It's hard to determine the impact of the Swifty demographic on these bets, but this preseason, Wired reached out to multiple sportsbooks, including Betrayal, DraftKings, Fanduel, and Rivalry, which said the Taylor Swift effect was real, and hopefully it will continue this fall. The season will continue to influence their industry. ,
Tim Whitehead, sportsbook head at BetRivers, put it successfully. “As long as the world's biggest pop star is still dating one of the NFL's most popular players, we'll tap into that narrative to attract new audiences.” But even at the start of the year, despite Kelce still attracting strong bets, the external Swift effect was shut down. Fanduel noted that in the two opening games, in which neither Swift participated, Kelce's teammates placed similar betting levels on him. This month, a Fanduel spokesperson told Wired that interest in betting on Kelce “has fallen in line with other playmakers at the majors.”
Michael Narine, an associate professor of sport management at Brock University in Canada, dominated it for the U.S. election and equated betting circles with prop betting, drawing less attention to the couple's relationship than they did to their partnership. Had settled. “The T. Swift effect is still present, it's just been muted over the last year,” he says. “It's not as timely, it's not as high-speed, but it's still valuable for books.”
A Study A study from the University of Queensland in Australia, published in December, found that about 90 percent of the country's regular sports bettors are male, and suggested that this was, at least in part, due to physical betting venues being “male-dominated”. Although smartphones do make gambling more accessible to the female audience. This pattern holds in other countries, like the US, where only 28 percent of the 2,000 current sports bettors surveyed were women, according to a Two-week survey by YouGov Last year. “It's surprising that betting companies are attempting to capitalize on this shift, targeting women with novelties such as predicting how many awards Taylor Swift will win at this year's Grammys,” author Rohan Irving said in a statement about the study. Said in the release.
Despite the attention Swift has received from online sportsbooks since dating Kelce, she is only one character in a chorus in the new wave of narrative betting that has grown along with the industry. In the past, betting narratives that struck chords with bookmakers focused on underdog or champion players and teams. Today The Tales Spoon has expanded to include a wide range of competitions, from the Oscars, to the US presidential elections, to reality TV shows.
Jones, from Fanduel, says the artful sports gambler has little to do with this trend. “They're looking at defensive matchups, offensive matchups, weather, historical data; They’re not caring who the guy is dating,” he says. But many recreational bettors—who Jones says make up “an overwhelming majority” of Fanduel's customer base—seek narratives like the Swift-Kellas romance when wagering.
Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico who has researched sports betting behavior, says over email that sportsbooks are “trying to convert a group of people who are not wagering into bettors. ” But whether a SWIFT-based strategy differs from the industry's usual marketing is less clear. “I don't know that having Taylor Swift prop bets is any more dangerous than any other set of prop bets, free bet promos, or other gimmicks that they offer,” he says.
For Grubbs, it is a broader question of the appropriateness of gambling advertising, an uncertain debate that includes whether sportsbooks should promote on television or be allowed to sponsor sports teams.
“At the end of the day, we are content creators,” says Betonline.ag's Cooper, noting that the more “click-baity” the content, the better. “When we see a story or something that's trending, we're going to lean into that and try to distribute it to a wider audience.”
Industry representatives I spoke with were hopeful about a change should Swift get engaged or have a baby with Kelce. “If Taylor Swift ever did a Super Bowl halftime show and the Chiefs were in it, it would break the whole world, the Internet, everything,” Cooper says.