that almost everyone covets.”
Other polls drew similar conclusions.
A recent survey of 2,000 Americans by the online lending marketplace LendingTree found that 24% of Gen Z-ers and 20% of millennials are more interested in football because of Swift. Eighteen percent of Americans — and 31% of Gen Z-ers — said they’re rooting for the Chiefs because of her.
And 16% of Americans said Swift had influenced them to spend money on football, such as buying memorabilia or signing up for a streaming service to watch games.
“If there’s one thing that people should’ve learned all too well by now, it’s that you should never be surprised by the enormity of Swift’s influence,” LendingTree chief credit analyst Matt Schulz said. “We’ve seen it with her records and concerts, of course, but we’ve also seen it in movies, politics, and now football.”
Earlier this week, Swift announced that an extended version of her Eras Tour concert film, which set multiple box office records of its own after it was released in October, will head to Disney+ in March. The following month she will release her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which she announced at last weekend’s Grammy Awards.
Just like with the concert, Swifties are more likely to be watching the Super Bowl on screen than in person, though a study from one company found that 1% of them would sell an organ to pay for the experience. And if the how-to guides cropping up online this week are any indication, the Swift-themed watch parties are likely to be very glittery.
Hungarian director Béla Tarr at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011.
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Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director best known for his bleak, existential and challenging films, including Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, has died at the age of 70. The Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association shared a statement on Tuesday announcing Tarr’s passing after a serious illness, but did not specify further details.
Tarr was born in communist-era Hungary in 1955 and made his filmmaking debut in 1979 with Family Nest, the first of nine feature films that would culminate in his 2011 film The Turin Horse. Damnation, released in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival, was his first film to draw global acclaim, and launched Tarr from a little-known director of social dramas to a fixture on the international film festival circuit.
Tarr’s reputation for films tinged with misery and hard-heartedness, distinguished by black-and-white cinematography and unusually long sequences, only grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after his 1994 film Sátántangó. The epic drama, following a Hungarian village facing the fallout of communism, is best known for its length, clocking in at seven-and-a-half hours.
Based on the novel by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and frequently collaborated with Tarr, the film became a touchstone for the “slow cinema” movement, with Tarr joining the ranks of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos. Writer and critic Susan Sontag hailed Sátántangó as “devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.”
Tarr’s next breakthrough came in 2000 with his film Werckmeister Harmonies, the first of three movies co-directed by his partner, the editor Ágnes Hranitzky. Another loose adaptation of a Krasznahorkai novel, the film depicts the strange arrival of a circus in a small town in Hungary. With only 39 shots making up the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Tarr’s penchant for long takes was on full display.
Like Sátántangó, it was a major success with both critics and the arthouse crowd. Both films popularized Tarr’s style and drew the admiration of independent directors such as Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the latter of which cited Tarr as a direct influence on his films: “They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.”
The actress Tilda Swinton is another admirer of Tarr’s, and starred in the filmmaker’s 2007 film The Man from London. At the premiere, Tarr announced that his next film would be his last. That 2011 film, The Turin Horse, was typically bleak but with an apocalyptic twist, following a man and his daughter as they face the end of the world. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
After the release of The Turin Horse, Tarr opened an international film program in 2013 called film.factory as part of the Sarajevo Film Academy. He led and taught in the school for four years, inviting various filmmakers and actors to teach workshops and mentor students, including Swinton, Van Sant, Jarmusch, Juliette Binoche and Gael García Bernal.
In the last years of his life, he worked on a number of artistic projects, including an exhibition at a film museum in Amsterdam. He remained politically outspoken throughout his life, condemning the rise of nationalism and criticizing the government of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
California’s wet winter continued Sunday, with the heaviest rain occurring into the evening, and more precipitation forecast for Monday before tapering off on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.
A flood advisory was in effect for most of Los Angeles County until 10 p.m.
Los Angeles and Ventura counties’ coastal and valley regions could receive roughly half an inch to an inch more rain, with mountain areas getting one to two additional inches Sunday, officials said. The next two days will be lighter, said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist at the weather service office in Oxnard.
Rains in Southern California have broken records this season, with some areas approaching average rain totals for an entire season. As of Sunday morning, the region had seen nearly 14 inches of rain since Oct. 1, more than three times the average of 4 inches for this time of year. An average rain season, which goes from July 1 to June 30, is 14.25 inches, officials said.
“There’s the potential that we’ll already meet our average rainfall for the entire 12-month period by later today if we end up getting half an inch or more of rain,” Munroe added.
The wet weather prompted multiple road closures over the weekend, including a 3.6-mile stretch of Topanga Canyon Boulevard between Pacific Coast Highway and Grand View Drive as well as State Route 33 between Fairview Road and Lockwood Valley Road in the Los Padres National Forest. The California Department of Transportation also closed all lanes along State Route 2 from 3.3 miles east of Newcomb’s Ranch to State Route 138 in Angeles National Forest.
Los Angeles County Department of Public Health officials say beachgoers should stay out of the water to avoid the higher bacteria levels brought on by rain.
After storms, especially near discharging storm drains, creeks and rivers, the water can be contaminated with E. coli, trash, chemicals and other public health hazards.
The advisory, which will be in effect until at least 4 p.m. Monday, could be extended if the rain continues.
In Ventura County on Sunday, the 101 Freeway was reopened after lanes were closed due to flooding Saturday. But there was at least one spinout as well as a vehicle stuck in mud on the highway Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. The freeway was also closed Saturday in Santa Barbara County in both directions near Goleta due to debris flows but reopened Sunday, according to Caltrans.
Santa Barbara Airport reopened and all commercial flights and fixed-wing aircraft were cleared for normal operations Sunday morning. The airport had shut down and grounded all flights Saturday due to flooded runways.
In Orange County early Sunday afternoon, firefighters rescued a man clinging to a section of a tunnel in cold, fast-moving water in a storm channel at Bolsa Avenue and Goldenwest Street in Westminster, according to fire officials.
A swift-water rescue team deployed a helicopter, lowered inflated firehoses and positioned an aerial ladder to allow responders to secure the man and bring him to safety before transporting him to a hospital for evaluation.
Heavy rains continued to batter Southern California mountain areas. Wrightwood in San Bernardino County — slammed recently with mud and debris — was closed Sunday except to residents as heavy equipment was brought in to clear mud and debris from roadways, the news-gathering organization OnScene reported.
After canceling live racing on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day due to heavy showers, Santa Anita Park also called off events Saturday and Sunday.
After several atmospheric river systems have come through, familiar conditions are set to return to the region later this week.
“We’ll get a good break from the rain and it’ll let things dry out a little bit, and we may even be looking at Santa Ana conditions as we head into next weekend,” Munroe said. The weather will likely be “mostly sunny” and breezy in the valleys and mountains.
Millie Bobby Brown in the final season of Stranger Things.
Netflix
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Netflix
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we’ve known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?
To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.
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