Taylor Swift's ode to Travis Kelce on new album! Fans go wild over lyric about 'touchdowns' on track The Alchemy from The Tortured Poets Department: 'Trying to be the greatest in the league'

Taylor Swift has dropped her new album and the penultimate song appears to contain multiple references to football and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.

'The Alchemy', the 15th song on 'The Tortured Poets Department' went viral in the minutes following the album's midnight release. The bridge of the song is where the references to Kelce are the most obvious.

'Cheers chanting 'cause they said / There was no chance / Trying to be the greatest in the league / Where's the trophy?/ He just comes running over to me,' she sings.

Then the chorus kicks in: 'Touch down / Call the amateurs and cut them from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown, baby I'm the one to beat / 'Cause the sign on your heart said it's still reserved for me / Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?'

Other parts of the song refer to 'blokes warm[ing] the benches'.

It's a slow song that is clearly about the man in her life, who she has been publicly dating since September of 2023 - when she went to her first Kansas City Chiefs game against the Chicago Bears. 

But fans may have gotten tipped off about the content of the song long before the album drop. 

Claims began circulating on Thursday that Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, has leaked a day early and Swifties than managed to snatch an early listen think at least one song is about Kelce.

'The Alchemy' apparently has multiple references that fans have interpreted to be about Kansas City Chiefs star Kelce.

One fan took to X and wrote: 'the alchemy is clearly about travis lmao touchdown, greatest in the league, gloves on the bench... "where's the trophy he just comes running over to me"

Another said: 'There is one beautiful surprise - The Alchemy is about Travis!

'References touchdowns, teammates, trophies and how they had an instant connection they couldn't resist.'

A different fan responded to a wider discussion about the record by saying: 'I also think the alchemy is about Travis. It fits perfectly.' 

Speaking about the upcoming release back in February, when he was building up to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, Kelce said he had heard some of the songs on Swift's latest release.

'I have heard some of it and yes, it's unbelievable,' he said to reporters. 'I can't wait for her to shake up the world when it finally drops.'

While Swift has penned her first song about her beau, it's not the first time that she's sung about him.

During her Eras Tour stop in Argentina this past fall, with Travis in attendance, she changed the lyrics to her song 'Karma' saying that 'Karma is the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to me'.

Swift also makes multiple references to her brief romance with Matty Healy and the demise of her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn on new album.

Fans expected the end of her union with the British actor to have inspired much of her work but they were left surprised by the many nods to the 1975 frontman, who she dated for a few weeks in May last year, nine years after they were first romantically linked.

Opening track 'Fortnight' features Taylor reflecting about becoming strangers with a former lover after a short romance.

Hours before the album dropped, Swift revealed that the album's lead single would be Fortnight featuring rapper/singer Post Malone.

And as the album hit streaming platforms Thursday night, Swift published a lengthy statement on Instagram where she described it as 'an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time - one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.'

She continued: 'This period of the author's life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted.

'This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that's left behind is the tortured poetry,'