The Taylor Swift craze surrounding the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl-winning season helped fuel a 30% increase in the fan base, said Clark Hunt, the team’s chief executive officer.
Swift became a fixture at Chiefs games last year after she began dating Travis Kelce, a tight end on the team. The pop megastar’s presence at Arrowhead Stadium, which started at a game against the Chicago Bears in September, confirmed their relationship and sparked a media frenzy.
“I always want to point out how happy I am for Taylor and Travis in the relationship. I’ve seen them together and they make a make a fantastic couple,” Hunt said in an interview at his office in Dallas. At the same time, “the knock-on effect has been amazing, the growth in our female fan base has been amazing over the last year.”
When Swift attended her first game, she didn’t want any special accommodations and preferred to walk through the stadium’s front gates, Hunt recounted.
“Our security people were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” he said with a laugh. “She came to the game and completely lit up social media, every other kind media.”
Mahomes, Kelce
Swift wasn’t the only factor driving the Chiefs’ rising fan base, of course. Led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the team played four postseason games and won its second straight Super Bowl.
Merchandise sales also reflected the success. Mahomes and Kelce ranked third and fourth, respectively, on the year-end top-50 player sales list, which ranks the league’s top performers on officially licensed NFL player products. The Chiefs also got a chance to win fans abroad, with a regular-season game in Germany.
But Swift’s impact stunned the NFL, Hunt said. The league confirmed his tally of the rising popularity, without saying how it measures the fan base. She attended 13 of the Chiefs’ 21 regular and postseason contests, including Super Bowl LVIII, which was the league’s most-watched game ever, averaging 123.4 million viewers across all platforms.
“We have celebrities at our games every single weekend and we’ve never seen anything like this,” Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social, influencer and content marketing, said last fall.
Private Equity
Hunt spoke in a wide-ranging discussion with his brother Dan, who is the leader of the Dallas host committee for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in addition to his interests in American football. Clark and Dan are sons of the late Lamar Hunt, the longtime Chiefs owner, for whom the NFL’s American Football Conference championship trophy is named.
Clark Hunt also leads the league’s finance committee and is tasked with creating a framework that would allow private equity investors to buy into teams.
Under the current proposal, a select group of vetted and pre-approved firms would be allowed to buy up to 10% of teams. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he expects the league to approve a framework before year-end.
“I’m optimistic that we’ll meet the commissioner’s timeline of having the program up and running by the end of the year,” Hunt said.
