What Taylor Swift and Chiefs Fans Have in Common

It’s fall, which means the Kansas City Chiefs are back on TV and, inevitably, so is Taylor Swift. 

Taylor Swift and the Chiefs have been part of the same conversation for a few years now. What started with cameras cutting to her in the stands turned Chiefs games into something you could follow for the football, the celebrity sightings, the outfits or, depending on your group chat, all of the above.

Watching Sunday Night Football recently, I started wondering whether all that crossover showed up in the audiences themselves. Taylor and the Chiefs have occupied the same cultural space for a few years now, but had their audiences actually started to look more alike?

So I decided to put the audiences side by side and see what showed up.

Comparing Taylor Swift, Chiefs and 49ers Fans

I started with three official websites: the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the San Francisco 49ers. The first two I don’t need to explain, but the 49ers I decided were my control group. Mostly because I needed another major NFL fan base to keep this test in check, and partly because I’m from the Bay Area and this is my experiment. 

For each analysis, I kept the audience description intentionally simple. I asked our platform to look at people who are fans of or interested in the Chiefs, Taylor Swift and the 49ers.

That was it. No Travis Kelce in the Chiefs prompt. No football in Taylor's. No assumptions about women watching the NFL, Swifties buying jerseys or Chiefs fans suddenly developing strong opinions about Red (Taylor's Version). If there was crossover, I wanted the data to find it without me putting it there first.

What came back initially looked pretty much like football. Go figure. 

The Chiefs had an audience segment of locally rooted supporters interested in Kansas City pride, Arrowhead Stadium, tailgating and team history. They also had a segment who followed statistics, player projections, injuries and matchup analysis.

And the 49ers produced their own versions. One audience segment centered on regional identity and game-day traditions, while another followed statistics, fantasy football, roster decisions and predictions. So as a control, my hometown team was doing its job.

What the Chiefs Audience Data Showed

Then there were the Chiefs’ Game-Day Socials, a younger audience concentrated between ages 20 and 34 whose interests stretched well beyond football.

Their interests included live music, short-form video, streetwear, concert events, food festivals and social media creators. They searched for watch parties and sports bars, followed Chiefs-related short-form creators and posted game-day outfits and stadium photography.

Our platform described their relationship with Chiefs football as a “social lifestyle.” That sounded awfully familiar after looking at Taylor’s audience.

Her Eras Socialites were younger fans who experienced Taylor through TikTok, Instagram, streaming and group chats. They created fan edits, planned concert outfits, made friendship bracelets, shared memes and followed fan communities.

Obviously, friendship bracelets and sports bars aren't the same behavior. But there was something familiar underneath. Both audiences had swept a whole range of things — music, outfits, food, friends, going out — into a single way of being a fan. 

How 49ers Fans Compared

This was about the point where I needed the 49ers to keep me honest. They had lifestyle-oriented audiences too. Red & Gold Stylemakers, for example, connected the team with streetwear, sneaker culture, jerseys and limited-edition fashion drops. Another segment planned trips around games, stadiums, dining and entertainment. So some expansion beyond the actual football game clearly wasn't unique to Kansas City.

But the Chiefs' Game-Day Socials were broader in a really interesting way. Our platform grouped music, nightlife, food, creators, fashion, photography, celebrity culture and live events around the same younger audience. With the 49ers, those same lifestyle behaviors tended to split off into more specific groups, like a fashion audience here and a travel audience there.

That difference stuck with me, because it was the same thing I'd noticed about Taylor. Her Eras Socialites carried the fashion, music and social behavior together in one younger audience.

What Audience Overlap Can Look Like

I went into this half expecting our platform to hand me a neat little audience of football-loving Swifties. It didn't, and I'm glad.

The similarity between Taylor's fans and the Chiefs' Game-Day Socials was in the shape of the audience. In both, a whole mix of lifestyle interests and behaviors had gathered in one group instead of splitting into more specialized segments. That doesn't mean I've secretly found a group of Swifties inside Chiefs Kingdom. The data can't tell me that.

What it can tell me is that the 49ers looked different. Their lifestyle behaviors showed up across separate audience segments, with fashion in one place and travel in another. So what I'd actually watch for is how those behaviors cluster: whether they stay packed into one audience or scatter across a few.

We tend to look for audience overlap in the obvious places: age, interests, the same creators or cultural references. But two audiences can look alike in a way that has nothing to do with what they're into. A fandom big enough to fold music, fashion, nightlife and food into one group of people is a very different thing from one that files all of that into separate segments, even when the interests underneath are the same.

Taylor's younger fans looked like that. So did the Chiefs'. And there are probably a lot more audiences out there that seem ordinary interest by interest, right up until you notice how much of a life those interests add up to.