When a man dates Taylor Swift there are three things he can be sure of. Her army of fans, the Swifties, will scrutinise his every move, the relationship will be given a title –
A mash-up of their names but with Taylor’s dominant – and he will end up much richer than he was before he caught the eye of the world’s biggest pop star. Examine the career trajectories of everyone from Harry Styles and Calvin Harris to Tom Hiddleston and Joe Alwyn and you will be persuaded that their relationship with a certain 35-year-old billionaire turbocharged their path to stardom,
Styles was dating Ms Swift when One Direction took the US by storm in 2012. A song co-written by Swift turned Harris from a top DJ into a fully-fledged hit-maker. Headline-grabbing antics during a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it liaison with Swift, transported Hiddleston into the A-list. And Joe Alwyn has no need to worry about his Hollywood career because the song-writing credits his ex-girlfriend so generously granted him will keep him in millions for the rest of his life.
No one has a fan-base to match Swift’s and – as long as they play the game – her boyfriends are welcomed into fold. The latest man to win the golden ticket is the Kansas City Chiefs star, Travis Kelce, 34.
American Football fans fiercely deny Ms Swift has helped the three-time Super Bowl winner’s career but it’s hard to ignore the fact that his status as the latest Mr Swift has boosted his profile globally. Last September, after Swift was first seen supporting him at a Kansas City Chiefs game, ‘Travis Kelce’ became the top Google search term, with more than 5million queries.
And his star has been in the ascendant ever since. Sales of his No 87 shirt skyrocketed 400 per cent and listeners to his TikTok podcast, New Heights, with his brother, Jason (a former American footballer himself), increased by a factor of four.
Before ‘Traylor’, the show’s listening base was 32 per cent female, now it’s 50 per cent. And Kelce has played up to this new-found listenership, many of them undoubtedly Swifties, by dropping mentions of their relationship into every episode since Traylor went public. After that football game in September, Travis told his brother on the podcast: ‘Obviously, we’re together but I have to keep some things private so I won’t be sharing details moving forward.’
