In a Friday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Kansas City Chiefs owner and CEO Clark Hunt said his team’s female audience has increased significantly since one of its players, Travis Kelce, started dating Taylor Swift.
Swift, who dominated the cultural landscape last year with the blockbuster success of her Eras Tour, made headlines after she was spotted at several Chiefs games. Her fans to turned their attention to Kelce and the team.
“It’s been a very interesting, very fun year having the two of them dating, the attention that’s been focused on the Chiefs,” Hunt said. “Our female audience has grown leaps and bounds.”
Hunt refuted claims that the pair’s romance is a publicity stunt for his team, calling the relationship “purely organic.”
Besides a high-profile courtship, there’s another factor changing the Chiefs’ fanbase: the rise of sports streaming. Millions of fans tuned in to watch the Chiefs’ Thursday night game on Amazon Prime, Hunt said. The team’s Saturday playoff game against the Miami Dolphins is set to stream on Peacock.
“We’re very excited about tomorrow night being on Peacock,” Hunt said. “We think it’s going to open up a completely new fanbase to us, much more of a younger demographic.
Kelce’s social media accounts have also felt the impact of the player’s romantic ties to Swift, as his Instagram followers count increased by over 1.5M in the weeks after the Bears-Chiefs game.
According to Socialblade metrics, Kelce’s only two comparable periods of leap in popularity on Instagram were in February of 2020 and 2023, both directly after the Chiefs won the Superbowl.
In the week before lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy for the first time in his career in 2020, Kelce had gained 17,818 followers, compared to 201,130, afterwards – a 183,213 difference.
This year, in the week leading to the Super Bowl win against his older brother, Jason, and the Philadelphia Eagles in Arizona, the tight-end clinched 34,103 followers on Instagram, compared to 332,163 afterwards – a 289,060 difference.
In the week prior to and after publicly announcing his relationship with Swift, Kelce obtained 133,638 new followers, compared to 850,770 after his relationship status changed – a 717,132 difference.
The Chiefs are set to host the Eagles for a rematch of this year’s Super Bowl game as part of Monday Night Football coverage, on November 20, and with Swift potentially attending, Kelce’s followers count on Instagram might see another sharp rise during and after the game.
Much to the delight of fans, the Kelce brothers have also released a Christmas song this week.
According to preliminary Nielsen data, compared to an average of the first three weeks of ‘Sunday Night Football,’ the largest demographic gain were among girls aged 12 to 17 (53 percent), women aged 18 to 24 (24 percent) and women aged 35 and over (34 percent).
What’s more is, the Chiefs game versus the Chicago Bears on Sunday, September 24, saw the highest viewing figures of the week for any T.V. network, 24.3million.
Despite being a star in the NFL, Travis Kelce has never been as popular as he is now, after he and Taylor Swift publicly announced their relationship, as research reveals a 37 percent spike in female NFL viewers thanks to America’s favorite power couple’s romance.
Kelce, the 34-year-old tight-end for the Kansas City Chiefs, is considered one of the best of all time in his position. But, even he is not immune to the Swift Effect, with a huge jump in Google searches, social media follows and even jerseys sales evidence of the enormous impact interacting with the globally recognizable popstar can have.
