Unpacking the wild theory behind Taylor Swift’s sudden NFL obsession

Taylor Swift’s new love affair with the NFL has continued to blossom. After first attending a Kansas City Chiefs home game two weeks ago, the singer backed it up with an appearance in New York to watch the Chiefs take on the New York Jets and cheer alleged beau Travis Kelce.

But while fans and sports watchers continue to debate exactly what is driving Swift’s fascination with the NFL (is it romance? Is it a cynical move to get headlines ahead of her upcoming film and album releases?) some sleuths believe they’ve discovered the real reason.

Could Taylor Swift really have attended the New York Jets game to distract people from her private jet usage? Let’s investigate.Credit: Getty Images

Some suspect that Swift’s team had an ulterior motive: namely that her appearance at the Jets game was a ploy to get her controversial use of private jets buried by her supposed newfound love of football.

So how exactly would this work, and what problem is she trying to solve? Let’s investigate.

In August last year, Swift was named in a sustainability report that revealed the celebrities with the worst carbon emissions from their private jets, based on data from the now-suspended X account @CelebJets.

Data showed Swift was the worst offender, as her plane racked up 170 flights in the first 200 days of 2022 alone, releasing 8294 tonnes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere – reportedly more than 1000 times the average person’s annual emissions.

Swift used to own two planes, but reportedly sold one in 2020. Following the report, a spokesperson said the claim was “blatantly incorrect” since the pop star could not be held responsible for “most or all” of the trips taken on her jet because she regularly lends it out.

This is all to say that before Swift’s sudden interest in the NFL, googling “Taylor Swift jet” brought up results that largely related to her contribution to the climate crisis. Now, googling the same thing mainly brings up pictures of her celebrating a touchdown or links to where you can buy the denim shorts she wore to the game.

If rumours of Swift and Kelce’s romantic relationship are true, it’s fair to believe she attended the Jets game to support her new beau. But given Swift’s penchant for “Easter eggs”, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see wild theories that the whole thing is a long play focused on search engine optimisation.

Its timing also seems convenient since Swift continues to jet-set around the world despite the negative press the sustainability report elicited three years ago. According to Insider, she has used her plane about 104 times this year, with 86 of those flights allegedly having taken place since March, when the US leg of her Eras Tour began. With the Eras Tour yet to reach European and Australian shores, the Grammy winner would undoubtedly benefit from turning attention away from how she’s getting from A to B.

Further adding to the speculation was the fact that Swift brought a posse of famous friends to the Jets game, including power couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds and two of the most newsworthy recently single celebs – Sophie Turner and Hugh Jackman. In other words, it was practically guaranteed their attendance would make headlines.

All of this being said, the theories remain just that: theories. But it’s not the first time celebrity PRs have manipulated technology to change the narrative (think Rob Lowe’s appearance in the 2014 film Sex Tape, which cleverly distracted online searchers from his own sex tape from the 1980s).

Who knows, perhaps the next story we’ll see is of Swift belting out Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl. That would be even less expected than football.

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