Custom suits. Mink coats. Lots of bling. And an abundance of Louis Vuitton duffle bags.
This isn’t the scene of a New York fashion show. Or the red carpet at a Hollywood movie premiere. This is in a musty, concrete basement at your local NFL stadium each week.
Even the Washington Commanders’ mascot shows up in $1,040 Louis Vuitton shoes on game day.
But the tunnel walk is more than the players’ newest catwalk. It’s one of many indicators of athletes’ growing influence in off-the-field popular culture.
“There was always a desire to be dressing Hollywood stars, to be dressing people for the red carpet, to be dressing performers on stage,” said Vogue style director Leah Faye Cooper. “But athletes, at the time, were not really that visible.”
Last year, Faye Cooper profiled Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow and Minnesota Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson during their appearances at Paris Fashion Week as part of a growing wave of NFL players finding new ways to express themselves.
“You saw an athlete when they were playing, but they were just in their uniform,” she said. “Arriving at the game, no one was photographing.”
But now, Faye Cooper said, people are paying attention, so much so that the NFL hired its first-ever fashion editor, Kyle Smith, in 2024.
Today’s NFL stars are visible beyond Sundays. They are hosting podcasts, making music and appearing in TV shows and movies. They are attending the Met Gala, becoming brand ambassadors and building post-playing careers in production and broadcasting.
“The NFL dominates the American media,” said Daniel Durbin, an expert in sports and popular culture at the University of Southern California. “And it still has the easiest road to making celebrities.”
Players’ date nights are followed by the paparazzi, and their weddings are highly confidential. Just ask Buffalo Bills offensive lineman Dion Dawkins, who accidentally leaked the wedding date of quarterback Josh Allen and actress Hailee Steinfeld months before their nuptials. Dawkins backtracked and said, “I have no idea what’s going on” when the media swarm caught on to the secret. (Spoiler alert: He knew what was going on.)
Star-studded relationships like Allen and Steinfeld’s are all around the NFL. Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s engagement to one of the world’s most popular music stars, Taylor Swift, has changed his status from star tight end to, simply, star. Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert was spotted last weekend with his girlfriend/singer Madison Beer, enjoying a Los Angeles Lakers game courtside and attending Game 3 of the World Series (though he admitted they left before the historic 18-inning Dodgers win). San Francisco 49ers star Christian McCaffery married former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo last year, with teammates George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk there to witness, and they welcomed their first child this year.
These relationships bring a new spotlight to the personal lives of NFL stars — whether they want it or not. New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs caught himself in a messy situation this offseason when a viral video of him on a boat with rapper Cardi B coincided with a stretch when he was not seen at multiple Patriots practices. (The couple announced in September that it is expecting a baby.) New York Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner saw a July getaway with rap star Ice Spice spoiled by TMZ, and he later explained how surprising the attention was in the usually serene Lake George in upstate New York.
“It got to the point where there were like hundreds of people following behind us,” Gardner told CBS New York afterward. “It was just crazy.”
Athletes who may have once been limited to a niche following of faithful sports fans are becoming mainstream celebrities. That’s not something many of them are used to, said Michael Schneider, an executive editor at Variety who has covered the TV business for 25 years.
“When you had a certain level of A-list stars that dominated the public’s attention, that’s long gone,” Schneider said. “If you’re a sports star, if you’re a reality star, if you’re a music star, once upon a time, you had a small but very loyal audience. That’s gone. Your audience is everywhere. And you’re part of the machine.
“It’s changed quite a bit.”
Sports stars aren’t completely new to the spotlight, but the ways athletes are developing their profiles beyond the field are changing. The biggest shift in this marriage between athlete and celebrity is social media. With infinite ways to reach an audience, the definition of a celebrity athlete is becoming less clear. And so are the ways in which athletes are navigating it.
“In years past, we probably had a pretty clear-cut line,” said Michael Giardina, a Florida State University professor who has done extensive research on the intersection of sports, media and culture. “Michael Jordan was a global celebrity. Tiger Woods was a celebrity. David Beckham, Roger Federer. It was easily acknowledgeable who was a global celebrity.
“(Now), the line is a bit more complicated.”
On July 19, 1965, then 22-year-old New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The title read: “Football Goes Show Biz,” with a photo of Namath — soft-smiling, hands on hips in an effortlessly cool kind of way — illuminated by the shining lights of Times Square.
“Broadway Joe,” as he would soon be known, helped lead the Jets to a Super Bowl three years later, but his off-the-field Hollywood endeavors became the true staple of his legacy.
“For the NFL, he was really the first lightning rod celebrity figure,” Durbin said. “It was perfect timing in the late 1960s, right before ‘Monday Night Football’ made the NFL the dominant sport in the country, and (Namath) brought all the celebrity to it.”
Sports have always had an overwhelming impact on culture, Durbin explained. The ancient Greeks measured time in Olympiads, representing the four years between the Olympic Games. Baseball cards represented players’ notoriety in the United States throughout the 19th century, while newspapers added dedicated sports sections to their publications.
Today, it’s the athletes themselves who are in the driver’s seats behind their public profiles.
