Whether you love or loathe their ubiquity there is no escaping the whirlwind romance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
The record-breaking singer went public with her relationship to the triple-Super Bowl-winning tight end in September, and ever since then, we can’t stop talking about them.
Whether it’s complaining about how much attention they’re getting or speculating about any future betrothments, everybody seems to have an opinion about the pair.
Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce’s Combined Net Worth Will Blow Your MindPHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY NEWSWEEK/GETTY
But they’re certainly not the only celebrity sports couple to capture the public’s imagination; our fascination with the world of entertainment meeting the sports arena can be traced back to the 1950s when screen siren Marilyn Monroe married baseballer Joe DiMaggio.
“The top mix in terms of media exposure seems to be athletes and entertainers,” Eric Smallwood tells Newsweek. Smallwood is the president of Apex Marketing Group which has conducted research into the economic impact of Swift and Kelce’s relationship.
“It’s taking people from the top of their respective industries and that just blends nicely and becomes a conversation piece.”
Since then, there’s been no shortage of high-profile couples whether they’ve stood the test of time or not. Think Spice Girl Victoria Beckham and her soccer-playing husband David Beckham, aka Posh and Becks. Then there’s one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time, Tom Brady, and the highest-paid supermodel in history, Gisele Bündchen. Other A-list sports and entertainment couples include Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi, or singer Ciara and football player, Russell Wilson.
Sport and pop celebrity couples “hold such power” when it comes to famous pairs, according to Hannah Yelin, a reader of media and culture at Oxford Brookes University and author of Celebrity Memoir: From Ghostwriting to Gender Politics. That’s because the power lies in their “crossover appeal.”
“Celebrity couples are always branding partnerships,” she told Newsweek, and that there’s an intrigue when one famous person begins dating someone unexpected, we get to “know them in a new context.”
“We may know their cultural output in their own arena thoroughly. But we see a different side to them in their partner’s arena,” Yelin adds.
Yelin explains that an A-list crossover couple is a great “business strategy,” which was evident when the “Bad Blood” singer first went public with Kelce.
The NFL’s TV ratings have jumped astronomically too, especially with women. It just recorded the highest regular-season viewership by women, including a 53 percent surge with teenage girls and a total of more than 2 million women of all ages tuning in since Swift started attending games, which can only mean more advertising opportunities from TV and on-field exposure, according to IDX.
Some data has even suggested the Taylor Effect brought a 20 percent increase in sponsorships, per The Wrap.
But how do the Kansas City Chiefs star and Swift size up in comparison to other celebrity couples?
Two of the highest-earning celebrity couples in the world until recently, not just in the entertainment-sport crossover realm, were the Beckhams and Brady and Bündchen. They were worth a combined $800 million and $650 million respectively until the quarterback and supermodel split in late 2022, per CEO World.
As for, Swift and Kelce, the balance of their combined personal fortune is definitely tipped in the pop star’s favor, especially after she joined the billionaire’s club in 2023.
She’s estimated to be worth about $1.1 billion after more than doubling her wealth last year, while Kelce’s estimated $50 million personal fortune pales in comparison. Those figures are based on estimates by Forbes magazine.
However, there are multiple ways to measure a celebrity couple’s value beyond what’s sitting in their respective bank accounts. It also has to do with the brand value and cultural impact they can have.
Smallwood’s research found Swift brought $331.5 million of equivalent brand value to the Chiefs from when she went public with Kelce on September 24 to January 22 alone.
“The equivalent brand value is what it would cost for a brand to advertise across media where they have gotten exposure from TV to print, radio and social media,” Smallwood previously told Newsweek, adding that in the same period, there were 100,000 mentions of the couple in traditional media alone.
But measuring other couples’ cultural or brand impact is almost impossible if they began dating before the internet, or even before social media.
Even without that data, one thing that tracks with all the high-profile sporting-entertainment couples, even as far back as Monroe and DiMaggio, and it’s that we became more fascinated by them when they are each at the top of their game.
Take the Beckhams, Victoria who was then known as Posh Spice when she started dating David in 1997, was one of the most famous women in the world as part of the girl group Spice Girls. David himself was a household name thanks to his prowess on the soccer pitch with Manchester United and carried the hopes of his national England to win a World Cup. Once they started dating, their names were everywhere, even more so than normal—by their standards.
The same can be said for Brady and Bündchen, Monroe and DiMaggio, and now Swift and Kelce.
“If the Chiefs had not won last year’s Super Bowl and then made the playoffs this year, Kelce’s relationship with Taylor would have definitely been a different story in terms of exposure,” Smallwood explains.
There is no doubt that Swift is one of the most successful music artists in history, her current Eras world tour is already the highest-grossing live music tour of all time with months of it remaining. The subsequent Eras concert movie broke box office records and Swift has dominated music charts and streaming platforms with her multitude of releases.
Kelce himself is no stranger to record-breaking success. He just won his third Super Bowl with the Chiefs and holds a record of touchdown connections in NFL history alongside his quarterback, Patrick Mahomes.
That combo of two people at the elite level in their respective fields plays a big role in the public’s fascination with them.
“It’s all intertwined with success,” Smallwood says, adding “his on the field and hers on the stage definitely helped propel this thing along further.”
But another advantage Swift and Kelce have on their side is that so much of their relationship is played out on social media. Not necessarily their own, but many of the people that idolize them.
“The fan bases of older generational duos such as Jay-Z and Beyonce and Tom Brady and Giselle, while just as ‘popular’ are less visible on social media compared to Kelce and Swift.
“By way of example, Swift has nearly ten times the Instagram followers than Giselle does and this social media presence equates often to greater media impressions and visibility,” Frank Salzano, a managing partner of Salzano Ettinger Lampert & Wilson law firm tells Newsweek.
