Will Taylor Swift go to the Super Bowl? The challenges: a concert, 5,600 miles and 17 time zones
The singer, who is dating Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, is expected in Las Vegas on February 11 despite the fact that she will be performing in Tokyo the night before
Taylor Swift is a trend that goes far beyond her music. This past Sunday, January 28, the 34-year-old singer’s surname became a trend on X (formerly Twitter) after she went to M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, to watch her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, play. Swift watched first-hand as Kelce and his team defeated the Baltimore Ravens 17-10, which secured their spot at Super Bowl LVIII, where they will face the San Francisco 49ers, who defeated the Detroit Lions. But not even the team’s or Kelce’s names were the biggest trend online on Sunday: Swift equaled or surpassed them. And that’s despite the fact that it was not even possible to search for her name: on Saturday, she decided to remove it after a series of deepfake porn images of her began circulating on the social media platform before X took steps to take them down. “We are committed to maintaining a safe and respectful environment for all users,” the platform stated.
Swift, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail, is considering whether to sue, but on Sunday she seemed very far removed from all that controversy. The artist arrived at the Baltimore stadium at noon, dressed in red, and was seen cheering Kelce from one of the boxes, as she has been doing week after week since September, whenever her schedule has allowed. This time, she even jumped onto the field with Donna and Ed, the player’s parents, and hugged him and kissed him publicly, in an unusual gesture. However, although Swift has been with Kelce practically since the start of the regular season, a big question remains: will the singer be there at the Super Bowl, the most important game of the year? It won’t be easy, but everything indicates that she will.
The Eras Tour, in which she reviews her 17-year career across 10 albums, is the artist’s most ambitious project to date. Between March and October 2023 it has taken her to 24 cities in 66 concerts in the U.S., Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, in addition to making her a billionaire. But now the Pennsylvania native is about to embark on the international leg of her tour, with no fewer than 85 concerts scheduled until late November. It starts in February in Tokyo, where she will play four nights: 7, 8, 9 and 10. Then Swift will go to Melbourne and Sydney, in Australia, for six more shows, then to Singapore in March. In May, the tour will move to Europe: Madrid (Spain is the only country where there is only one scheduled concert), Lisbon, Milan, London... until August, when the tour will return to the U.S. and finally end in Canada in December.
That last show at the Tokyo Dome complicates, but does not necessarily prevent, Swift’s presence at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, where the Super Bowl game will be played on February 11, just one day later. The Japanese capital and Vegas are around 5,600 miles apart, which means an 11-hour flight. The fact that there are no direct flights should not be a problem for the singer, who has used her private jet to get around for years. But the main issue is the time difference, since there are 17 different zones between Japan and the U.S. West Coast. But this works in her favor.
In Tokyo, the concert starts at 6 p.m. (although with the opening acts, Swift will appear on stage around 7 p.m.), and it is not going to be short: there are 44 songs (plus two surprises), for a total of about three and a half hours. Therefore, the artist would finish the concert at around 10.30 p.m. Then she would have to leave the stadium, go to the airport and fly for about 11 hours. If it were to take off at midnight local time on Saturday (7 a.m. on Saturday on the West Coast), it would arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon.
The Chiefs’ game against the 49ers starts on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time (the Las Vegas time zone), so if Swift departs Tokyo on Saturday night and sleeps on her plane, she would arrive in Nevada late Saturday afternoon.
This mathematical calculation has been making headlines, and even Drew Barrymore last November marked the times on a whiteboard during her show, already thinking that Kelce’s team might make the finals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl last season (when Travis defeated Jason, his brother, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles), and also in 2019, adding to their first title in 1969. If they win the Super Bowl again this year, it will be Kelce’s third. For the singer it will be her first final: until she began dating Kelce last summer, she had not been known to be a fan of the NFL. While it is true that her presence as a performer at the game’s sought-after halftime show has been discussed on many occasions, and even certain sports and entertainment media claim that she has declined to participate on more than one occasion, it is not certain that the NFL has invited her. Last year the guest performer was Rihanna, and this year the rapper Usher will be the star.
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