Taylor Swift Triggered a Tsunami of Sports Bets. Then She Stopped Turning Up

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.