How to sum up Taylor Swifts record-breaking Eras tour? Unavoidable and unignorable, given its scale and economic impact: the highest-grossing concert tour of all time boosted tourism, local businesses and the hospitality industry more significantly than the 2024 Summer Olympics and the Super Bowl. Dancing from concertgoers at several stops registered seismic activity.
In a world stratified by endless streaming options, over the past two years Swift has felt like the worlds only ubiquitous, monolithic pop culture figure, drawing unprecedented levels of engagement among white women and girls in particular.
Now, the most powerful people in womens football have turned their attention to Swift.
Michele Kang, the American owner of Washington Spirit, Olympique Lyonnais Feminin and London City Lionesses, has told her players and staff they are not competing with mens football teams for eyeballs but the entertainment business Swift included. You all have seven evenings a week, she began at a media conference to mark her purchase of London City. You can go see a Taylor Swift concert. Why would you come to watch womens football? We have to convince people this is the best form of entertainment.
Nikki Doucet, the chief executive of Womens Professional Leagues Ltd, the company that has taken control of the Womens Super League (WSL) and Championship from the Football Association (FA), spoke to the Guardian newspaper in August about the importance of capturing your Taylor Swift fanbase: fans who had discovered the womens game through the Lionesses and had no prior affiliation with mens football. In a September address with wider media, Doucet stressed the need for womens football to find its own language and identity: the game should be unafraid to try new things if it was serious about growth. Maybe we want to share friendship bracelets, or something the mens game might never think of but it might work for our game, she said.
At talk of friendship bracelets, Doucet met her greatest point of resistance online from womens football fans who felt that importing what the New York Times called the badge of the Swiftie fandom would dilute the integrity of a sport often battling to be taken seriously. Followers of womens football are creating its culture in real time often online and as a result the nature of fandom is constantly reinventing and reflecting on itself. That newness brings a certain malleability to the sport, but fans are understandably protective when it comes to preserving what they see as the best parts of that space. Womens football already has its own ecosystem and idiosyncrasies, many argue why does it need to borrow some from Swift?
Some talked as if making friendship bracelets was about to become a condition of entry for womens games. Others wondered if Doucet was simply grabbing at Swift as a figure popular with millions of women and girls.
What actually happened was that, following its takeover, WPLL commissioned an external company to break down the womens football fanbase, the results of which were analysed in January and February last year. Research took four months and comprised over 150 hours of interviews across the country with more than 60 people from the ages of 10 to 60.
The differences that emerged were not based on age, sex or geography but in the respondents relationships with football, spawning three different groups. The first is the core fan: the intensely loyal, the season-ticket holders, those abreast of formations and tactics. They disproportionately over-influence because theyre the biggest cheerleaders, theyre the most vocal and theyre just so important, Doucet tells .
Then comes the secondary fan, who has come to the womens game via mens football but does not necessarily have the capacity to follow both with the same devotion. They may flit in and out around international breaks and major tournaments.
Group three is the free fan, or, in Doucets words, the one thats never watched mens football before. In most cases, their first encounter with football is the Lionesses. They are still learning the games key characters, rivalries and rules.
Doucets Guardian interview coincided with Swifts final shows at Wembley, when media estimates predicted an impending £300million ($380m) boost to the London economy due to Swifts impact. Doucet attended one of the concerts. When I looked around that particular stadium and you see whos in the crowd, it looks similar to the Lionesses crowd and the Euros crowd, she says. It doesnt look similar to a mens football crowd. What were trying to do here is get womens football to be more culturally ingrained in our society and bring it to more people who may not necessarily watch mens football.
Part of it was maybe trying to use an analogy more so for the clubs and the football stakeholders to show what an incredible opportunity it is. Traditionally, they dont really talk to that audience. Swift, Doucet says, is someone who has listened to her fans, has created a massive community thats open for everybody and is giving her fanbase what they want. She listens. She responds. Its that type of concept: are we listening to our fanbase? Are we giving them the content they want? Do they have the stories that they need to follow the teams or the players or (enhance) their understanding of the game?
Doucet got her first friendship bracelet at a WSL game at Tottenham Hotspur. Several players wore them to the WSLs media launch day in September. The West Ham United goalkeeper Kinga Szemiks was a gift from team-mates and Aston Villas Maz Pacheco wore one from a fan. I just love getting bracelets from the fans, Pacheco, 26, said. I change them every day. (They bring them) to every game. Its beautiful.
Its tapping into different behaviours and listening, thinking, and responding, Doucet adds. Is that something our fanbase would like? Is it something they wouldnt like? And if they wouldnt? OK, fine.
