The Gen-Z Problem With the NFL’s Social WAG Campaign

Authenticity is hard to find in the modern age of digital content—and in the NFL.

A video of Justin Herbert and Madison Beer hanging out at Chargers training camp has gone viral this offseason. | Screengrab on Twitter/@madisonchart

The year is 2026. Patrick Mahomes and a perfectly in-shape Travis Kelce are suiting up for another campaign with the Chiefs. Puka Nacua, fully healed after running through a glass window, will be hoping to play in the Rams’ season-opener next month sans any more controversy. Mike Vrabel and a Patriots team emerging from an offseason scandal eye a redemptive return to the Super Bowl. The through line across every narrative in NFL training camp so far? Be wary of what you see online.

That’s what the modern age of viral deepfakes, psyops and stealth marketing campaigns continues to teach everyone from the chronically plugged-in to the stubbornly A.I.-averse. So, when the NFL recently admitted that it’s trying to increase its exposure to women and girls through curated—and flirty—training camp content on social media, there’s naturally going to be a problem.

The NFL has been coordinating efforts to reach its female fans as a part of a far-reaching content campaign involving players’ WAGs (wives and girlfriends), according to a new report from Front Office Sports. One example is the widely-circulated video of Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert spending some personal time with fiancée Madison Beer at camp in early August. Bengals’ Joe Burrow and rumored romantic partner Olivia Ponton along with Giants’ Jaxson Dart and girlfriend Marissa Ayers have also felt more “visible” online than in past years, and as it turns out, that’s no coincidence.

“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.”

The league’s efforts to “scale up” its female-focused content date back to the seismic, world-stopping origins of Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce. Everyone knows where they were in September 2023 when Swift was spotted in the Chiefs suite alongside Kelce’s mom Donna watching a game at Arrowhead. Those who couldn’t believe their eyes immediately logged onto X (formerly Twitter) where Adam Schefter confirmed it with a matter-of-fact sentence. This was, in fact, real.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s high-profile relationship was not a PR stunt after all and helped the NFL gain more female fans. | David Eulitt/Getty Images

Swift and Kelce are now happily married, but their whirlwind romance may serve as a cautionary tale to those in the NFL currently navigating the public sphere with their high-profile significant others. For years—and still, some are not convinced—“Tayvis” was seen singularly as a public relations powerhouse. Nothing more than a celebrity marketing ploy to get the Chiefs star more mainstream visibility while thrusting Swift and all her musical greatness back into the spotlight (at the time, she hadn’t released any new music since her tenth studio album, Midnights, in 2022).

“Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are in a PR relationship,” one NPR headline in 2023 read. “All the reasons why I believe Tayvis is a PR stunt” was the title of a nine-month-old Reddit thread. It even escalated to a point where Kelce’s representatives had to condemn a fabricated PR breakup contract that had surreptitiously surfaced online.

If it were so easy for cynics to believe Swift and Kelce were “just faking it,” the same applies to Herbert and Beer, or any other power couple in the league. In this dangerous era of misinformation, NFL’s concerted efforts to push more WAG content online, as noble as their intentions are, isn’t doing the players or their sweethearts any favors.

Scrutiny is, of course, inevitable when you’re a starting NFL quarterback or a Grammy-nominated singer. Beer, 27, boasts 60 million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined, along with over 15.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Ponton is a former Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model. Ayers is an influencer who started modeling as a ring card girl for Jake Paul’s boxing company.

It can’t be lost on the NFL that the trio are all Gen-Z and all popular content creators, making it that much easier for the league’s social team to plaster their faces across platforms and promote the kind of lovey-dovey material more often associated with gossipy celebrity sites. It’s exactly what influencers live for. In late July, the NFL’s post of Herbert and Beer’s engagement racked up over half a million likes on Instagram and almost two million on TikTok, far surpassing any other post that month or this offseason, for that matter.

At the end of the day, (social) engagement sells. It’s a big reason Swift made the NFL almost $1 billion since she started dating Kelce, according to MarketWatch. But when the wealthiest sports league in the world tries to use WAG content from (as far as we know) real human relationships to grow its audience, it runs into a larger societal issue unique to this generation: What even is authentic, anymore?

One needs only to peek over at the movie industry and see the shameless lengths actors go to promote their movies: Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell in the 2023 rom-com Anyone But You, and Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a 2025 reboot of The Naked Gun. The capitalization of the flirty yet ambiguous press tour relationship is nothing new, and has arguably done more to disillusion film aficionados and put them off from the product. The NFL would do well not to veer into the same treacherous territory.

Before A.I. technology and capitalist agendas make cynics of us all, people just want to watch football and cheer on their favorite players. The NFL’s evolving campaign to cross over and reach new communities and fanbases is a good thing, to be sure, but social media exposure always comes with a personal cost and blurs the lines between fact and fiction. As far as the facts go, Swift and Kelce’s once-perceived national cry for attention was, actually, just a timeless love story. Here’s to the league’s other lovebirds getting their own happy endings, too.

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