Tremendous Bowl 2024: Taylor Swift, the NFL, and two routes to cultural dominance

Someday on Sunday, the white-hot middle of the largest spectator occasions of the previous 12 months will arrive in Las Vegas. Their each transfer will probably be tracked by relentless media and much more relentless followers.

Additionally, a soccer sport will probably be performed.

There will probably be no scarcity of storylines at Tremendous Bowl LVIII, which — I’ll prevent the Google search — kicks off at 6:30 pm ET on February 11. Can Kansas Metropolis Chiefs coach Andy Reid and quarterback Patrick Mahomes win their second-straight title? Will Mr. Irrelevant — San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy — strike a blow for anybody who was ever picked final in gymnasium class and take residence the Lombardi trophy? Will Las Vegas sports activities books clear up on the $16 billion — greater than the entire GDP of Madagascar — People are projected to wager on the large sport? (My predictions: sure, no, and completely.)

What is going to make this Tremendous Bowl so necessary, at the very least for lots of the greater than 120 million People who will in all probability tune in to look at the sport, would be the anticipated presence of 1 Taylor Alison Swift. A short recap for anybody who till just lately took up residence beneath a rock: This previous fall, Swift began relationship Chiefs tight finish Travis Kelce and commenced displaying as much as his video games. Individuals — everybody, actually, however particularly guys like this — went loopy.

For all their variations — Swift ruthlessly mines her feelings for her music; feelings may end up in a 15-yard penalty within the NFL — what Swift and professional soccer have in widespread is sheer cultural weight.

Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing live performance tour ever, taking in additional than the subsequent two largest 2023 excursions mixed. She broke the document for many international streams ever on Spotify at greater than 26.1 billion in 2023 — or greater than three streams for each human on Earth — and had 4 of the ten most-consumed albums this 12 months, all with out truly releasing an album of recent music. When she made historical past along with her fourth Album of the 12 months Grammy final week, it was only one extra jewel within the tiara.

On the opposite facet, the NFL is to the remainder of the leisure trade what 6-foot-8, 365-pound Philadelphia Eagles left deal with Jordan Mailata could be to a peewee soccer participant. Of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023, NFL video games accounted for 93 of them, up from 82 in 2023 and 72 in 2020. The NFL pulls in about as a lot income because the NBA and MLB mixed. Of the 50 most useful sports activities franchises on this planet, 30 of them are NFL groups. By nearly each metric, the already dominant NFL goes up and to the appropriate.

Swift and the NFL are every larger than large. However what’s actually illustrative of American leisure immediately is how completely different their paths to the highest have been.

Nobody participant is greater than the NFL

When you try SportsPro’s rating of the 50 most marketable international athletes, you need to go all the way in which right down to 35 — previous NBA stars, F1 drivers, and soccer gamers — to get to an NFL participant: Travis Kelce. And with all due respect to Kelce’s Corridor of Fame profession, I’ve a sense that has extra to do along with his girlfriend than his 74 profession landing receptions.

In some other sport, the truth that essentially the most profitable crew, the Chiefs, relies within the league’s Twenty fifth-biggest media market could be an issue. When the small-market Denver Nuggets received final 12 months’s NBA finals, scores notably dipped. However such issues don’t matter within the NFL, the place the Chiefs set scores data in final 12 months’s Tremendous Bowl and can doubtless accomplish that once more.

Different sports activities are additionally depending on particular person gamers to generate curiosity: see Messi-mania in Main League Soccer. When Michael Jordan lastly retired, NBA viewership plunged for years because the league struggled to discover a new star round which to orbit. Distinction that to the NFL, which simply spent its first season since 1999 with out Tom Brady. Brady — as a lot because it pains everybody outdoors the better Boston space to say, together with me — is the NFL’s equal to Jordan, with another ring. But when Brady left, scores simply stored going up and up.

It wasn’t primarily Brady or Mahomes or Kelce that folks had been tuning in to see. It’s NFL soccer itself, and no participant is greater than the Nationwide Soccer League.

However nobody is greater than Taylor Swift.

A singular celebrity

If the NFL has made itself into the largest, strongest, most watched establishment in leisure, Swift has risen to the head by disrupting each establishment round her. Get right into a dispute together with your former document label over possession of your unique album masters? Simply re-record and launch the albums — and watch years-old songs zoom to the highest of the charts. Wish to make a live performance movie of your epic Eras Tour? Reduce out the middlemen and make a deal straight with the theater chain AMC — and watch that film turn into the highest-grossing live performance movie ever. As Swift informed Time journal, which made her its 2023 Individual of the 12 months: “I wager on myself.”

Swift is ready to do all this not simply because she has expertise and moxie, however as a result of she has been in a position to forge an unusually robust relationship along with her followers. That’s the way you create a lot enthusiasm that your live performance followers generate the equal of a 2.3-magnitude earthquake at a Seattle present (one twice as highly effective because the seismic exercise generated throughout a 2011 NFL playoff sport in Seattle).

Attending an Eras present isn’t not like attending, say, a Inexperienced Bay Packers sport at Lambeau Subject: The feelings are intense, the screaming by no means stops, and lots of people are in costume. The distinction is that everybody at an Eras present is there to see Taylor and Taylor alone — and he or she all the time wins.

So when Swift meets the NFL at Tremendous Bowl LVIII, it received’t simply be a collision of pop and jocks, men and women, glitter and dirt. It’ll be the singular celebrity contrasted with what could be America’s final, finest collective trade.

And may Travis Kelce get down on one knee earlier than Swift after the sport — one thing that, like every part else within the Tremendous Bowl, you’ll be able to place a wager on — then by way of one prism, it’ll be a traditional American story: the soccer captain and the homecoming queen residing fortunately ever after.

Considered one other method, it’ll nonetheless be one other form of traditional American story: a company mega-merger that finally ends up with the large getting larger.

This story appeared initially in In the present day, Defined, Vox’s flagship every day e-newsletter. Enroll right here for future editions.