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It’s difficult to quantify Swiftie’s demographic impact on these bets, but in the offseason, WIRED reached out to several sportsbooks, including BetRivers, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rivalry, who said the Taylor Swift effect was real and expected it to continue to impact their industry. this season. .
Tim Whitehead, head of sports betting at BetRivers, put it succinctly. “As long as the world’s biggest pop star continues to date one of the NFL’s most popular players, we will leverage that narrative to attract new audiences,” he told WIRED in a statement. But even at the beginning of the year, even though Kelce continued to attract big bets, the enormous Swift effect seemed to have disappeared. FanDuel noted that in two of the first games, neither of which Swift attended, Kelce’s teammates scored similar betting levels to him. This month, a FanDuel spokesperson told WIRED that interest in betting on Kelce “has leveled off to be in line with the other Chiefs playmakers.”
Michael Naraine, an associate professor of sports management at Brock University in Canada, attributes this to the US election dominating the news and betting cycles, along with less flashy headlines on the couple’s relationship as they adjusted to their partnership. . “The T. Swift effect still exists, it’s just faded over the last year,” he says. “It’s not as current, it’s not as high-momentum, but it’s still worth the books.”
TO study A study from the University of Queensland in Australia, published in December, found that almost 90 percent of the country’s regular sports bettors are men, and suggested this was at least partially because physical betting spaces were “male-dominated” throughout history, although smartphones make gambling more accessible to female audiences. This pattern holds in other countries, such as the United States, where only 28 percent of current sports bettors out of 2,000 surveyed were women, according to one study. two-week survey by YouGov last year. “Not surprisingly, betting companies are trying to take advantage of this shift, targeting women with novel bets like how many awards Taylor Swift will win at this year’s Grammys,” author Rohann Irving said in a statement about the study.
Despite the enormous attention Swift has received from online sports books since dating Kelce, she’s just another character in the chorus of the new wave of narrative betting that has emerged along with the industry. In the past, betting narratives that struck a chord with bettors focused on champion or underdog players and teams. Today, the stories being told have expanded to include a wide range of competitions, from the Oscars to the US presidential election to reality television shows.
FanDuel’s Jones says passionate sports players give short shrift to the trend. “They are analyzing defensive matchups, offensive matchups, weather, historical data; “They don’t care who the guy dates,” he says. But many recreational bettors, who Jones said make up “an overwhelming majority” of FanDuel’s customer base, look for narratives like the Swift-Kelce romance when they bet.
Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of New Mexico who has researched sports betting behaviors, says by email that sportsbooks “are absolutely trying to convert a group of non-gambling people into gamblers.” “. But it’s less clear whether a Swift-based strategy differs from typical industry marketing. “I don’t know if having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more pernicious than any other set of prop bets, free bet promotions, or other gimmicks they offer,” he says.
For Grubbs, it’s more about a broader question about the appropriateness of gambling advertising, an unresolved debate that includes whether bookmakers should advertise on television or be allowed to sponsor sports teams.
“At the end of the day, we are content creators,” says Cooper of BetOnline.ag, noting that the more “click-baity” the content is, the better. “When we see a story or something that’s trending, we’ll lean into that and try to distribute it to a broader audience.”
Industry representatives I spoke to were hopeful for a change should Swift become 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 ruin the whole world, the Internet, everything,” Cooper says.
