Taylor Swift does not care if you are mad that she is heavily featured on NFL broadcasts.
Whenever Swift attends one of Travis Kelce’s games with the Kansas City Chiefs, her presence instantly becomes a massive story. Last week, she traveled to Green Bay, where she acknowledged one fan with a sign (an interaction that left the fan “sobbing”) and greeted fans on the way to her box suite. She gave no interviews, called for no attention, and simply watched her boyfriend play (and lose 27-19 to a Packers team that kept itself in the playoff hunt).
So you’ll have to pardon Swift if she isn’t worried about football fans who rage over the NFL’s coverage of her.
“I’m just there to support Travis,” Swift, the 2023 Person of the Year, told Time in the outlet’s annual feature. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images
After all, as Swift noted, she has very little sense of when the cameras focus on her.
“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she told Time. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when then [sic] camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.”
It should probably come as little surprise to Swift, who sold out 151 shows across five continents in a matter of hours when she announced her Eras Tour, that the cameras find her quickly. The networks and broadcasts don’t feel they have much to apologize for, either. After all, Swift is such a singular star that her presence at games boosts the ratings (whether angry fans like it or not).
As NBC’s Mike Tirico noted last week: “This is broadcast, and hundreds of friends of my daughter who were watching the game were like, ‘That was really cool that you guys did that.’ This is broadcasting. You’re trying to reach a broad audience, right? And little bits that don’t take away from anything that happens on the football field, that’s going to welcome your audience. Don’t you want to grow the audience overall?”
After all, a little exposure to the sport can make a fan out of anyone, even if they previously held little interest.
“Football is awesome, it turns out,” Swift told Time (“playfully,” according to Sam Landry, the author of the story). “I’ve been missing out my whole life.”
A number of Swifties around the world might feel the same.
Swift told Time that her mentality has shifted over the years under the intense scrutiny of being a star.
“I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter,” Swift said. “Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.