The NFL has made the entire 2023 – 2024 football season about Taylor Swift. Meanwhile, NFL fans — actual NFL fans — are and have been understandably upset about it. All these people want to do is watch some football, but they’ve been promulgated all season with constant camera pans to Swift.
Obviously, Travis Kelce is having a tremendous season, but early in the season when Swift started making appearances at Kelce’s games, the NFL quickly realized they could make money off her. Since the media are obsessed with Swift, that inevitably meant the NFL showing her at games would get more people watching — not for the actual game but for this love story unfolding between Swift and Kelce.
So at last Sunday night’s Kansas City Chiefs playoff game, Taylor Swift was caught on camera appearing to mouth, “Go away, please.”
To this, I say: Fair.
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Now, this is Taylor Swift, and she is arguably the most famous woman in the world next to, maybe, the likes of Beyoncé. Therefore, the cameras are not going to go away, especially because she is dating someone in the public eye. It’s not as though she decided to date someone out of the limelight, which she could have done. But rather than date men who are private and low-profile, she tends to date men who are famous as well. Furthermore, people are obviously invested in her love story because, after all, her music centers around how she falls in and out of love. That’s how she’s been able to connect with her audience. So there is no way the cameras are just going to go away.
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But I do feel somewhat empathetic to her. She is not asking for the cameras to be on her, and I’m sure it is embarrassing for her. She wants the focus to be on Travis Kelce. Even in my own life and in a much smaller circumstance, I have politely declined when someone has asked me for a picture while at one of my husband’s speaking events. A picture with me at one of his events is not the appropriate time.
While people are upset about the focus being taken away from Kelce and put on Swift, she, too, wants the focus to be on him. And I think this is legitimate.
But the NFL is not going to stop.
This level of attention is the high cost of being someone that famous, but I sense it annoys her. Despite the fact she is incredibly famous, she still wants to take part in things like a normal person. She doesn’t want to have this embarrassing level of attention on her as she’s learning about and getting to know his family. She wants them to like her, just like any girlfriend would. What she does not want is for Kelce’s family to just associate her with lots of cameras and floods of people coming up to her, obsessed with every moment of her life. At the end of the day, she is just a person.
In the long run, I still do not think this relationship is going to work out. These were my early predictions, and I stand by them. She might get a baby out of this, but I do not think they are well-matched or well-suited for each other for a slew of different reasons. But, as it pertains to the NFL, they have been particularly invasive — and they’ve used Swift just to make some money. That’s the worst part.