“You don’t have that single publication that makes you right now, and it is part of the evolving media landscape,” Durbin said. “So much relies on your own ability to maximize your social media impact and then your own relationship to other celebrities.”
The NBA was perhaps first to master the modern form of sports celebrity by embracing the star power of its athletes — and of the fans surrounding them. Courtside seats are hotbeds for celebrity sightings and have linked the game to popular culture, “Entertainment Tonight” host Kevin Frazier said.
“The courtside seat is holy grail real estate,” said Frazier, who worked for ESPN before jumping to entertainment news. “You can put somebody courtside and in half the shots, you’re going to see them there. When you put Kim Kardashian courtside at the Lakers game, you’re going to see a lot of Kim Kardashian. That became a big deal. And the NBA was so smart to capitalize on it.”
Sound familiar to the NFL’s “Taylor Swift effect?”
The NFL adopted its own version of the courtside seat with camera shots of box seating at games. It fully leaned in when Swift began attending Chiefs games at Arrowhead Stadium in 2023, panning to her throughout the broadcast and leading to new records in fan engagement.
Taylor Swift has become a regular at Chiefs games to watch her fiancé Travis Kelce and TV cameras aren’t shy about finding her. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
The celebrity link works in the inverse, too. Kelce is one of the most recognizable faces in the NFL and beyond. He and his brother Jason’s “New Heights” podcast was licensed last year for a reported $100 million. He’s tested the waters in Hollywood, too, starring in Netflix’s “Happy Gilmore 2” as a waiter alongside Super Bowl LX halftime performer Bad Bunny.
Kelce’s Instagram following (7.9 million) is nearly double that of Kansas City’s team page (4.4 million), and he’s not alone. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (6.6 million) also outweighs the Chiefs’ total. The same goes for Burrow in Cincinnati (4.1 million followers to the Bengals’ 1.8 million), Jefferson in Minnesota (1.9 million to the Vikings’ 1.6 million) and quarterback Lamar Jackson in Baltimore (3.6 million to the Ravens’ 2.4 million).
Star-studded rookies are outshining their franchises, too, thanks to the opportunity to build personal brands in college with name, image and likeness legislation. The No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft, Travis Hunter, is known for his contagious energy as much as his two-way prowess. At 22, Hunter outpaces the following of his Jacksonville Jaguars (1 million) and starting quarterback Trevor Lawrence (963,000) with 2.2 million followers on Instagram.
Rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who fell to becoming a fifth-round draft pick and began the season No. 3 on the Cleveland Browns depth chart, is more popular online than his team (2.5 million to 1.6 million followers). His jersey was the top five most popular entering the season, per the NFLPA, a testament to a level of recognizability not usually seen for players with his status (regardless of his famous family ties).
“You don’t have to be there in the top five as in your sport to, post-retirement, have numerous investments, have a media presence and do these things off the field,” Giardina said. “I just don’t think we were seeing that 20 years ago.”
Social media provides a new touchpoint for athletes to connect with fans and build personal brands. If gameday is the stage, social media is the meet-and-greet.
“There are a lot more celebrities now, and there are a lot more opportunities,” Schneider said. “These days, you don’t need to go to the mainstream route. … You could become a creator or do your own shows. (You could) podcast, which everyone seems to already have a podcast. There are so many options there.”
NFL player-hosted podcasts have boomed in recent years. Six shows hosted by current or former NFL players rank in Apple’s Top 50 sports podcasts.
Networks are also buying into the celebrity value of athletes. Amazon Prime and Netflix paid millions for rights to air NFL games in recent years. The streamers are also investing in documentaries that pull back the curtain to athletes’ personal lives and passions, from Netflix’s “Quarterback” to Prime Video’s recent release of “Saquon,” a feature-length docuseries that follows the five-year journey of Philadelphia Eagles star Saquon Barkley.
“In a world where there are no guarantees. Your one guarantee is that if you have sports rights, you’ll have an audience,” Schneider said. He added that a more recent trend has been the uptick of athletes getting involved in production, following in the footsteps of Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.
Commercially, some NFL stars are just as recognizable to brands as they are to their teams. Mahomes joked recently that he was able to pull off a trick play against the Las Vegas Raiders thanks to his acting experience in State Farm commercials.
There’s been a shift in the way sports stars are covered in the media, too. Traditionally, entertainment-focused brands from People to TMZ treat athletes for what they are: entertainers. In an interview for his GQ cover story, Kelce put it best, lamenting how he relates to his mega-star fiancée over the physical and mental pressures of their jobs in the spotlight.
“I hadn’t experienced somebody in the same shoes as me,” Kelce said, “having a partner who understands the scrutiny, understands the ups and downs of being in front of millions.”
From fashion to television and podcasting to production, NFL stars are translating their skills on the field into a more personal presence that resonates with fans. It’s certainly not all glamorous, but it’s a sign of how sports stars are shaping industries beyond their own.
“(Sports are) always pressed on popular culture because it’s such an important part of culture,” Durbin said. “And such an important part of how we view ourselves, our accomplishments, what we do, and how we see the world.
“You have those who may or may not consciously target being celebrities, but because they have the stage of sports, they walk into it.”
