Taylor Swift, the future of fandom and a dilemma facing women’s football

How to sum up Taylor Swift’s 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 world’s only ubiquitous, monolithic pop culture figure, drawing unprecedented levels of engagement among white women and girls in particular.

Now, the most powerful people in women’s 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 men’s 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 women’s football? We have to convince people this is the best form of entertainment.”

Nikki Doucet, the chief executive of Women’s Professional Leagues Ltd, the company that has taken control of the Women’s 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 women’s game through the Lionesses and had no prior affiliation with men’s football. In a September address with wider media, Doucet stressed the need for women’s 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 men’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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. Women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 they’re the biggest cheerleaders, they’re the most vocal and they’re just so important,” Doucet tells .

Then comes the secondary fan, who has come to the women’s game via men’s 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 Doucet’s words, “the one that’s never watched men’s football before”. In most cases, their first encounter with football is the Lionesses. They are still learning the game’s key characters, rivalries and rules.

Doucet’s Guardian interview coincided with Swift’s final shows at Wembley, when media estimates predicted an impending £300million ($380m) boost to the London economy due to Swift’s impact. Doucet attended one of the concerts. “When I looked around that particular stadium and you see who’s in the crowd, it looks similar to the Lionesses crowd and the Euros crowd,” she says. “It doesn’t look similar to a men’s football crowd. What we’re trying to do here is get women’s football to be more culturally ingrained in our society and bring it to more people who may not necessarily watch men’s 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 don’t really talk to that audience.” Swift, Doucet says, is “someone who has listened to her fans, has created a massive community that’s open for everybody and is giving her fanbase what they want. She listens. She responds. It’s 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 WSL’s media launch day in September. The West Ham United goalkeeper Kinga Szemik’s was a gift from team-mates and Aston Villa’s 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. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s tapping into different behaviours and listening, thinking, and responding,” Doucet adds. “Is that something our fanbase would like? Is it something they wouldn’t like? And if they wouldn’t? OK, fine.”

Doucet’s data has already demonstrated that the buying habits of women’s football fans differs from those in the men’s game. “This is another opportunity to drive asset value for their club,” she says. “We have to understand: what’s a great experience? How are we creating the right experience for women’s football, across all of the clubs, that people want to keep coming back to?”

There is little overlap between Swifties and men’s football fans. Andrew James, 29, describes himself as an “Evertonian Swiftie — not in that order”, and enjoys rewriting Swift’s songs with an Everton twist (see his illustrated reimagining of Swift’s All Too Well addressed to Dominic Calvert-Lewin from the perspective of Tom Davies).

“I’m into them both for similar reasons, even though there’s not really much crossover in how I experience them,” he says. “I’m aware that people do kind of see them as very different things. I’ve 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 men’s international break but does not go to women’s games regularly. He wonders if the women’s game can borrow from Swift’s 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 women’s football fans are a little more permeable. Players from the 2015 World Cup-winning U.S. Women’s 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 team’s marketing through the years. In 2023, Swift filmed a video announcing Alex Morgan’s inclusion in the World Cup squad. Swift is also a frequent topic on Arsenal Women’s 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 City’s men’s and women’s teams. “But now I think — and social media really helped in this — it has merged. Fan culture has infiltrated sport in a way that we’ve never seen before.”

Women’s 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 women’s football.

The anger preceding Eidevall’s Arsenal departure — including ‘Jonas Out’ graffiti and a fan displaying a cardboard P45 at a match — felt like new territory, tonally, for the women’s game and something more in keeping with men’s 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 it’s bled into football, especially women’s 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 Swift’s lyrics, social media posts and iconography. “There are so many storylines built into her music,” says Swiftie and Arsenal fan Laura, 32. “It’s very easy to buy into as a consumer, particularly with how she positions herself with all of her ex-boyfriends. Even if it’s made up, it’s a personal connection. I think one thing that is probably missing for women’s football, just because it’s not had the time to develop, is the heroes and villains of the game. In men’s football, in terms of the personal connection, there are teams you hate or players you love. That’s something she plays on quite well.”

“Taylor Swift teaches fans about her backstory and with the eggs, she’s 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 they’re learning about the technical side. Our job is to make sure that, no matter who you are, you can find women’s 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, Swift’s 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 Swift’s 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 LVIII’s 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 weren’t talking about the game yesterday,” he said. “And whatever that reason is, I’m 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 women’s sport despite, at several points in her career, positioning some strands of feminism as central to her brand identity.

Swift’s 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 Swift’s 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 it’s a point worth noting, at least in a narrative sense, when positioning Swift as crucial to the growth of women’s sport. Her absence becomes more glaring when contrasted with her presence at men’s sporting events such as the U.S. Open in September, where she made headlines for dancing alongside Kelce.

Still, Swift’s 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 Swift’s viral Chiefs puffer coat, for example, now has a merchandising deal with the NFL. Swift’s 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, men’s sport hasn’t even spoken to women — never mind women’s 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 women’s sports. “Because (women’s sport) is new, we don’t have anything to compare it to,” she explains. “The product on the pitch is the same, but everything around it is different to men’s sport. The closest thing we probably have is how we’ve seen the same tactics and the same audience react and behave to the likes of Taylor Swift. That’s probably the closest model we can compare with in terms of showing there’s an opportunity. You can’t really go: ‘Look at men’s sport — we can get here some day’, because actually it’s a different audience. We’re 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 men’s football team would naturally want to watch the club’s women’s side. Clubs focused their marketing on pulling both together. The Women’s 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 football’s governing body UEFA.

“That was the first time we were like: ‘OK — maybe it’s not just the men’s fans we need to go after’,” says Mitton. “The low-hanging fruit is this audience we’ve never spoken to before who probably think football isn’t for them. Actually, it is.”

Doucet has spoken at length with fans who have found, in women’s football, a community that feels safer and more inclusive than men’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 game’s 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; men’s football is infamous for demanding its female fans prove their credentials. In that vacuum, women’s football has an opportunity to expand.

None of that should be to the detriment of hardcore fans of women’s football. Equally, there is nothing to stop Swifties from following men’s football should they choose to.

“I totally understand why core fans are like: ‘Don’t change this world. I love it. I love football. Don’t bring in friendship bracelets’,” concludes Mitton. “But if we don’t 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 there’s something super special about women’s football. We do, too. I cannot overemphasise the importance of the fan insights: any decision we will make is made on informed insight. We’re 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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