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AS TAYLOR SWIFT searched the crowds on the pitch at Baltimore’s M&T Bank stadium after the Sunday night game between the Kansas Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens, it could have been a scene from a schmaltzy film. When her eyes landed on her prize, superstar player Travis Kelce, her boyfriend of recent months, she broke into a wide smile. Holding on to the 6ft 5in ‘tight end’ (a proper NFL term, we are told) she celebrated the win for his team, the Chiefs, which would see them play at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas on 11 February. ‘Brilliant, I love you,’ Swift murmured to Kelce, lip readers declared, as the pair kissed as though millions weren’t watching
As well as a seminal win for Kelce, this was a seminal moment in his relationship with Swift; by far their most public display of affection, after weeks of blurry photos of her cheering him on from a VIP stadium suite, or him waiting at the side of a stage for her to perform. These latest photos are a sure sign that their romance has become more serious than even the most dedicated Swifties might have realised.
According to insiders, 34-year-old Swift, who started dating Kelce last summer after they were introduced by a mutual friend he described as ‘Cupid’ in an inter view with The Wall Street Journal, is smitten in a way they have never seen before. Kelce stated that he had ‘never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them’ and the feeling , say Swift’s friends, is mutual. This has a lot, one says, to do with how uninhibited Kelce is about fame in general. In Swift’s previous six-year relationship with The Favourite actor Joe Alwyn, privacy was their modus operandi; we rarely saw the couple together. Rather than walk red carpets, they were said to spend a lot of time holed up in their £8m Primrose Hill house. In one inter view Alwyn said, ‘We live in a culture that is so increasingly intrusive… the more you give – and frankly, even if you don’t give it – something will be taken.’ Dating the most famous woman in the world and privacy aren’t the happiest of bedfellows, however, and they parted ways in April last year.
Enter Kelce, 34, who is apparently not only supremely unbothered by fame, but, in fact, is leaning into the viral nature of his own. He has a hit podcast, New Heights, that he hosts with his brother, former NFL star Jason, and a penchant for wearing outfits that have made him a street-style darling on TikTok. He had his own The Bachelor-style dating reality TV series called Catching Kelce, which ran for a season in 2016, and released a Christmas single with his brother (which