Doucets data has already demonstrated that the buying habits of womens football fans differs from those in the mens game. This is another opportunity to drive asset value for their club, she says. We have to understand: whats a great experience? How are we creating the right experience for womens football, across all of the clubs, that people want to keep coming back to?
There is little overlap between Swifties and mens football fans. Andrew James, 29, describes himself as an Evertonian Swiftie not in that order, and enjoys rewriting Swifts songs with an Everton twist (see his illustrated reimagining of Swifts All Too Well addressed to Dominic Calvert-Lewin from the perspective of Tom Davies).
Im into them both for similar reasons, even though theres not really much crossover in how I experience them, he says. Im aware that people do kind of see them as very different things. Ive definitely got two different sides to my X account.
An Everton fan living in London, he watched Everton Women win the Merseyside derby during the mens international break but does not go to womens games regularly. He wonders if the womens game can borrow from Swifts habit of making every show unique by dropping hints and announcements. Every concert could be a night that she announces something, he says. If there are ways to hold off announcing signings on social media and having them at the stadium, that would be a much more exciting thing. It will give them extra reasons to go to the match.
The boundaries between Swifties and womens football fans are a little more permeable. Players from the 2015 World Cup-winning U.S. Womens National Team joined Swift on stage that year for the East Rutherford concert of her 1989 World Tour and her music has featured prominently in the teams marketing through the years. In 2023, Swift filmed a video announcing Alex Morgans inclusion in the World Cup squad. Swift is also a frequent topic on Arsenal Womens official TikTok, with players asked to choose their favourite albums and songs.
When I was growing up, football fans and music fans were two very separate types of people, says Oli, 26, a Swiftie of 16 years who follows Manchester Citys mens and womens teams. But now I think and social media really helped in this it has merged. Fan culture has infiltrated sport in a way that weve never seen before.
Womens football culture, he says, comes heavily from pop culture and Stan culture and that level of fandom. The chronically online strand of WSL fandom has its own in-jokes, narratives, heroes and villains; some fans are as likely to root for individual players as they are clubs; a good portion of the rivalry between the former Arsenal and Chelsea managers, Jonas Eidevall and Emma Hayes, was stoked online and was the first of its kind in womens football.
The anger preceding Eidevalls Arsenal departure including Jonas Out graffiti and a fan displaying a cardboard P45 at a match felt like new territory, tonally, for the womens game and something more in keeping with mens football. There were parallels, though, with the pop Stan culture of the 2010s, when fandoms from Directioners to KatyCats to Beliebers and Arianators warred with each other online.
In pop culture and I think its bled into football, especially womens football we have become a little bit more defensive of the things that we like when people attack them, continues Oli. I would argue the Swifties were the start of that.
Much of the online Swiftie presence is devoted to dissecting her lyrics and Easter Eggs, the hidden messages laced through Swifts lyrics, social media posts and iconography. There are so many storylines built into her music, says Swiftie and Arsenal fan Laura, 32. Its very easy to buy into as a consumer, particularly with how she positions herself with all of her ex-boyfriends. Even if its made up, its a personal connection. I think one thing that is probably missing for womens football, just because its not had the time to develop, is the heroes and villains of the game. In mens football, in terms of the personal connection, there are teams you hate or players you love. Thats something she plays on quite well.
Taylor Swift teaches fans about her backstory and with the eggs, shes communicating with them and is cultivating a long-term fandom that is showing up, Doucet adds. Our insights would suggest the free fan is more attracted to the players personalities and theyre learning about the technical side. Our job is to make sure that, no matter who you are, you can find womens football and you can find something for you. Hopefully, you can convert more people to become a core fan. Ultimately the success of any league is to have as many core fans as possible.
Helpfully, Swifts impact on the NFL, via her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, provides a recent case study. The NFL had been making efforts to attract greater numbers of female fans, but Swifts attendance at matches supercharged everything. Prior to Super Bowl LVIII, U.S. brand consulting and analytics firm Apex Marketing Group calculated that Swift had generated $331.5m in equivalent brand value how much they would have had to spend for the same level of exposure for the Chiefs and the NFL. Super Bowl LVIIIs record 123.7million average viewers was widely attributed to the 24 per cent leap in engagement from 18 to 24-year-old women. All in all, the NFL enjoyed its highest regular-season female viewership since its records began.
Perhaps the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, put it best: People are talking about the game that werent talking about the game yesterday, he said. And whatever that reason is, Im good with it.
The caveat, of course, is that the NFL had the actual Taylor Swift to draw eyeballs. More significantly, Swift also has engaged little with womens sport despite, at several points in her career, positioning some strands of feminism as central to her brand identity.
