Taylor Swift just recently took the football world by storm, when her relationship with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, was revealed in September 2023. Since then, she has attended twelve of Kelce’s football games. Attending the Super Bowl will be her 13th game. While Swifties were enchanted by this, many football fans began to complain about her presence. People went to extreme lengths, talking about how Swift has ruined football, blaming her for whether the Chiefs won or lost (which if you believe that, you really are the foolish one). Time and time again, Swift has been scrutinized for simply supporting her boyfriend as he tries to win his third Super Bowl. But the craziest thing is that when Kelce went to support Swift at The Eras Tour, now the highest-grossing tour in all of history, it was seen as supportive and adorable. These sexist double standards persist and it’s exhausting to keep up. Swift decided to shake it off and responded to the scrutiny saying, “I’m just there to support Travis. I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads and Chads.”
We’re not the only ones who think Swift going to the games has been great to see. At her recent concert, Adele said that Swift made football more enjoyable to watch. But this doesn’t only apply to Adele. Swift has brought together so many dads and daughters. Before this year, we had never really watched football with our dads. But with Swift there, we found ourselves watching it more and more. This led to us spending more time with our dads, as they explained how the whole game worked, and we explained all of the Taylor-coded messages Kelce would do during the game. Swift has introduced girls to the world of football, a world that they were kept out of for so long. Her attendance at these games represents female empowerment and resistance against men who view the sports world as patriarchal.
Even though “dads, Brads and Chads” might claim that Swift’s attendance at N.F.L. games is bad for the N.F.L., data shows that it’s actually quite the opposite. Right after she attended her first Chiefs game, there was a record number of purchases related to the N.F.L. Her presence at these games is increasing sales and public interest. TV and news networks have also been majorly profiting off of this. Networks have been hyper-focused on Swift’s attendance at Chiefs games, reactions to Kelce’s plays and friendship with Brittany Mahomes, wife of Kelce’s friend and teammate, Patrick Mahomes. Every time Swift attends another Chiefs game, hundreds of new articles are released about it.
This year, fans wondered if she would attend the Super Bowl to support Kelce and the Chiefs against the San Francisco 49ers. She just finished her four nights performing in Tokyo, with her last performance just being the night before the Super Bowl. Fans have been speculating whether she has enough time to make it all the way from Tokyo to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Swifties have even been calculating her flight path. We’re not sure how the “dads, Brads and Chads” will react to her presence at the Super Bowl, but we hope that they take this moment to bond with their daughters and show them that, like Swift, they can have an interest in football.
