Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end and fiance of Taylor Swift, sparked jokes and hopes this week when he announced his investment in the embattled amusement park company Six Flags Entertainment.

The football star, alongside two corporate executives, teamed up with JANA Partners to purchase a combined stake of about 9% of Six Flags’ shares, making them one of its largest shareholders, according to Tuesday’s news release.

JANA Partners is an activist investment firm, meaning it buys a substantial stake in a company’s equity in order to push for changes — both operational and managerial — it believes will benefit that company.

“Couldn’t pass up the opportunity to continue the tradition and make Cedar Point and Six Flags even more special for the next generation of families!” Kelce wrote on Instagram. “So crazy to even imagine this is real, but you gotta love it when life comes full circle.”

Kelce also shared home video clips of himself as a child enjoying the rides at Cedar Point, the 364-acre amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, that he and his brother (and retired pro footballer) Jason grew up going to every year, as the two enthusiastically reminisced in an episode of their New Heights podcast. Kelce, who grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, calls himself a “lifelong Six Flags fan.”

Cedar Point’s former operator, Cedar Fair, merged with Six Flags in 2024 to become the largest amusement park operator in North America, touting 42 parks across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

At the time, many amusement parks — and Six Flags especially — were struggling to increase attendance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Park analysts and enthusiasts hoped the merger would lower ticket costs, raise revenue and make it more competitive against industry heavyweights like Disney and Universal.

But that hasn’t been the case, says Dennis Speigel, CEO of the consulting firm International Theme Park Services.

“As this merger occurred, I think the due diligence was probably done a little too quickly and it had a lot of flaws in it,” he told NPR. “And then it was also impacted by what I call the external factors: weather, economy, uncertainty of what’s happening in geopolitical areas.”

Six Flags now has $5.3 billion in debt. Its CEO, Richard Zimmerman, is set to step down by the end of the year, after it reported a net loss of $100 million for the second quarter of 2025 and combined attendance down 9% year-over-year. It is shuttering one of its parks — Six Flags America in Bowie, Md. — in early November and is expected to close another in Santa Clara, Calif., in 2027.

Speigel is hopeful the new shareholders will get Six Flags back on track. And while he was initially surprised to learn of Kelce’s involvement, he says it makes sense because “he’s at the zenith of his career in football … and in love.”

“Having a name like that be associated with Six Flags at this point in time, when they’ve gone through quite a few years recently of negativity, speaks well to their future and what they’re looking to do,” he says. “Obviously, he’s a younger person. He speaks to the teens, the young adults and the young adults with families. And that’s the Six Flags audience.”

Kelce’s fame — and high-profile love story — have boosted businesses before. Swift is credited with increasing female NFL viewership and ticket sales as their relationship unfolded. And, in recent days, his social media announcement has been flooded with fans’ pleas for a Swift-themed park, or at least a rollercoaster.

Six Flags’ rocky ride 

Six Flags opened with the “Six Flags Over Texas” park in 1961, and for years was one of America’s most iconic theme park companies (along with Disney). But for the last decade, Speigel says, it has been “a ship at sea without a captain.”

“I would have to say [out of] the top five or six operators during the last couple of years, Six Flags has suffered the most,” he says.

Six Flags has had four CEOs since 2015.

It shifted its pricing strategy in 2022 to target a more affluent demographic, confusing and alienating core customers in the process. And in recent years, a number of high-profile ride malfunctions have stranded and even injured visitors. This year, extreme temperatures and economic uncertainty drove attendance down even further.

“To see Six Flags have fallen off the precipice and down to where it is now, it’s sad,” Speigel says. “And everybody in the industry, competitors and alike, are all rooting for their return and their comeback.”

Visitors arrived to a “Welcome Back” sign at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, Calif., when it reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2021.

Jae C. Hong/AP

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Jae C. Hong/AP

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What might change? 

JANA Partners said in its announcement that it plans to engage with Six Flags’ management and board of directors “regarding opportunities to enhance shareholder value and improve the guest experience.”

NPR has reached out to Jana Partners for more information about its goals but did not hear back by publication time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the investment firm wants to “modernize technology, refresh leadership and evaluate a potential sale as ways to boost the company’s share price.”

In a statement shared with NPR, a Six Flags spokesperson said it appreciates the perspectives of shareholders and takes their feedback seriously.

Speigel says Six Flags’ debt could force the new investors to take “some drastic measures,” like selling some of its parks, either to commercial real estate or even private equity groups. And he stresses that foot traffic is key in the industry.

“We live on repeat visitation, and repeat visitation is driven by capital improvements, new rides and attractions, dark rides, the new technologies,” he says. “So we have to hopefully see the growth from that.”

Speigel says even though U.S. amusement parks may not be experiencing the same rate of growth that they did several decades ago, they still attract some 400 million visitors each year — most of whom don’t care who owns a park as long as their experience is clean, fun and safe.

He hopes JANA recognizes Six Flags, and the industry in general, as “the last real bastion of family fun in the United States, in fact globally, where a family can go as a total unit. And I hope they put their capital behind that and lift it out of the ashes where it is now.”