Taylor Swift, the NFL and a new wave of female sports fandom - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT商学院

Taylor Swift, the NFL and a new wave of female sports fandom

The league has various strategies to attract young women to the game — but the draw of a pop star remains unmatched

During the first half of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the Jumbotron at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas briefly cut away from the action on the field to show Taylor Swift chugging a beer in her luxury suite overlooking the stadium.

Swift was there, of course, to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his Kansas City Chiefs, who won their second consecutive National Football League championship in dramatic extra time.

But the biggest winner of the evening was the NFL, by all measures the single greatest unifying live entertainment behemoth in the US. The league was given a tremendous gift when Swift began attending fixtures this year: ticket sales for some Chiefs games nearly tripled, and overall NFL ratings rose 7 per cent for the 2023 season.

It’s great news for the NFL, but the most powerful sports league in the richest country in the world should not be dependent upon the whims of a pop star’s social life to develop a deeper relationship with female fans.

The millions of young women in Swift’s fan base are of great benefit to the NFL: of the roughly 58 per cent of Americans who watch football each week, three-quarters are men over 50, according to a 2023 study by SponsorPulse.

Despite conspiracy rumours to the contrary, NFL leaders have admitted that the Taylor television traffic is just a happy accident. Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, told reporters last week that the NFL wasn’t clever enough to devise the Swift-Kelce romance even if they tried.

“I don’t think I’m that good of a scripter, or anybody on our staff,” he said. “Taylor is obviously a dynamo. Everything she touches, there are people following, so we count ourselves fortunate, we welcome it.”

Sports fans who arrived in Las Vegas last week ahead of the Super Bowl shared with me their reflections on what’s working — and not — for female audiences. Across the board, they said, they enjoy the interpersonal stories in sport.

“It’s all about how the team is functioning together,” says Lori Haddock, 55, a San Francisco 49ers fan from Omaha. “Football is a family thing to do . . . especially if you have something that you can watch together, that is so competitive and so fun.”

Like Swift, Haddock got into football through the relationships in her life: first watching Kansas City Chiefs games growing up with her father, and later switching allegiances to the 49ers when she met her husband. She says her daughter never caught the football bug growing up, but now aged 28, she’s recently embraced watching the sport with her partner.

Kiah Cresser, 27, and Ben Mathiou, 28, travelled to Vegas from Australia’s Gold Coast to attend their first Super Bowl after Mathiou, a professional rugby player, scored tickets a year ago. Cresser, dressed fashionably in a trenchcoat and knitted caramel top, tells me she wasn’t much of a sports fan until the Swift-Kelce relationship blossomed. “It’s a love story, how can you resist that?” she says.

As a result, she consumes NFL stories on TikTok, and says she will probably stay invested in the Chiefs regardless of whether Swift and Kelce stay together. Her primary interest, she says, is the cast of characters in and around the game, including quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife, Brittany. “It’s not really anything that the NFL is doing specifically,” she adds.

To be sure, the league is making an effort to develop fan interest among women; last year, flag football — a non-tackle version of the game open to all genders — was introduced as a high school sport in the state of California, in advance of the sport’s inclusion in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, thanks to some persuasion by the NFL. If women have an opportunity to play the game, the thinking goes, it will further endear football to them for life.

Such a strategy may pay off in the long run. In the meantime, American football is relying on images of Swift having the time of her life in her stadium box, high-fiving family members and cheering with her girlfriends. The message is a quietly revelatory one for some women: this is a space for your entertainment, too.

sara.germano@ft.com

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

神秘对冲基金Magnetar如何豪赌AI

这家因押注次级抵押贷款下跌而闻名的机构,正押注数十亿美元于CoreWeave。

印尼抗议活动反映出民众对经济状况的强烈不满

不平等加剧以及对普拉博沃政府的不信任,引发数十年来最严重的政治动荡。

战火中的选择:美国人奔赴俄罗斯寻求“传统价值观”

莫斯科正推行一项签证计划,瞄准的是那些对西方社会心怀不满的人。

经济学家警告投资者低估了特朗普对美联储的威胁

接受FT调查的经济学家担心,总统对美联储的攻击已经对美国央行和经济造成长期损害。
1天前

美国对委内瑞拉行动意在禁毒还是推翻其领导人?

美国政府以海军部署让尼古拉斯•马杜罗保持紧张,但很少有人认为美国海军陆战队会真正登陆。

美国富人向私募信贷基金投入创纪录资金

机构需求放缓之际,散户投资者成为增长的重要来源之一。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×