Taylor Swift sparked a tsunami of sports betting. Then I stopped

It’s difficult to quantify the Swiftie Demographic’s influence on these bets, but preseason, Wired reached out to several sportsbooks including Betrivers, Draftkings, Fanduel and Trivalry, who said Taylor Swift’s influence is real, and they expect it to continue to influence their industry this season.

Tim Whitehead, head of sportsbooks at Betrivers, puts it succinctly. “As long as the biggest pop star in the world is still dating one of the most popular players in the NFL, we will leverage that narrative to attract new audiences,” he told Wired in a statement. But even early in the year, although Kells still attracts strong bets, the huge quick effect appears to have worn off. VanDuel noted that in two early games, which Swift did not attend, Kells’ teammates had similar betting levels to him. This month, a FanDuel spokesperson told Wired that interest in betting on Kelce “has gone to other playmakers on Tribal.”

Michael Narain, an associate professor of sports management at Brock University in Canada, attributes this to the US election dominating the news and betting tournaments, along with less attention-grabbing headlines in the couple’s relationship as they settle into their partnership. “The T. Swift influence is still there, it’s just been muted over the past year,” he says. “It’s not topical, it’s not huge momentum, but it’s still value for the books.”

A He studies from the University of Queensland in Australia published in December, found nearly 90 percent of the country’s regular sports bettors are male, and suggested this was due, at least in part, to “male-dominated” physical betting spaces over history, despite Smartphones are making gambling more accessible to female audiences. This pattern holds true for other countries, such as the United States, where only 28 percent of current sports bettors out of 2,000 surveyed were women according to A two-week survey by YouGov last year. “Unsurprisingly, betting companies are trying to capitalize on this shift, targeting women with new bets such as how many awards Taylor Swift will win at this year’s Grammys,” author Rohan Irving said in a statement about the study.

Despite the huge attention Swift has received from online sportsbooks since dating Kelce, she’s just one figure in a chorus in the new wave of narrative betting that has risen alongside the industry. In the past, narratives that hit the ropes with betting have focused on underdog or champion players and teams. Today the tales have expanded to include a wide range of competitions, from the Academy Awards, to the US presidential election, to reality television shows.

Avid sports gamblers are giving a little spin to the trend, says Jones, of FanDuel. “They look for defensive matchups, offensive matchups, weather, historical data; they don’t care who the guy’s dating,” they say. But many recreational bookmakers—which Jones says are an “overwhelming majority” of FanDuel’s customer base—look for narratives like Fast romance when betting.

Sportsbooks are “absolutely trying to convert a group of people who don’t bet to bettors,” Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico who has researched sports betting behaviors, says via email. But whether the based-based strategy differs from the usual marketing in the industry is less clear. “I don’t know that having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more harmful than any other combination of prop bets, free betting promotions, or other gimmicks they offer,” he says.

For Grubbs, it’s instead a broader issue about the appropriateness of gambling advertising, an unsettled debate that includes whether sportsbooks should be promoted on television 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-through” the content, the better. “When we see a story or something that’s trending, we’ll lean into it and try to distribute to a broader audience.”

Industry representatives I spoke with were hoping for a makeover if Swift was engaged or had a child with Kelce. “If Taylor Swift did the Super Bowl halftime show and the Chiefs were in it, that would break the whole world, the Internet, everything,” Cooper says.