Talking Football with the American Left: Taylor's Version

Shirts off and your friends lift you up over their headsBeer sticking to the floor, cheers chanted, cause they said,There was no chance, trying to be the greatest in the leagueWhere's the trophy?He just comes running over to me.—Taylor Swift, “The Alchemy,” The Tortured Poets Department (2024)Linebacker Dave Meggyesy of the St. Louis Cardinals quit football at age twenty-nine. As his politics had grown increasingly leftist during the 1960s, so too did his dissatisfaction with the game. Meggyesy sponsored buses to transport demonstrators to Washington, refused to eat grapes picked by nonunion workers, and persuaded thirty-seven teammates to sign a petition against the Vietnam War, making him a target of the team's front office, fans, and Vice President Spiro Agnew.1 In his memoir, Meggyesy accused football of creating “the most repressive regime in our history . . . ruled by [Richard Nixon], a football freak,” and he hoped that “when society changes in the way I hope it will, football will be obsolete.”2Flash forward to Super Bowl LVIII, when 123 million people, including pop star Taylor Swift and much of her fanbase, saw quarterback Patrick Mahomes pass to wide receiver Mecole Hardman, securing a 25–22 overtime win for the Kansas City Chiefs over the San Francisco 49ers. The game was the most-watched television program in American history, making clear that society's day, which Meggyesy hoped for, has not yet come.But it's possible that a new day for football, at least politically, has arrived. Less than a year after the dynastic Chiefs won their next ring, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduced “Coach” Tim Walz, a groundbreaker in leftist politics, as her running mate. The designation, which former college coach Sen. Tommy Tuberville insists his staff call him, infuriated opponent Donald Trump, who often tried to politically leverage—with varying degrees of success—football.“Walz was an ASSISTANT Coach,” Trump posted to Truth Social, undoubtedly infuriating defensive coordinators everywhere, “not a COACH.”3Walz made one of his first campaign stops before the 2024 Democratic National Convention with a high school football team in Pennsylvania. At the DNC, delegates waved COACH WALZ signs; during his acceptance speech, players he coached at Minnesota's Mankato East High School took to the stage in their old red and white jerseys. The political left, clearly, had invited football to its party, a deviation for a sport that has traditionally, with some exceptions, been most visibly the province of Republicans, from Jack Kemp to Steve Largent, J. C. Watt to Tuberville.Essential to grasping the cultural and political salience of football on the left during the Harris–Walz campaign is the relationship between Swift and Chiefs’ star tight end Travis Kelce. Their coupling not only enabled and amplified Walz and the Democrats, who embraced football in a way that exploded its old-style gender and cultural norms, reflecting a savvy that Meggyesy could not have imagined, but also reaches beyond a single presidential election. In the hands of “Tay-vis,” football has been recast as a love story, one that brought about a right-wing backlash that laid the foundation for the Democrats to seize upon the opportunity to take the sport as their own.“It's the fourth quarter, we're down a field goal but we are on offense and we've got the ball,” Walz told the frenzied DNC delegates in August 2024. “We're driving down the field. And boy do we have the right team.”4That the Harris–Walz ticket recognized the power of football in the wake of the Swift–Kelce relationship speaks volumes about the game's hold on its fans, which comes at a cost people are willing to pay even if it makes them uncomfortable. In so many ways, football is (apologies to baseball) America's pastime, a full-blown entertainment industry driven not just by passionate local and regional fanbases but by a national audience that watches regardless of who is playing. This audience of millions is made possible by network juggernauts like ABC's Monday Night Football and NBC's Football Night in America, as well as numerous specialty platforms the National Football League (NFL) provides, generating narratives that enable football's power brokers to talk their way out of just about anything: gross racial inequities, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), domestic violence, murder, and even—in the recent case of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin—on field (albeit temporary) death.5Football is undeniably dangerous. Thus, while millions love to watch it, they do not necessarily want their own kids to play, with constant reminders, from Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa's many concussions to, most horrifically, the suicides of Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau, as to what is at stake.6“If you had an 8-year-old kid now,” Chicago Bears’ legend Mike Ditka famously asked Bryant Gumbel on Real Sports, “would you tell him you want him to play football?”“I wouldn't,” responded Gumbel. “Would you?”