Could Chiefs be 'America's team'? Data company says Swift may give team edge over Cowboys

Kansas City is gaining ground toward becoming the most popular football team in the U.S., according to an artificial intelligence data company that credits a certain mega pop star for giving the Chiefs a swift boost. 

Qloo (pronounced "clue") is a company that been tracking consumer preferences for the past 10 years. Artificial intelligence can quickly analyze billions of date points to understand the popularity of brands (like NFL sports teams, musics, movies) and entities or products.

“Our range is anything cultural,” said Justin Zhen, the vice president of sales. “What is a trend around the world that we can shed some color on? We’ve written about the top turkey brands by state.”

The Qloo algorithm takes public data from social media, adds in some transactional data of consumer purchases and mixes in anonymized first-party data from Qloo partners. Out of 100,000 brands analyzed, the Chiefs now rank 475 and the Cowboys rank 314. No. 1 is Nike.

All the data is analyzed by AI and data scientists, like Sam Eauch, who are able to create visual representations like a heat map of NFL team popularity. Outside of the football team's native states, the December maps show shows the Philadelphia Eagles have an impressive fan base in North Dakota. Mississippi is home to a concentration of Baltimore Ravens supporters. And the Dallas Cowboys still have a Texas-sized, lasso-hold on the nation. But the pinkish red of the Chiefs is stretching in popularity from the center of America out.

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“As you can see by the heat maps, we look at affinity by state,” said Eauch. “Affinity is people expressing how popular a certain brand is. We can aggregate that down to a city block level.”

In the massive list, the Chiefs are climbing, up 77 spots in the past few months. While the Cowboys, known as “America’s Team,” have dropped seven spots.

"It’s definitely a trend that we’re keeping an eye on,” Eauch said.

Although the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl earlier this year and in 2020, the CEO and founder of Qloo, Alex Elias, credits the recent boom in popularity to Taylor Swift dating tight end Travis Kelce.

“Taylor is such a phenomenon," said Elias. "She transcends being just a hitmaker; she's a cultural icon."

Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.