Why Taylor Swift Has Never Headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Why Taylor Swift Has Never Headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Taylor Swift added sports media darling/antihero to her overflowing well of accomplishments when she started dating NFL player Travis Kelce, but somehow she has yet to live the life of a Super Bowl Halftime Showgirl.

Swifties were pretty convinced that 2026 was going to be the year, that all her talk of sourdough bread-baking ahead of Super Bowl LX being held at Levi's Stadium in the San Francisco Bay Area—the de facto sourdough capital of the world—couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

And considering she admitted during her epic August 2025 New Heights appearance that she's gone "a little Zodiac killer" with her months-in-advance Easter egg drops...

And the puzzle-obsessed serial killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s...

Hey, we didn't start the conspiracy era, we're just living in it.

But it's Bad Bunny who's going to be taking the stage Sunday in between halves of the New England Patriots-Seattle Seahawks game.

So, maybe the real question is, will Taylor ever join the club that includes Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Beyoncé as members?

Which seems antithetical, because wouldn't the biggest sport in the United States and the producers of the most-watched live TV event of the year want to join forces and get the biggest pop star in the world?

The answer, as it turns out is, yes, in their wildest dreams. But Taylor revealed recently why she wasn't ready to get in the game just yet. 

"Here's the thing, Jay-Z has always been very good to me," Taylor said of the musician, whose Roc Nation struck a partnership with the NFL in 2019, during her Oct. 6 appearance on The Tonight Show. “Our teams are really close. They sometimes will call and say, 'How does she feel about the Super Bowl?' And that's not an official offer or like a conference room conversation—we’re really close, it’s like, 'How does she feel about it in general?'"

But now that she's rooting so hard for the guy on the Chiefs, it's not on her Wi$h Li$t. 

As Taylor put it, "We're always able to tell him the truth, which is that I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that field. That is violent chess, that is gladiators without swords. That is dangerous. I am, the whole season, I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field."

She was able to jet from Japan to Las Vegas after performing four straight nights in Tokyo to be at Allegiant Stadium when Travis won his third Super Bowl, but it would have been too logistically difficult to put on a show there in time.

Yet even Taylor's tight schedule didn't prevent endless speculation up until the 11th hour that she'd join Usher (who was announced as the headliner back in September 2023, when Taylor was just starting to dip her feet into the NFL spectator pool) in some capacity on stage.

The "Yeah" singer, meanwhile, had a Vegas residency through December 2023, so he was the definition of geographically desirable when it came to putting the show together.

And Taylor playing Super Bowl LIX in 2025, during which the Chiefs were steamrolled by the Philadelphia Eagles at the New Orleans Superdome, would have just been unfortunate.

Meanwhile, it's hard to remember, but for some of the 15 years after she first hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with her 2008 sophomore album Fearless—before she attended her first Chiefs game in 2023, that is—Swift wasn't always known as a singer of arena-shaking bangers for everybody, as in both the daughters and their dads.

That narrative has since been thoroughly dismantled, stadiums literally quaking during the Eras Tour. But fan-favorite anthems such as "You Belong With Me" aside, Taylor was not yet the artist she would soon become. 

Taylor declined, however, purportedly because she was in the thick of rerecording the albums she made for Big Machine Records, her response to Scooter Braun acquiring the rights to her back catalogue when his company Ithaca Holdings bought the label in 2019.

That ambitious project dovetailed with her most prolific period to date, which saw the release of Lover, folklore, evermore and Midnights between 2019 and 2022, book-ended by 2024's 31-track The Tortured Poets Department and, of course, her most recent release, The Life of a Showgirl.

TMZ also reported in 2022 that sources with direct knowledge of the halftime show said Taylor didn't want to take that particular stage until she'd finished re-recording her first six albums. She's still got two to go, her 2006 self-titled debut and 2017's persona-redefining Reputation, teasing the latter as "a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure."

But, possibly putting an end to that self-imposed constraint, in May 2025 Taylor sealed the deal on buying back her catalogue from Shamrock Holdings. So, while as her own lead songwriter she had held onto her publishing rights from the beginning, now she owns her master recordings.

As for her hesitance to run with the ball, don't blame her future spouse.

"This has nothing to do with Travis," she insisted of the 36-year-old. "He would love for me to do it. I'm just too locked in." 

But should the Kansas City Chiefs tight end call it a career after three Super Bowl rings, and there's a blank space on Taylor's calendar that would allow for her to fine-tune a halftime show to her exacting specifications on Feb. 14, 2027...

At this point, baby, she just has to say yes.

In the meantime, here are some other great Super Bowl Halftime Shows to remember: