The NFL’s push to spotlight players’ relationships online is drawing attention for all the wrong reasons.
According to a new report from Front Office Sports, the league has been working to reach women fans through curated social media content centered on players’ wives and girlfriends. That effort has shown up in recent camp coverage, including the widely circulated video of Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert spending time with fiancée Madison Beer at camp in early August. Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow and rumored romantic partner Olivia Ponton, along with Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart and girlfriend Marissa Ayers, have also been more visible online than they were in past years.
Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s SVP of social and influencer marketing, said the league has long leaned into players’ families and loved ones.
“On the league and club level, we’ve engaged our players’ families and loved ones for years,” Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s SVP of social and influencer marketing, told FOS. “Whether it’s training camp, weekly practice or a major event like the Super Bowl, we look for authentic opportunities to highlight our players and the people who are part of their journey.
“The content is authentic, genuine and relatable, and that’s resonated strongly with women and young fans, who are key growth audiences for the NFL.”
But in an era shaped by deepfakes, misinformation and constant suspicion, that strategy comes with risk. The league’s efforts to “scale up” its female-focused content trace back to the wave of attention that followed Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in September 2023, when Swift was seen in the Chiefs suite with Kelce’s mother, Donna, at Arrowhead. The moment immediately set off a frenzy online, with Adam Schefter confirming it in a blunt post that made clear the sighting was real.
Swift and Kelce are now happily married, but their relationship became the template for a much larger debate about celebrity, publicity and whether a famous romance can ever just be a romance. At the time, plenty of people treated “Tayvis” as a branding exercise, not a relationship.
One NPR headline in 2023 called them “Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are in a PR relationship,” while a Reddit thread was titled “All the reasons why I believe Tayvis is a PR stunt.” The speculation even got so far that Kelce’s representatives had to push back against a fake PR breakup contract that appeared online.
That same skepticism can easily spill over to Herbert and Beer, or to any other high-profile couple the league decides to feature. Beer, 27, has 60 million followers across Instagram and TikTok and more than 15.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Ponton is a former Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model. Ayers is an influencer who began modeling as a ring card girl for Jake Paul’s boxing company.
The NFL is clearly aware that the names it’s spotlighting are Gen-Z, social-first and built for attention. Herbert and Beer’s engagement post in late July pulled in more than half a million likes on Instagram and nearly two million on TikTok, making it the league’s biggest post that month and, by the report’s telling, the biggest of the offseason as well.
That kind of engagement is the point. It helped turn Swift’s relationship with Kelce into a massive business win for the league, with MarketWatch reporting the NFL made almost $1 billion since she began dating him.
But there’s a downside to leaning on real relationships as content. The more the league tries to package authenticity, the easier it becomes for fans to question whether anything they’re seeing is genuine.
The same dynamic has played out in movies, where press tours and promotional pairings can start to feel engineered rather than organic. The article points to Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell during the 2023 rollout of Anyone But You, as well as Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson for a 2025 reboot of The Naked Gun, as examples of how quickly a flirty media strategy can wear thin.
For the NFL, the challenge is simple: reach new audiences without turning real people into content props. The league may be right that its expanded social push helps connect with women and younger fans, but every extra post also blurs the line between public interest and manufactured spectacle. And in a media landscape already flooded with fakes, that line matters more than ever.
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