Swifts role in the sphere is different to, for instance, the actress Natalie Portman, who leads the majority-female ownership group behind NWSL side Angel City. Swift has not publicly backed Wrexham AFC Women, who have a sponsorship deal in place with the beverage company owned by Swifts close friend Blake Lively (Swift is godmother to Lively and Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds three daughters). Since dating Kelce, Swift has enjoyed a friendship with Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany Mahomes (a former soccer player turned fitness influencer), who both own stakes in the NWSL team Kansas City Current but she has not been seen at their matches.
She is under no obligation to but its a point worth noting, at least in a narrative sense, when positioning Swift as crucial to the growth of womens sport. Her absence becomes more glaring when contrasted with her presence at mens sporting events such as the U.S. Open in September, where she made headlines for dancing alongside Kelce.
Still, Swifts involvement has precipitated an important shift in how sports executives think about their audiences: here is an audience you have overlooked and underserved but that is primed to follow sport. Even if those women do not remain lifelong fans of the NFL, Swift has triggered a conversational shift in sports boardrooms. The designer behind Swifts viral Chiefs puffer coat, for example, now has a merchandising deal with the NFL. Swifts gameday wardrobe sparked conversations over team apparel for women.
We often talk about the power of the female economy and that, for a long time, mens sport hasnt even spoken to women never mind womens sport being a space which is opening a new market, says Jenny Mitton, a managing partner at M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment.
Mitton and her team have included Swift in their discussions with chief marketing officers and key decision-makers to underscore the commercial opportunity in womens sports. Because (womens sport) is new, we dont have anything to compare it to, she explains. The product on the pitch is the same, but everything around it is different to mens sport. The closest thing we probably have is how weve seen the same tactics and the same audience react and behave to the likes of Taylor Swift. Thats probably the closest model we can compare with in terms of showing theres an opportunity. You cant really go: Look at mens sport we can get here some day, because actually its a different audience. Were deploying different tactics. Probably, the most like-for-like comparison is with role models and icons like Taylor.
Since its inception, the WSL, broadly speaking, operated on the assumption that existing fans of a mens football team would naturally want to watch the clubs womens side. Clubs focused their marketing on pulling both together. The Womens Euros proved a turning point when sales figures revealed that 75 per cent of general ticket purchases were made by fans previously unknown to the FA and European footballs governing body UEFA.
That was the first time we were like: OK maybe its not just the mens fans we need to go after, says Mitton. The low-hanging fruit is this audience weve never spoken to before who probably think football isnt for them. Actually, it is.
Doucet has spoken at length with fans who have found, in womens football, a community that feels safer and more inclusive than mens football. Like Doucet, Amelia, 26, a fan of Fulham men, the Lionesses and Lewes Women, found similarities between the Eras tour audience and the Lionesses crowd. Both felt like inclusive spaces for women and girls, where their dreams and inner lives were respected.
Whenever I think of a womens football match, I always feel quite safe and I really enjoy being around all the women who enjoy the same things as me, she says. It can be hard, as a woman, to feel like you can enjoy something without being ridiculed. One of the similarities between Swifties at the concert and women who enjoy womens football matches is reclaiming it as your hobby and unapologetically enjoying it.
Food for thought, then, for the key movers and shakers at board level in womens football. Fandom will always carve out its own identity beyond their interventions but over the next few years those at the top will make winning more fans a priority.
Plainly, Swift will not do all their work for them. Her very white fanbase will not, for example, solve the games well-documented issues with diversity, but significantly she has stakeholders looking beyond the white, male model of sport fandom. A 2024 study by Snapchat found that 47 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds believe the world of traditional sports fandom is inaccessible to them unless they meet certain criteria; mens football is infamous for demanding its female fans prove their credentials. In that vacuum, womens football has an opportunity to expand.
None of that should be to the detriment of hardcore fans of womens football. Equally, there is nothing to stop Swifties from following mens football should they choose to.
I totally understand why core fans are like: Dont change this world. I love it. I love football. Dont bring in friendship bracelets, concludes Mitton. But if we dont talk to audiences in different ways and show people who have probably never been served football, how are we going to grow that base? For these sports to thrive and survive, we need to bring these new audiences in.
We are trying to listen as best we can to continue to make good decisions for the league and to help, adds Doucet. I think you have a core fan who is really educated, but probably a little bit nervous about change because everybody believes theres something super special about womens football. We do, too. I cannot overemphasise the importance of the fan insights: any decision we will make is made on informed insight. Were constantly talking, learning and evolving as the fan, the broader market and the industry evolves.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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