Romantic Relationships, Athlete Branding, and Social Media Dynamics: Examining the National Football League’s Instagram Posts and Fan Responses to Taylor Swift Content

Leagues increasingly feature athletes’ off-field romantic relationships on social media, yet little is known about how they shape the audience response. Our study sheds light on how textual–visual configurations depicting romantic relationships affected user engagement. Forty-one National Football League Instagram posts about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship and 201,472 user comments were examined. Findings revealed that posts visually presenting Swift and Kelce with minimal romantic cues generated higher likes and more favorable sentiment than explicitly romantic content. Furthermore, we identified brand image tensions stemming from the National Football League’s simultaneous engagement of pop-culture audiences and traditional football fans, leading to polarized reactions rooted in a gendered, resource-allocation conflict. Our study illustrated how cognitive schema conflicts influenced audience responses to cross-cultural social media marketing efforts while providing practical guidance for integrating athlete romance into social media content through optimal visual–textual combinations that effectively manage competing audience expectations.