Analysis: Taylor Swift's appearances at the Superbowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs' games this season has helped the sport attract more female fans
By Daragh O'Leary, University of Galway
Ahead of the weekend's Superbowl in Las Vegas, a recent article from Front Office Sports has claimed that Taylor Swift has provided American football with its highest regular-season viewership from women since their records began. Additionally, the Apex Marketing Group has estimated that she has generated $331.5 million in brand value for the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL.
So how did she manage this? It's simple. She’s going out with one of the players. Swift’s recent romance with the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, has seen her attend many of his games. Consequently, her presence at these games seems to be functioning as a major form of publicity for both the Chiefs and the NFL. What’s particularly impressive about this is that she seems to be having an effect on specifically female viewership, a segment of the market which the NFL had previously failed to capture.
As the graph above indicates, the NFL seems to be a product which interests men more so than women. This isn’t very uncommon within the world of sports. Males also make up the majority of the audience (71%) in the English Premier League. Several reasons have been offered within research literature to explain this viewership disparity, but most of these can only be speculated upon. What is for certain is that women do seem, on average, less likely to watch live sporting events than men.
What interests me about Swift and female NFL viewership is that she is essentially functioning as a solution to market failure. Classical economists are frequently criticised for their love of the market and insistence that it provides the most optimal solutions to all of life’s little problems.
But any economist worth their salt will be fully aware of the limitations of the market mechanism. It’s why textbooks contain entire chapters devoted to market failures arising from public goods, monopolies, externalities and information asymmetry.
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From RTÉ 2fm's Game On, Jeff Shep looks at the Taylor Swift/NFL crossover
The last of these is the issue in the NFL which I think Swift is helping with. One of the reasons which economic theory has developed to explain why markets fail is information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. Information asymmetry is a fancy-sounding term us economists use to make ourselves sound clever. It basically just means that certain transactions may not take place because consumers may not have enough information about the product involved in it.
Here's an example of how I was an unfortunate victim of this type of market failure last summer. Paolo Nutini was playing gigs in Cork and I didn’t go. I like Paolo Nutini, I lived in Cork, I had the money to go, but I didn’t realise he was playing – market failure!
In the case of females watching the NFL, Swift seems to be functioning as a conveyer of information for the NFL. A lot of people tuning in to watch her at games may previously have been aware that the Kansas City Chiefs played in the NFL, but they may not have been aware they would enjoy watching the games. The corresponding increase the NFL has had in female viewership across their regular season seems to suggest a lot of Swifties have been tuning in to watch Swift and have been pleasantly surprised to find that they enjoyed the game as well.
From ESPN, Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce celebrates with Taylor Swift after the team beat the Baltimore Ravens to reach Super Bowl LVIII.
This is a nice illustration of the power which information has in markets. Many of these women will presumably have been aware of the existence of the NFL prior to Swift's attendance at these games. If they had an interest in the sport, they should have been watching games previously but, as it turns out, it required their interest in Swift to initiate them into regularly viewing NFL games.
For anyone who is sceptical about the impact celebrity figures can have in turning people onto sports, here's another example. There are millions of men in their late twenties and early to mid-thirties today who have to suffer through supporting Manchester United because they thought David Beckham's haircut looked cool when they were younger.
The exact degree to which Taylor Swift is influencing the NFL and whether the effect will continue is another thing
While I do like to see the effect which Swift seems to be having on female NFL viewership, I think claims about exact increases to brand value may have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Plenty of studies show that there is a positive association between brand value and celebrity status, but it’s nearly impossible to exactly calculate how much additional value is attributable to the pop star's attendance at NFL games which her boyfriend is playing.
What we can say is that Swift seems to be having some kind of an influence on the NFL as a brand. The exact degree to which she’s influencing this and whether the effect will continue is another thing.
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Dr Daragh O'Leary is a research associate in the the Centre for Entrepreneurial Growth & Scaling at the Cairnes Business School at the University of Galway. His current research looks at the activity of scaling firms. He is an Irish Research Council awardee
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
