YOUUnder the bright lights of the playing field, Travis Kelce plays the role of a certain kind of NFL leader: a touchdown-scoring force that fans in Middle America can rally around. But until a few weeks ago, anyone who didn’t follow American football closely had trouble recognizing Kelce, even though the 33-year-old has had top billing in three of the last four Super Bowls and has been featured prominently in national ad campaigns. for Bud Light and Covid vaccinations and this year he hosted Saturday Night Live. Indeed, NFL fans discovered just how famous Kelce was was not once he started dating Taylor Swift.
The pair’s involvement, which had been heavily rumored for weeks, was apparently confirmed last Sunday when Swift showed up at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the home team’s game against the Chicago Bears. If Swift’s color palette — red lips and nails that matched a Kansas City jacket — didn’t reveal her favorite team, her seat in the stadium suite next to Kelce’s mother, Donna, certainly did. When Kelce scored in the third quarter, the Fox cameras cut to Swift banging on the suite’s glass, bumping a neighbor and apparently shouting: “Let’s fucking go!”. Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback who facilitated the touchdown, said afterward, “I knew I had to get to Trav…I think he wanted to get in the end zone as much as all the Swifties wanted to.”
Soon, Kelce got his taste of the next level of fame. On Sunday, “Travis Kelce” was the top search term in Google, with more than five million searches. Sales of his jersey No. 87 have increased by 400%. The actual match, a 41–10 defeat to the league’s worst team, was the most watched match of the week, with more than 24 million viewers — and Roku TV data showed that the number of female viewers ages 18 to 49 in the game increased 63% from Kansas City’s last game. On X (formerly Twitter), Swifties discussed football rules.
For decades, the NFL has portrayed itself as a game of beauty and violence for red-blooded American men. Only in recent decades has the league made more concerted efforts to appeal to women. But more often than not, that meant being labeled idiots and selling breast cancer awareness merchandise while incidents of sexual assault and domestic violence were swept under the rug. Ever since Swift landed in Kansas City, the NFL has been eating draws attention, with posts about Swift on their official accounts. The New Yorker outed Swift and Kelce “a dream couple” for the competition.
As with all of Swift’s relationships, some have accused the singer of being more interested in publicity than love. Certainly, the couple’s origin story is almost too sappy to believe. Kelce said he first tried to approach the pop star in July when she played Arrowhead Stadium for her Eras tour, adding that he made her a friendship bracelet that he hoped to give her personally — a ritual borrowed from the lyrics of her song You’re. on your own, boy. It’s not clear if that was the moment they became close, but months later Swift was at his game.
Power couples of this magnitude are not a new phenomenon in American sports. Before Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady were American football’s Posh and Becks and the Kardashians made it a sport to compete against black athletes, baseball immortal Joe DiMaggio of Marilyn Monroe and the New York Yankees became the blueprint for the all-American relationship – athleticism and the Hollywood star. bomb. Madonna reframed the relationship as one of rock stars when she dated Dennis Rodman during his Chicago Bulls heyday.
In most cases, the couple became more famous together than apart, but in this case it’s really more Swift who puts Kelce on the map (as impossible as that may be for roster purists to entertain even remotely).
Kelce has made no secret of his desire for a post-playing career in Hollywoodsigning with the powerful agency CAA earlier this year. On SNL he showed a sharp wit and physical comedy chops as he steered upstairs women-focused charities in the NFL And gay-straight male relationships. His desire for fame off the field dates back to 2016, when he starred in an E! Network reality TV dating series called Catching Kelce, in which women from each of the 50 states competed to be “his perfect teammate.”
The dating show also helped establish Kelce’s apparent embrace of black culture. Bee the time, Kelce cut his hair in a faded Caesar style straight from the black barbershop, hung diamonds from his ears, showed up to work in street clothes and fourth touchdowns by breaking into the stinky leg. He mostly dated Black womenincluding Access Hollywood correspondent Zuri Hall and journalist and model Kayla Nicole, and posed for hip-hop culture magazine Complex. Kelce’s embrace of black culture set him apart from his older brother Jason – a standout with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles – who is more like your friendly neighborhood lumberjack.
Things looked and felt very different Sunday though. Kelce now sports a crew cut and a ’70s mustache, looking for all the world like a Missouri sheriff’s deputy. (“Went from ‘yo bro’ to ‘you know why I held you back’,” one X user wrote on Sunday).
“We thought he was comfortable being between two worlds,” said Kristen Warner, a professor of media studies at Cornell University. ‘But this is his beautyto use the language of the black fraternity, his reintroduction into a society in which he could not participate because, it seemed, he had made an alliance with black people.
Still, it’s not like Kelce hasn’t offered Swift a publicity boost. Although her star has never been bigger, before linking up with Kelce, Swift was rumored to have been involved with Matty Healy, the 1975 frontman with a well-documented history of racist and sexist commentsespecially insulting the rapper Ice Spice. Swift’s fans demanded an explanation; When it fell through, they doubled down by canceling Swift album purchase orders and tour tickets. Healy was eventually forced to do so apologies for his commentswhile Swift avoided comment altogether before announcing a collaboration with Ice Spice.
So there is a mutual benefit in what appears to be the hottest new relationship in the US. It may only be a few months before the next breakup song is written, but Kelce and Swift are America’s newest power couple for now. And the biggest winner is the sport of American football. As long as announcers can keep making sly references to Swift songs when Kelce scores, the NFL will be happy with the fact that millions of women and girls are now watching this football game.