Who’s the Bigger Get—Taylor Swift or the NFL? Halftime Deal Falls Apart
(September 29, 2025) – The prospect of Taylor Swift playing Super Bowl LX carried with it no shortage of subplots.
There was Swift’s engagement to the NFL’s most recognizable tight end, Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief who, at 35, could be playing in his final season.
There was the Chiefs’ quest to find some of its Super Bowl mojo after having been drubbed by the Philadelphia Eagles in the last big game (Sunday’s route of a good Ravens team was a promising start). There was also Vice President J.D. Vance half-joking that the NFL might place its “thumb on the scale” for the Chiefs to return to the big game this postseason.
And then there’s Taylor—the biggest pop star in the world—becoming the first white artist to headline since Jay-Z’s 10-year entertainment partnership with the NFL began in 2019.
It was poised to be a ratings bonanza, surpassing last season’s game as the most watched Super Bowl Halftime performance ever: the world’s biggest star on the world’s biggest stage.
Until it wasn’t.
Swift and the NFL were reportedly in negotiations for the “Fortnight” singer to perform at next year’s big game on February 8 before Swift allegedly walked away because the NFL refused to agree to her terms (or as mainstream media pejoratively termed it: “give in to her demands”).
Those “demands” allegedly included unprecedented requests—ownership of her performance footage and prime-time ad slots for her products, free of charge. It’s important to note that Swift’s next album, The Life of a Showgirl, drops this Friday (Oct. 3) and will likely still be a big seller four months from now.
News outlets (like Substack, the Daily News, and other publications) speculated that Swift “knows her worth” and that the normal compensation for performers — worldwide exposure — wasn’t enough. One industry source was quoted as saying, “She knows the kind of ratings she brings, the global attention she commands. She wasn’t about to hand that over for free.”
After all, Swift has already boosted the NFL’s bottom line. Chiefs games saw ratings spikes once she started dating Kelce in 2023. The 2025 Super Bowl, which featured Kansas City (and Swift in the stands), was the most-watched network telecast of any type in U.S. history, drawing 127 million viewers.
For Swift, this was about leverage. Fresh off the highest-grossing world tour ever and with 14 No. 1 albums (soon to be 15 with The Life of a Showgirl), she’s clearly the most powerful artist of her generation. Even megastars like Beyoncé, Prince, the Rolling Stones, and Michael Jackson performed halftime shows without pay, but Swift is testing whether simple “exposure” still carries weight. And as the post-Scooter Braun Taylor, scarred from her battle to reclaim her masters, she’s far less likely to give away her work for free.
The NFL had a brand to protect as well. Giving Swift ownership of the footage of her performance along with free game-day ad space would have set a slippery precedent for the league and could lessen its leverage for future negotiations. Media outlets reported late Sunday (Sept. 28) that Puerto Rican rapper—and fellow global superstar—Bad Bunny was ultimately selected as this year’s performer.
So the standoff came down to one question: Who’s the bigger get—the NFL or Taylor Swift?
Both sides believed the answer was obvious. The rest of us may still be debating it. But one thing is clear: for the first time, the NFL might have found a star it couldn’t afford.
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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