A rumoured relationship has seen fans flock to wear a supposed dream boyfriend’s football shirt

Taylor Swift is, probably, the most famous person on this strange planet. Her Eras tour is set to become the highest-grossing of all time, likely reaching the big one billion dollars mark as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Not only are the seats within the stadium selling out, but those fans who weren’t lucky enough to get tickets (or fork out thousands at resale) are camping out just to hear her belt out the 45-track setlist. Her early merch goes for thousands on resale sites (a Lover heart-shaped vinyl now costs upwards of £1,000), and her fans are more than happy to pay the price – such is the awesome power of Taylor Swift’s specific strain of fame.

In the grand tradition of rabid fandoms, there’s also a huge emotional investment in her private life (which unarguably can become very public very quickly). Swift sent the rumour mill into overdrive by attending the NFL game where her supposed new guy, Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce, was playing. Swifties went into overdrive, and performed retrospective tea leaf readings on TikTok and Reels by way of her old lyrics: “And I can see you years from now in a bar/ Talking over a football game” from 2010’s “Mean”, and “That’s when you came in wearing a football helmet and said/ ;Okay, let’s talk'” from “Stay Stay Stay”.

But her fans have also bumped up the sales of Kelce’s merch. Global purchases of his shirt – a very Bring It On scarlet jersey with the number 87 on the back – skyrocketed by a massive 400 per cent according to ESPN. It tracks. Forbes reported that merch sales roughly adds around $87 million to her portfolio. And there’s plenty of it: T-shirts! Friendship bracelets! Vinyl! Which is most surprising since Swift came to fame at a time when vinyl-first artists were all but gone (a 2022 Guardian article found that the Midnights LP pushed UK record sales above 5.5 million). That’s the Taylor Swift effect.

But this feels a bit different. Even the most experienced of pollsters would struggle to pull together a Venn diagram of Swifties and true Kansas City Chiefs fans – but one can assume the crossover would be pretty slight. And yet millions are buying football jerseys at around £100 a pop as a tribute to two people they’ll probably never meet who might be in a relationship with one another. It’s tour merch for the tabloids; a souvenir of a pop cultural moment that may be completely fleeting. Swifties perhaps want something tangible as a signpost of her life, and thus a signpost of theirs.

It’s hard to replicate or compute the exact formula behind Swift’s success. But maybe the fans see Swift living out their dream in real time: a vicarious proxy popstar that releases banger after banger, and one who, after a string of broken hearts, cheers on her star football player love interest at the big game from the bleachers. Now that’s a proven formula.