Going into the Super Bowl, the ‘Taylor Swift effect’ on the NFL looks even stronger than it did at this time last year. Here’s why.

Maybe the NFL should consider making Taylor Swift an unofficial MVP.

After Swift further elevated Travis Kelce’s popularity in 2023, the NFL enjoyed a “Taylor Swift effect” of additional growth, including spikes in merchandise and ticket sales, particularly among female fans.

Now it’s a year later, and Swift and Kelce are still together and gearing up for yet another Super Bowl appearance, with Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs set to play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. So is Swift’s presence at Kelce’s games – and Kelce’s presence at at her concerts – still paying dividends for the NFL? The numbers suggest it is.

It’s unclear exactly when Swift and Kelce officially started dating, but the “Love Story” singer began appearing regularly at Chiefs games in September 2023. And from Sep. 24, 2023, to Jan. 28, 2024 – the date of that year’s AFC Championship game – Swift created $366,753,290 in total equivalent brand value for the NFL, according to data provided to MarketWatch from Apex Marketing, a company that specializes in advertising and branding services. This equivalent brand value metric measures value across all social media, TV, radio, digital news and print news.

That effect hasn’t faded. In the year since, Swift has helped the NFL even more, according to Apex, creating an estimated $634,304,163 in equivalent brand value from the day after the 2024 AFC Championship through Jan. 27, the day after the 2025 AFC Championship.

What’s driving that growth?

Social media and digital news have been the two biggest factors in Swift’s momentum in bringing brand value to the NFL, Apex’s Eric Smallwood said, with major spikes occurring whenever Kelce appeared at her concerts or joined the singer onstage during her record-breaking Eras Tour.

“The ‘Swift Effect’ and the corresponding media exposure continued for the NFL and the Chiefs prior to 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,” Smallwood said. “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.”

In total, Swift has added nearly a billion dollars’ worth of brand value -$992,361,912, to be exact – to the NFL since fall 2023, according to Apex’s estimates.

Her influence on the NFL has been seen across social media. The number of Kelce’s Instagram followers jumped from 2.7 million to 5.39 million during the Chiefs’ playoff run in 2024 and has continued to rise, sitting at 6.7 million going into this year’s Super Bowl. As for the NFL, while the changes to follower count for its social-media accounts on specific dates are not currently known, the league said that female fans accounted for nearly half of its new followers on TikTok in 2024.

And move over, traditional Super Bowl parties – “Taylor Bowl” parties with Swift-themed food and drinks are a hit on TikTok, as Swifties continue to celebrate their “Super Bowl era.”

“Appealing to women and youth audiences has been a concerted, strategic focus for many years, and we saw a lot of momentum already happening, with growing fandom, perception and engagement among these demographics,” Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president for social, influencer and content marketing, said in a statement. “That further accelerated last season with Taylor, especially in social media consumption among 13- [to] 24-year-old women.”

For the Chiefs specifically, some fan-growth metrics are even more pronounced. A Chiefs marketing executive told InStyle this week that women now make up 57% of the team’s total audience, a much higher figure than the 46% league average. In addition, among girls age 8 and over, 56% are fans of the NFL, according to a report from consumer research firm Zeta Global titled, “How Women (and Taylor Swift) Are Changing the Big Game for the Better.”

See: Here’s how much money NFL stars Patrick Mahomes, Saquon Barkley and Jalen Hurts can make in Super Bowl bonuses

Swift’s presence at NFL games has also led to big ratings boosts among certain demographics.

While Swift has wide-ranging appeal, she is particularly popular among women and girls, and that is the group that propelled NBC and “Sunday Night Football” to such lofty viewership heights during primetime games the singer attended.

“Viewership among teen girls (age 12-17) spiked 53% from the season-to-date average of the first three weeks of [“Sunday Night Football”], while the audience among women aged 18-24 was up 24%, and women 35+ increased 34%,” NBC said about the 2023 Chiefs-New York Jets primetime game, at which Swift was featured several times. “The collective growth resulted in an approximate viewership increase of more than 2 million female viewers.”

Viewership peaked at an estimated 29.4 million viewers, which was higher than the average 19.9 million viewers that watched “Sunday Night Football” games in the 2022 season, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. While comprehensive ratings for this year have yet to be released, Zeta estimates that female viewership for the 2024 NFL regular season among girls age 12 to 17 was 8.1% higher than in the previous season.

And while the Super Bowl is generally one of the most-watched events in the country, Swifties may be even more invested in the game this year, because rumors that Kelce could propose to Swift on the field have reached a fever pitch. (Even renowned sportswriter Bill Simmons has weighed in on the possibility.) While it’s not legal in the U.S. to bet on the odds that Kelce puts a ring on it, some other countries’ sportsbooks have allowed fans to wager on whether he will pop the question after the game.

Read more: Want to bet that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend will score a touchdown in the Super Bowl? DraftKings stock may be a less risky gamble.

Of course, not everyone who became an NFL fan during the last two years did so because of Swift. A number of other factors could have pushed them toward the NFL.

“There are a lot of factors that impact the demography of a game, from streaming fragmentation to the closeness of the game to the fan base with each team, so measuring the ‘Swift effect’ can be daunting,” said Jason Damata, CEO of Fabric Media, an agency that works with TV companies and measurement firms.

But Swift does have a history of boosting businesses and local economies, which is why she was included in the 2023 MarketWatch 50 list of the most influential people in markets. During her recent Eras concert tour, for example, Swift reportedly boosted local economies by hundreds of millions of dollars in places like Los Angeles and Vancouver. One market researcher said the Eras Tour had a $5 billion global impact.

Last year, an estimated 123.7 million U.S. viewers across all streaming platforms tuned in to Super Bowl LVIII featuring the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. That was the most viewers ever, and we’ll soon know whether Super Bowl LIX breaks that record. Having Swift there should certainly help.