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

It’s hard to quantify the influence of the Swift demographic on these bets, but previously, Wired reached out to several sportsbooks, including BetDriver, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rivalry, which said the Taylor Swift effect was real and expected to influence their industry this season. This season will have an impact.

Tim Whitehead, head of sportsbook Betterverse, put it succinctly. “As 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, with Kells still attracting strong bets, the exotic Swift effect seemed to have worn off. FanDuel noted that in two early games, not attended by Swift, Kelce’s teammates earned similar bet levels to him. This month, a FanDuel spokesperson told Wired that interest in betting on Kelce “stands on par with other playmakers on the majors.”

Michael Narine, associate professor of sport management at Canada’s Brock University, says it’s the US election dominating the news and the couple’s relationship with the prop betting circle occupying headlines as their partnership settles in. “The T. Swift effect is still there, it’s just been muted in the last year,” he says. “It’s not as topical, it’s not as fast-paced, but it’s still worth the books.”

A Study A study from the University of Queensland in Australia, published in December, found that about 90 percent of the country’s regular sports bettors are men, and suggested that this is at least partly due to a “male-dominated” history for physical betting sites, even though smartphones are made by women. Gambling is more accessible to audiences. This pattern holds in other countries, such as the United States, where only 28 percent of the 2,000 current sports bettors surveyed were women. YouGov’s two-week survey last year “It’s not surprising that betting companies are trying to capitalize on this shift, targeting women with novelties such as how many awards Taylor Swift will win at this year’s Grammys,” author Rohan Irving said in a release about the study.

Despite the scant attention from online sportsbooks since dating Kelce, he’s just one character in a chorus of a new wave of narrative bets that has sprung up alongside the industry. In the past, betting details that focused on underdog or champion players and teams struck a chord with bettors. Today, spilled stories have expanded to include a wide range of competitions, from the Oscars to the US presidential election, to reality TV shows.

Ardent sports gamblers buck this trend a bit, says Asa Jones of FanDuel. “They’re looking at defensive matchups, offensive matchups, weather, historical data; “They don’t care who the guy’s dating,” he says. But many recreational bettors—who Jones says make up the “overwhelming majority” of FanDuel’s customer base—look for details like the Swift-Kells romance while playing.

Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico who studies sports betting behavior, said in an email that sportsbooks are “trying to convert a group of people who are not betting into a group of people who are not betting on the betters.” But it is less clear whether a momentum-based strategy differs from normal marketing in the industry. “I don’t know that having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more harmful than any other set of prop bets, free bet promos or other disguises they offer,” he says.

For Grubbs, it’s instead a broader question of the appropriateness of gambling advertising, a volatile debate that includes whether sportsbooks should be televised or allowed to sponsor sports teams.

“At the end of the day, we’re content creators,” says BetOnline.ag’s Cooper, noting that the more “click-betty” the content is, the better. “When we see a storyline or something that’s trending, we’re going to lean into it and try to distribute it to a wider audience.”

The industry representatives I spoke with were optimistic that any turnaround should get busy quickly or have a baby with Kells. “If Taylor Swift ever did a Super Bowl halftime show and the headliners were in it, it would break the whole world, the internet, everything,” Cooper said.