It's difficult to quantify the impact of the Swiftie demographic on these bets, but in the preseason WIRED contacted several sportsbooks, including BetRivers, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rivalry, who said the Taylor Swift effect was real and expected that this would continue to impact their industry this season. .
Tim Whitehead, head of sportsbook at BetRivers, put it succinctly. “As long as the biggest pop star in the world is still dating one of the NFL's hottest players, we will leverage that story to attract new audiences,” he told WIRED in a statement. But even early in the year, the outsized Swift effect seemed to have worn off, despite Kelce still attracting strong bets. FanDuel noted that in two early games, which were not attended by Swift, Kelce's teammates achieved similar commitment levels as him. This month, a FanDuel spokesperson told WIRED that interest in betting on Kelce “has leveled out to be in line with the Chiefs' other playmakers.”
Michael Naraine, associate professor of sports management at Brock University in Canada, attributes this to the US election dominating the news and gag betting cycles, along with less high-profile headlines in the couple's relationship as they settled into their partnership. “The T. Swift effect still exists, but it has only weakened in the past year,” he says. “It's not as current, it doesn't have as high momentum, but it's still valuable for the books.”
A study from the University of Queensland in Australia, published in December, found that almost 90 percent of the country's regular sports bettors are male, and suggested that this was, at least in part, due to the fact that physical gambling rooms have been 'male-dominated' throughout history. Smartphones make gambling more accessible to a female audience. This pattern also applies to other countries, such as the US, where, according to a two-week YouGov poll last year, only 28 percent of the current 2,000 sports bettors surveyed were women. “It's not surprising that gambling companies are trying to capitalize on this shift and target women with new bets like how many prizes Taylor Swift will win at this year's Grammys,” author Rohann Irving said in a press release about the study.
Despite the outpouring of attention Swift has received from online sportsbooks since her relationship with Kelce, she is just one character in a choir in the new wave of narrative betting that has proliferated along with the industry. In the past, bets that appealed to gamblers were on underdog or champion players and teams. Today, the stories have expanded to include a wide range of competitions, from the Oscars to the US presidential elections and reality TV shows.
Jones, of FanDuel, says avid sports bettors are paying little attention to this trend. “They look at defensive games, offensive games, weather, historical data; they don't care who the guy is dating,” he says. But many recreational gamblers — who, according to Jones, make up “an overwhelming majority” of FanDuel's customer base — look for stories like the Swift-Kelce romance when gambling.
Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor in the University of New Mexico's department of psychology who has researched sports betting behavior, said via email that sportsbooks are “definitely trying to convert a group of people who don't gamble into gamblers.” But whether a Swift-based strategy differs from typical industry marketing is less clear. “I don't know that having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more damaging than any other set of prop bets, free bet promos or other gimmicks,” he says.
For Grubbs, it's instead a broader question about the appropriateness of gambling advertising, a troubled debate over whether sportsbooks should be promoted on television or sponsored by sports teams.
“At the end of the day, we are content creators,” says BetOnline.ag's Cooper, noting that the more “click-baity” the content is, the better. “If we see a storyline or something that's trending, we'll jump on that and try to spread it to a broader audience.”
The industry reps I spoke with were hopeful of a turnaround if Swift were to get engaged or have a child with Kelce. “If Taylor Swift ever did a Super Bowl halftime show and the Chiefs were in it, it would destroy the whole world, the internet, everything,” Cooper says.
