Pop star. Style icon. Economic force.
Taylor Swift had a seismic effect on the U.S. economy in 2023, with the Eras Tour injecting billions of dollars into its 20 host cities — including Minneapolis — a windfall that rivaled that of hosting the Super Bowl.
Now, the 34-year-old's reach has extended to the $163 billion behemoth that is the National Football League.
Just months after going public, Swift and her new beau Travis Kelce, a Kansas City Chiefs tight end, had already shifted the economics of the NFL at a time when the league was grappling with how to attract more types of fans, said Misty Heggeness, an associate economics and public affairs professor at the University of Kansas.
It's estimated the relationship has been worth more than $330 million to the NFL and the Chiefs, who will play in the Super Bowl on Feb. 11.
"From an NFL perspective, one of the benefits to having Taylor Swift show up at the games is just that she has a huge fan base of younger people and younger girls and young women, who might not have really paid much attention to the NFL in the past," Heggeness said in a presentation Wednesday. The Minnesota Council on Economic Education (MCEE) and the Center for Economic Education hosted the event with St. Cloud State University.
The nonprofit MCEE trains K-12 educators to teach economics and personal finance to their students. Some of that training is around core concepts, and others, like Wednesday's webinar, are tied to current events, said MCEE Executive Director Julie Bunn.
"I think that economics can be viewed as a dry topic, one that [students] may feel intimidated by because they associate it with math or numbers or those types of things," Bunn said. Tying economics to something students are interested in and care about can help show "that all the things that we experience in our lives, that we see going on in our culture, have an economic angle to them," she said.
From an economics perspective, the Swift/Kelce relationship represents the very public collision of two businesses, and reactions from their respective consumers have been mixed.
At the first Chiefs game Swift attended in September, "the first response from the NFL was pure joy. It was a total novelty," Heggeness said. She noted the broadcast showed Swift multiple times as she cheered on the team while the league updated its social media bios with references to her and offered her free admission to any game.
"They really overdid it at the beginning, and then they experienced a backlash" from a loud subset of — arguably sexist, as some pundits have asserted — fans who did not want images of the red-and-white-clad pop star interrupting games, Heggeness said. The league backtracked but has remained publicly supportive of the relationship, including through comments from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Chiefs Head Coach Andy Reid.
That makes good business sense: One week after the news broke that Swift and Kelce were dating, purchases of his jersey spiked nearly 400% and 2 million more female viewers tuned in to watch the Chiefs than in the previous three weeks.
"Our female audience has grown leaps and bounds," is how Chiefs owner and CEO Clark Hunt quantified it in a recent interview on CNBC.
Swift attended 12 NFL games this year across the country, including the most-watched divisional playoff game Dec. 10 when the Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills and the most-watched AFC championship when the Chiefs' eliminated the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday.
The impact extends beyond the NFL, Heggeness said, from a woman who posts what Swift is wearing at each game she attends, causing those items to immediately sell out, to American Airlines' addition of Super Bowl flights numbered with Swift's birth year and Kelce's jersey number.
"[The NFL is] still willing to stand up for her in interviews with the media, they're still willing to put support behind her, and that's a business strategy for them," Heggeness said, "because they recognize the power of Taylor Swift in increasing the NFL fan base."
