Taylor Swift earned NFL $1 billion ahead of Super Bowl 59, more than doubled Travis Kelce’s Instagram followers: Report

The Taylor Swift effect on the National Football League (NFL) is real, and now there are numbers to back it up. Ever since the pop icon began dating NFL star Travis Kelce, there has been an increased focus on one of America’s biggest sporting leagues. Taylor’s popularity has given the sport and the league new followers and more eyeballs. A new report says that the singer has helped the league earn a staggering $1 billion in brand value over the last two years.

As Super Bowl 59, the NFL’s biggest night, approaches, MarketWatch carried a report about Taylor Swift’s impact on the league. Using data provided by Apex Marketing, a company specialising in advertising and branding services, the report found that the Swift effect has added over $992 million to NFL’s brand value since she began dating Travis Kelce in 2023.

Travis Kelce plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, one of the most dominant NFL teams currently. While he and Taylor never announced they were dating, the singer began appearing at Chiefs games in September 2023. This sparked an interest in the NFL among the singer’s legions of fans and also brought additional media attention.

Apex estimated that from Sept 2023 to January 2024 – the date of that year’s AFC Championship game – Swift created $366,753,290 in total equivalent brand value for the NFL. This includes brand value metric measures value across all social media, TV, radio, digital news and print news. In the 2024-25 season, Swift added $634,304,163 in equivalent brand value for the NFL. With Kelce appearing in the upcoming Superbowl and Swift certain to attend, the number will surpass a billion

Explaining Taylor Swift’s impact on the NFL, MarketWatch quoted Apex’s Eric Smallwood saying, “The Swift Effect and the corresponding media exposure continued for the NFL and the Chiefs before the start of the 2024 NFL season. … The media blitz continued as the Chiefs kept winning games and were featured on national broadcasts, leading into the playoffs and now the Super Bowl. Taylor was visible at games, and those appearances garnered media attention from sports-media outlets and those entertainment media outlets not normally covering the NFL.”
Taylor’s influence has extended to Travis Kelce’s own stature in the media. The American footballer has seen his Instagram follower count grow from 2.7 million in September 2023 to 6.7 million currently. Tracking agencies say that unlike earlier, most of his new followers are young women, a demographic core to Taylor Swift fans. Even the NFL admitted that female fans accounted for nearly half of its new followers on TikTok in 2024.

The Super Bowl is this Sunday, as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans. Taylor Swift’s presence—along with a certain Donald Trump—is set to turn the already buzzing evening into a media frenzy.