“Nope. That's sad. I wouldn't,” Ditka answered. “And my whole life was football. I think the risk is worse than the reward.”7Tackle football, boasting sport's highest injury rate, continues to see a decline in popularity among youth, with some states attempting to ban it for kids under age twelve.8 Accompanying the decline is a striking demographic shift by region, race, and political orientation—the game's most vociferous critics hail from the political left, perhaps best exemplified when President Barack Obama stated that he, too, would not let his child play the game.9Yet studies show that players’ injuries—including brain damage—is the price people are willing to pay to watch the sport they love. Indeed, football is very much a part of the stories Americans tell themselves—violence, nation, and belonging—the mythologies, according to historian Richard Slotkin, that become “the means through which we turn history into an instrument of political power.”10But if Walz embodies the political left's interest in football, it unfolded in real time thanks to Swift and Kelce, which in its reconfiguring of football's tropes of hypermasculinity, violence, and trauma, became the ultimate demonstration of what can be unleashed when football dances with progressive politics, a dance that Democrats picked up and ran with in the 2024 presidential campaign.Without question, the emergence of Swift, who attended her first Chiefs game in September 2023, into football's fold on Kelce's arm, translated football for a new arena of fandom and, eventually, politics. “The language of sport has long ceased to be confined to the back page,” posits scholar Barry Spurr.11 In Swift's hands, it shifted to a stage commanded by the world's most powerful singer-songwriter.The intersection of celebrity culture and professional sports is not new, but “Tay-vis” transformed football's narrative into a veritable romance novel, starring a male lead who proudly wore the badges of being vulnerable and protective. The couple gave the NFL its highest regular-season viewership among women in its history, as Swifties, the singer's passionate, influential, and economically powerful fan base, started watching, many (if not most) of whom were underrepresented in football's core viewership.12 If football is America's pastime, Swift is one of the world's pastimes, her historic Eras tour injecting billions of dollars into the global economy. After her seventeen shows in the UK, for example, Swift generated over £1.2 billion in net revenue, more than double what the Royal Family generates in a year. In football terms? In Eras’ first domestic leg in 2023, each of the stops—fifty-three concerts in twenty cities—had the economic impact of a Super Bowl.13The “Swifty Effect” on football was immediate; her financial impact on team and league brand value was estimated to be $330 million.14 The first game Swift attended drew 24.3 million viewers and was that weekend's most-watched NFL contest, with an almost 10 percent leap in young female viewers, who now wore shirts proclaiming “I'm in my Football Era” or “I'm Rooting for Taylor's Boyfriend.” Commentators gleefully inserted her lyrics into their calls while cameras panned to Swift-the-football-fan, who sat with Donna “Mama” Kelce and Brittany Mahomes, the quarterback's wife. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell crowed about Swift's impact, deeming it all “wonderful.” “My daughters and all of our family are Swifties,” he said. “Taylor is obviously a dynamo. Everything she touches, obviously there are people following. And so, we count ourselves as fortunate and we welcome it.”15 According to Fanatics, sales of Kelce's #87 Chiefs jersey skyrocketed 400 percent after Swift's first appearance at a Kansas City game.16“It's nice that she visits her stadiums in the offseason,” Swifties quipped online. That Swift was with Travis Kelce matters, as tight ends are a team's freight trains with hands. He and his brother Jason, the now-retired Eagles’ star, considered to be the most successful NFL siblings in many years, have played a central role in challenging traditional “tough guy” perceptions in a league filled with giant dudes whose job is to crush their opponents, replacing narratives of toxic masculinities with a generative masculinity that promotes emotional intelligence centered on living empathy and respect out loud. “As players, you write the narratives,” Jason said during his passionate retirement press conference, a master class on ugly crying (and an excellent lesson to those on the political right who derided Walz's son Gus for crying while watching his father on the DNC stage).Travis often has been in conservative crosshairs, a living clapback to those who want football to be gladiatorial combat (and have disdained the new safety protocols introduced in recent years). He was one of many who knelt on the gridiron in reaction to Trump's recommendation that owners fire any player who took a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter; he formed a brand partnership with Budweiser, spurned by conservatives for an ad featuring trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney; and on behalf of Pfizer, he encouraged vaccination against COVID-19 and flu. His relationship with Swift, long a vocal proponent of LGBTQ rights, among other left-leaning values, put him even more deeply at odds with those who traditionally controlled pro football's narrative.17At the end of 2023, when the Chiefs (briefly) descended into a mid-season slump that head coach Andy Reid judiciously took full responsibility for, right-leaning sports pundits complained that Swift dominated game coverage and had become, as commentator Skip Bayless put it, “a distraction,” ignoring that the Chiefs won nine of the twelve games that Swift attended and that broadcasts showcased her a mere twenty-five seconds per three-hour game. OutKick founder Clay Travis blamed the team's poor offense on Kelce's “worthless Pfizer shots” and dubbed Swift “the Yoko Ono of the Chiefs dynasty.”18Super Bowl hype brought the haters to a rhetorical climax. Fixating on who was allowed to love football, Newsmax host Greg Kelly tried to shame Swifties who watched Chiefs games for the (very) few glimpses of Swift, deeming their behavior a sin—“totally over the top worshipping this . . . elevating her to an idol.”19 Conservative conspiracy theorists, including one-time GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, scorned the idea that a woman could be capable of so much power, never mind in football, without some kind of backing from an imaginary deep state focused on keeping President Biden in power.