“Keep Your Politics Out of My Sports”
A Super Bowl edition by Jane McManus about how sports and politics have always been, and always will be, part of the same conversation.
My people, it’s Super Bowl Sunday!
An escape from the relentless drumbeat of life and politics. Right? Right?!?!
Not so much. Sports and politics have always been intertwined, whether we’re aware of it or not. Beyond the national anthem, if we pay attention, you’ll see politics—starting with the military flyover—peppered throughout the game today.
From Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier to the Olympic Games becoming a stage for geopolitical statements, the playing field has never truly been separate from the broader issues shaping our world. And that’s not a bad thing. It shows how deeply sports resonate with our shared values and aspirations.
Our collective passion for sports presents a unique opportunity. Sports are a space where we can bridge divides, appreciate shared humanity, and even spark change. No matter why you’re watching—the actual game, commercials, halftime show—sports remind us that we’re all part of something bigger. The game might end, but its impact can ripple far beyond the final whistle.
This is why I asked veteran sports journalist
to unpack how sports shape our politics and culture in my new book We Hold These “Truths.” The excerpt below is just a taste of her insight into why keeping politics out of sports was never possible—or desirable.And if you haven’t already, order your copy of We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back by Casey Burgat | Politics & Prose | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Enjoy the game, my friends. And go Broncos.
“Keep Your Politics Out of My Sports”
In fall 2023, the NFL gained a new fan.
Musician Taylor Swift had started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and attending Chiefs games in the enclosed suites of NFL stadiums. Soon, Swift’s fans were learning about the merits of the pass versus the run, and network cameras started looking to catch Swift celebrating after Kelce’s catches or find them embracing on the field after a game.
There have been few sports storylines that would make for such a great rom-com. This is essentially a prom queen–quarterback matchup, but one where everyone has a six-figure endorsement deal. He was dashing and, as tight ends often are, tall. She was a beloved, platinum-level artist who could sell out a stadium mere seconds after announcing a tour.
Yet almost immediately, the Swift backlash began.
As broadly popular as the couple was, traditional NFL fans and Taylor Swift’s Swifties sparked a culture clash on game day. Swift and her fans pulled ratings up and boosted the percentage of women in the audience when she was at a game. Meanwhile, some NFL fans (and almost always men) used social media to grouse about Swift’s image diluting the sanctity of an NFL broadcast. An X (formerly Twitter) user called NFL Memes posted a video of Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson with the caption “Only one man can save us from a Taylor Swift Super Bowl.”1
About the only thing the Swifties and NFL fans had in common: neither could understand what constituted a fair catch in the NFL’s rulebook.
Why was Swift a threat to a segment of NFL fans? How could adding the world’s most popular person to the country’s most popular sport somehow equal anger?
The answer is complicated and requires a bit of context. There is a conviction in our culture that somehow sports are—or at least used to be, and definitely should be—separate from politics. An idea that fans go or watch games purely to see feats of athleticism and mint new heroes to replace the fading ones. A pleasant fiction that team loyalty, and perhaps the success of a well-placed sports bet, are the only rooting interests to be found in an average television audience.
It’s a bit of wishful thinking, really. When members of a highly polarized citizenry are prepared to end relationships with siblings and parents over political affiliations, it’s nice to think that our games are a place of political neutrality. That the colors red, white, and blue blend with greens, oranges, and yellows to form team colors that require an easier fealty.
But of course, the truth is much more interesting.
Let’s return to Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift with that in mind. Football is more than just a game. It is a uniquely American undertaking, with flyovers by fighter jets and field-sized national flags for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Cheerleaders, commercial breaks, and rampant commercialism take up a big chunk of a game where between-the-whistles action may consume just 15 minutes. But the rest of the time is filled with commentary and projection. An NFL game is a pageant of baritone play-by-play announcers lauding men for their toughness and football intelligence. Those broadcasts are songs in praise of American masculinity.
As a woman who covered the game for a decade for ESPN and other outlets, I became used to the unwritten rules. You never talk about a no-hitter in progress in the dugout. You have to mention two teammates and a coach in the postgame presser. No sex the night before a big match.
A lot has changed as more women have become visible fans (the NFL can only command those massive audiences if women are watching as well), but the reaction to Swift shows that a lot hasn’t.
There are established roles for women around sports: sideline reporters, cheerleaders, and WAGs, a somewhat dismissive acronym for “wives and girlfriends.” There are celebrated exceptions who are referees, owners, broadcast analysts, coaches, and front office executives, but these are still relatively small in number. Swift doesn’t really fit, even as a girlfriend. She is a woman worth far more than her NFL boyfriend, a far brighter star in the cultural zeitgeist. Her financial and cultural power is independent of her relationship with one of the most recognizable players on a Super Bowl–winning team. There are videos of Kelce at her concerts, singing her lyrics like a fan.
If an NFL fan tuned into a football broadcast to be comforted by traditional roles, as he could depend on for decades, Swift’s prominence might strike a discordant note. As fan complaints escalated, announcers on game day struggled with how to respond when she was shown on camera. Ignore her? Can’t do that. Celebrate her and risk pissing off “true fans” back home on the couch?
Either way, the intrusion of a genuinely powerful woman interrupted the well-worn tread of game day. Former All-Pro running back turned commentator Tiki Barber spoke for many when he said, “The obsession is getting annoying.”2
And veteran broadcaster and former quarterback Boomer Esiason conspicuously avoided any mention of the pair even as the CBS cameras followed the celebration on the field after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl.
OK, boomer.
The debate about whether or not Taylor Swift should appear on camera during an NFL broadcast was—whether we recognized it or not—a political discussion. Who is the broadcast for: NFL purists or the larger audience? Are women, like Swift’s fans, voting members of the fan base or allowed only observer status?
Complicating all this, Swift had campaigned for Joe Biden in 2020, which galled many fans of a sport that reinforces so many conservative cultural values. One X user with the handle @ksMaga87 posted, “Every Time the NFL shows Taylor Swift I am donating $25 to the Trump campaign.”3
In short: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, and the term political football finally reaches its purest form.
The Swift-Kelce saga is one of countless examples over countless decades demonstrating that the myth of politics-free sports is false—always has been, always will be. The truth is that sports and politics are deeply interconnected and constantly in dialogue. We cannot surgically remove sports from the society in which they’re played, nor magically extricate political views from athletes and fans. Like it or not, politics and sports live together on the field just as they live in the world around it.
But there’s a deeper mistake in the myth, too. It’s not just that politics are a part of sports, inevitably. It’s that they should be.
Sports draw people together regardless of politics and identity. Games contain both conservative and progressive values, like self-determination and equity. The very act of sitting in the stands with 80,000 of your closest friends and sharing an experience is something humans have been doing for thousands of years. This literal common ground—one of the few remaining in America—is a place where we should be having these conversations.
In fact, sports have historically played a pivotal role in driving forward the political debate about critical issues, from women’s rights to racial equality to international relations. By believing that politics has no place on the playing field, we close ourselves off to not only reality but also the opportunity to explore our differences in one of the most accessible spaces we still have. Sports are our sandbox for testing solutions to societal problems, together with an incredibly diverse array of fellow Americans who all have our hearts in the game. A place to play, compete, and grow, in our ideas as well as our athleticism.
So if we came to play, let’s play. And may the best team—and the best ideas—win.
Read Jane McManus’s full essay in We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back by Casey Burgat | Politics & Prose | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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