The National Football League is unquestionably the behemoth of North American sports leagues in terms of every metric possible. It bests all other leagues in popularity, revenue, ratings, watercooler discussion, social media chatter, so on and so forth.
The NFL also has shown that it won’t back down to other sports leagues, and it’s even willing to go toe-to-toe with these leagues. A current example includes the NFL infringing upon the NBA’s footprint on Christmas Day by now scheduling games even when the holiday doesn’t fall on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Christmas Day will be on a Wednesday during the 2024 NFL season, and the just-released NFL schedule has two games on Dec. 25, marking just the third time since 1948 that an NFL game will be played on a Wednesday.
However, scheduling for this upcoming NFL season does reveal that the league, in which every franchise is worth at least $3.5 billion, won’t take on one entity, and her name is Taylor Swift.
Swift’s “The Eras Tour” began on March 17, 2023, and will run until Dec. 8, 2024, with the ending coinciding with Week 14 of the NFL season. Most of Swift’s shows are held in stadiums, whether football, baseball, or soccer venues, including ones normally reserved for NFL teams.
The tour includes three dates from Friday, Oct. 18, through Sunday, Oct. 20, at Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins. It then has three shows from Friday, Oct. 25, through Sunday, Oct. 27, at the Caesars Superdome, which houses the New Orleans Saints. Then, the final leg of the U.S. portion of The Eras Tour has dates from Friday, Nov. 1, through Sunday, Nov. 3, at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts.
Thus, the NFL could have squared up to Swift by scheduling home games for the Dolphins, Saints, or Colts on those respective dates, just as it took on the NBA on Christmas Day. However, the league chose to defer to the pop singer and instead has those three teams going on the road during those respective Sundays to avoid any type of scheduling conflict, according to Mike North, the NFL Vice President of Broadcast Planning.
Of the 152 shows in The Eras Tour, those nine dates are the only ones held in the United States that coincide with the NFL season. The first U.S. leg of the tour ran from March 2023 to August 2023, ending at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles just one day before the start of Week 1 of the NFL Preseason. She then went abroad with international dates from August 2023 and will close out that leg in August 2024. The tour ends with those nine shows in Miami, New Orleans, and Indianapolis, followed by nine shows in Canada to conclude.
Speaking of Canada, NFL schedule sleuths happened to notice that the Kansas City Chiefs—who feature Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce —will play not far from Canada at the same time that Swift is finishing her tour north of the border. The Chiefs have a road game at the Buffalo Bills in Week 11 on Sunday, Nov. 17. Swift’s tour just so happens to have a three-day set in Toronto from Nov. 14-16, with a four-day break in between, before another three-day Toronto set from Nov. 21-23.
Still, this scheduling quirk allows Swift to see Kelce play in Buffalo for a second time after she was in attendance for the Chiefs’ road win over the Bills in the AFC Divisional Round of last season’s playoffs. She should also have lots of other opportunities to see Kelce and the Chiefs in person as she has tour dates that conflict with just four of Kansas City’s 17 games—the three aforementioned from Weeks 7-9 and a Vancouver show in Week 14.
NFL fans as a whole will also have lots of chances to see the two-time defending champions as Kansas City has five primetime games in 2024, which trails only the Jets, 49ers, and Cowboys, who each have six. The Chiefs will have games on six different days of the week this season—Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