“I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Ramaswamy posted on X a few days before the Super Bowl. “And I wonder if there's a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let's see how it ages over the next 8 months.”20“Theories” usually reserved for the front page of tabloid rags posed as political dialogue claimed that Swift was a Pentagon asset and her relationship with Kelce a Democratic psyop election scheme, predicting she would announce allegiance to Biden on the field during halftime. A Monmouth University poll revealed that one in five Americans believed “that a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election actually exists.”21Yet while some tried to push Swift out of the football space, the NFL continued to embrace her, if not defend her. NFL analyst Ian Rapoport began the Super Bowl broadcast by assuring fans that “Taylor Swift is in Las Vegas,” admitting, “I'll never report bigger news today.” On Nickelodeon, Kelce's lower-third caption read “Taylor Swift's boyfriend—good at football,” while CBS's highly stylized team introductions included Kelce asking viewers “ARE YOU READY FOR IT?”—one of Swift's most oft-quoted lyrics—and winking, signposting that he was in on the fun, if not the political conspiracy theories that had recently surrounded the couple.Similarly, Swifties—donning red football jerseys emblazoned with SWIFT 89 (a reference to her 1989 album) or authentic NFL Chiefs and Eagles merchandise—welcomed Kelce with open arms to Eras in 2024. In Buenos Aires, with Kelce in attendance, Swift changed a line in her hit song “Karma” to “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to me.” For her eighty-seventh show (Kelce's number), she donned a sparkly yellow and red outfit—Chiefs’ colors. In London, when Kelce appeared on stage as a backup dancer, fans embraced it, noting on TikTok that they were more welcoming than football fans as they ate up the football imagery that summer. The staging of “So High School,” a song that posits how being in love is like “laughing in the middle of practice,” physically embodied a football narrative, from stadium lights to bleachers where the backup dancers replicated the moves of both the Chiefs’ cheerleaders and Kelce's on-field celebrations, culminating with Swift herself “swag surfin’”—the signature fan dance in Arrowhead Stadium—as the lights flashed red and yellow.Swift is one of modern society's most popular storytellers, a singer-songwriter who has achieved historic success by shaping gripping narratives around love and relationships that are sprinkled with so-called Easter eggs that keep fans invested. Why be a puzzle to your fans when you can make a puzzle for your fans? Football is not new to her oeuvre—on Lover (2019), her seventh studio album, “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” details teenage heartbreak at a homecoming dance. Now, football is a space where her life and lyrics intersect in real time. The rough-and-tumble gridiron was remade as a romantic tale that casts a wider net, broadening its appeal with stories of fathers watching games with their young daughters (which isn't to say this wasn't already happening).But that appeal made football's political turn easier. Amid a new season of football, Swift publicly confirmed to her 283 million Instagram followers that she was voting for Kamala Harris, signing her endorsement “childless cat lady,” a reference to Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance's oft-repeated insults regarding women without children. Within a day, over four hundred thousand people began the voter registration process at vote.gov—the website she included in her post—370,000 more than had logged in the day before.The endorsement sent Trump into a tailspin—he posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” to Truth Social—while solidifying the Democrats’ newfound ability to use football to political advantage, from the Senate campaign of Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker, in Texas, or the way Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro relentlessly pursued bringing the NFL draft to Pittsburgh. “The libs somehow winning football in the culture wars, I don't think I would have had it on my bingo card but I'm pretty psyched about it,” said one Harris campaign official, noting the grasp on patriotism the game holds.22Despite the emergence of the endzone “Trump Dance” celebration in the wake of Trump's election, the Swift–Kelce relationship speaks to political changes afoot in America, smoothing the pathway for Democrats to continue to capitalize on football's popularity, something that Walz, especially, leveraged, as his public persona is the opposite of toxic masculinity despite being a white, heteronormative, male, championship-winning football coach. That said, football remains the same game, plagued by its demons, still dangerous despite new safety protocols. So, while the love story crafted around “Tay-vis,” and by Swift enabled a politically embrace of football on the campaign while generating of for the it the game of its with the and who play That call from the if it is going to