Taylor Swift Says Her Mom Played Matchmaker With Travis Kelce

Taylor Swift says her mom quietly played matchmaker with Travis Kelce right after she’d weathered two major breakups — and it came with one very pointed nudge: “You gotta start doing something different.”

In her new Disney+ docuseries Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, Swift uses episode four, “Thank You for the Lovely Bouquet,” to explain how the Kansas City Chiefs star first landed on Andrea Swift’s radar. It’s the same episode where she looks back on the stretch of the Eras Tour defined by her splits from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy, summing it up with the line, “Men will let you down, the Eras Tour never will.”

Andrea says she first clocked Kelce the way most people did in 2023 — by scrolling. “I’m looking at the headlines and perusing around on the Internet and I see that this guy came to your show and he brought a friendship bracelet and wants to meet you,” she recalls. Curious, she went to her “resident expert on the Kansas City Chiefs,” cousin Robin. “Tell me about this guy named Travis Kelce,” she asked.

Robin’s review did the heavy lifting. “Oh my God, he is the nicest guy! And he really loves his mom,” she reportedly told Andrea. That was enough for Andrea to describe it as a “Ding, ding, ding, ding” moment in the doc — the green flag that made her start quietly connecting the dots.

“So you call me with this tone of, ‘Hey, I know you’re not gonna react well to this, but there’s a guy…’” Swift remembers. Andrea jumped in with, “He’s really cute!” before delivering the line her daughter still quotes back: “You gotta start doing something different.” Swift jokes that she’d always been “very non-athlete” and genuinely wondered what they’d even talk about on a date.

Andrea says she kept coming back to Kelce’s bracelet move, calling it “so earnest” and “the sweetest thing,” especially because he showed up with something from “your world.” On their first date, Swift says Kelce literally had to “explain football” to her — she calls it “violent chess” in the episode. “Then I became obsessed with him and therefore became obsessed with learning about football — greatest surprise of my life,” she says.

Both Swift and Andrea describe a clear shift once Kelce arrived. Swift notes she went through “two breakups on the first half of this tour,” while Andrea calls her future son-in-law “one of the happiest people” she’s ever met who “brought a lot of happiness to the room.” Swift adds that he’s “a real yes guy” who thrives when “the lights are the brightest.”

It’s another layer on a relationship already traced through family and friends — from one of Swift’s BFF’s sisters encouraging a Travis Kelce romance after a tarot reading, to their early “spark” being detailed by an SNL trio, to Kelce’s own story about Swift’s cousins snapping photos in front of his locker. Now, the doc gives Andrea her on-record credit as the mom who quietly helped set up the NFL star Swift would allude to as her “endgame.”

More on Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce’s Wedding Plans

Before you go, click to see all of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s cutest PDA moments.