Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce kiss after he won the Super Bowl with his team the Kansas City Chiefs. — © Getty Images
With an average of more than 123 million viewers, last Sunday’s Super Bowl was the most watched TV broadcast in the US since the moon landing in 1969, reports data company Nielsen. The presence of superstar Taylor Swift probably has something to do with it.
Would she get to the stadium in time? More than who would ultimately win the Super Bowl, in the run-up to the annual highlight of the American Football season, more people were concerned with whether Taylor Swift would make it to Las Vegas in time to meet her friend and Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce to shout his way to victory.
The answer turned out to be yes: after a performance in Tokyo on Saturday, the American superstar had quickly boarded a private jet, flown through nine time zones and finally arrived at the Allegiant Stadium well in advance. Something that the viewer could not possibly miss: Swift was also shown numerous times during the match.
Her presence certainly did no harm to the American channel CBS. With an average of 123.4 million people watching the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime (25-22), this year’s Super Bowl became the most-watched TV broadcast in decades. Only the 1969 moon landing, which captivated an estimated 150 million people, did better. According to data company Nielsen, a record number of 202.4 million people even watched at least part of the match and those figures do not yet include people who watched, for example, in a café.