When Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs in September 2023, sports betting fans were less than enthused.
Robert Cooper, BetOnline.ag sportsbook director, remembers the reaction from pitching early Swift-themed prop bets, novelty wagers that don’t affect a game’s outcome or take place outside the game entirely, to football media. “Don’t send me this S-H-I-T,” he recalls them saying. “Send me football top 10 [betting odds] and that’s it.”
But Swift’s appearances at Chiefs games over the next several months generated an estimated $331.5 million in brand value for the team and the NFL. She was credited with ratcheting up viewership ratings, particularly among women, in the 2023-24 NFL season, and spurring a flood of press coverage and merchandise sales in the process. By the time the Chiefs faced the San Francisco 49ers in the 2024 Super Bowl, there was another love story at play. Swift had been mainstreamed in the multibillion-dollar sports betting industry, was mentioned on betting podcasts, integrated into sportsbook social media promotions, and inspired prop bets on which millions of dollars have since been wagered worldwide.
The way the sports betting industry has leveraged Swift’s fame is indicative of a larger reframing of the public’s relationship with online gambling. By extending it beyond the world of sports and tying prop bets and social media promotions into larger news cycles, companies like FanDuel and DraftKings can attract new audiences from not just Swifties but a wide range of fandoms.
BetMGM memorably announced that the “Taylor Swift effect” led to a 51 percent increase in women betting. (The company didn’t share the betting figures that this increase is based on, or respond to questions from WIRED.)
That spike could be attributed at least in part to Swifties being able to wager on the Super Bowl using prepackaged sets named after their favorite Taylor Swift song titles. Other Swiftie prop bets were even more populist. BetOnline.ag offered bettors 89 Taylor Swift–themed prop bets for last year’s Super Bowl, including the primary color of her top at the Super Bowl and whether her screen time would exceed 28.5 seconds. (While offering prop bets directly on Swift’s actions is widely prohibited in the US, BetOnline.ag is licensed in Panama.)
But with the 2024-25 NFL season winding down, and the Chiefs facing off against the Buffalo Bills in the American Football Conference championship game this weekend, the Taylor Swift effect appears to be blunted.
Public relations representative for BetOnline.ag, Josh Barton notes that last year Swift “would be shown double-digit times on TV,” but this year her onscreen presence was diminished. Despite attending at least one game in person every month this season while finishing her Eras world tour, she’s attended fewer than in 2023-24.
That appears to have made an impact on betting volume. Ahead of the Chiefs’ September 24, 2023, game, when bets on the Chiefs at FanDuel increased by 247 percent, compared to the team’s game the previous week. “They were rooting for him to score a touchdown, in large part because they wanted to see her celebrate in the box,” says Chris Jones, vice president of communications at FanDuel. The handle, or money wagered on these bets, increased by 533 percent over the prior week. A more typical increase might be 20 or 30 percent, he adds.
It’s hard to quantify the Swiftie demographic’s impact on these bets, but preseason, WIRED reached out to several sportsbooks including BetRivers, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rivalry, which said the Taylor Swift effect was real, and expected it would continue to affect their industry this season.
Tim Whitehead, sportsbook head at BetRivers, put it succinctly. “So long as the world’s biggest pop star is still dating one of the NFL’s most popular players, we’ll tap into that narrative to attract new audiences,” he told WIRED in a statement. But even early in the year, despite Kelce still attracting strong wagers, the outsized Swift effect seemed to have worn off. FanDuel noted that in two early games, neither attended by Swift, teammates of Kelce’s garnered similar betting levels to him. This month, a FanDuel spokesperson told WIRED that interest in betting on Kelce “has leveled out to be in line with the other playmakers on the Chiefs.”
Michael Naraine, an associate professor of sport management at Brock University in Canada, attributes this to the US election dominating news and prop betting cycles, along with less attention-grabbing headlines in the couple’s relationship as they settled into their partnership. “The T. Swift effect does still exist, it just has been muted over the last year,” he says. “It’s not as topical, it’s not as high a momentum, but it’s still valuable to the books.”
A study from the University of Queensland in Australia published in December found nearly 90 percent of the country’s regular sports bettors are male, and suggested that this was due, at least partially, to physical betting spaces being “male-dominated” over history, though smartphones make gambling more accessible to female audiences. This pattern holds in other countries, like the US, where only 28 percent of current sports bettors of 2,000 surveyed were women according to a two-week poll by YouGov last year. “It is unsurprising that betting companies are attempting to capitalise on this shift, targeting women with novelty bets like how many awards Taylor Swift will win at this year’s Grammy’s,” author Rohann Irving said in a release about the study.
Despite the outsize attention Swift’s received from online sportsbooks since dating Kelce, she is only one character in a chorus in the new wave of narrative betting that has risen alongside the industry. In the past, betting narratives which struck chords with bettors focused on underdog or champion players and teams. Today the tales spun have expanded to include a wide array of competitions, from the Oscars, to the US presidential election, to reality TV shows.
Jones, from FanDuel, says ardent sports gamblers give little shrift to this trend. “They’re looking at defensive matchups, offensive matchups, weather, historical data; they’re not caring who the guy’s dating,” he says. But many recreational bettors—whom Jones says make up “an overwhelming majority” of FanDuel’s customer base—seek out narratives like the Swift-Kelce romance when wagering.
Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor in the University of New Mexico’s department of psychology who has researched sports betting behaviors, says over email that sportsbooks “are absolutely trying to convert a group of people who are not betting into bettors.” But whether a Swift-based strategy differs from the industry’s usual marketing is less clear. “I don’t know that having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more pernicious than any other set of prop bets, free bet promos, or other gimmicks they offer,” he says.
For Grubbs, it’s instead a broader question of the appropriateness of gambling advertising, an unsettled debate which includes whether sportsbooks should be promoted on television or allowed to sponsor sports teams.
“At the end of the day, we’re content creators,” says Cooper of BetOnline.ag, noting that the more “click-baity” the content, the better. “When we see a storyline or something that’s trending, we’re going to lean into that and try to distribute to a broader audience.”
The industry representatives I spoke with were hopeful about a turnaround should Swift get engaged or have a child with Kelce. “If Taylor Swift ever did a Super Bowl halftime show and the Chiefs were in it, that would break the entire world, internet, everything,” Cooper says.
Source : Wired
