Being the headline act on Super Bowl Sunday isn’t confined to likely MVPs on the field, but the allure of entertaining a packed stadium during the half-time break may be waning.

After NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s open invitation to Taylor Swift — who he admitted would ‘always be welcome’ to perform following the announcement of her engagement to Kansas City TE Travis Kelce — the music press was briefly ablaze with suggestions that Adele had also been asked to top the bill next February in Santa Clara. Both, however, are now being dismissed as possibilities amid rumours that they have declined the offer.

While the Taylor Swift speculation centred largely on Goodell’s comments, just a week ago, news site Page Six reported that Adele’s ‘people’ were ‘in talks’ with the NFL and Jay Z’s firm Roc Nation,which currently organises the entertainment, with Swift, Miley Cyrus and, from left field, Bay Area-based Metallica also under consideration. Adele, who says she only attended Super Bowl LVII to see Rhianna perform at half-time, has previous when it comes to eschewing the opportunity to perform at one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar. Nearly ten years ago, she turned down a Super Bowl offer because ‘that show is not about music’.

“I can’t dance or anything like that,” she explained. “They were very kind, they did ask me, but I did say no.”

Now the latest rumours are being played down, with some outlets reporting that the London-born singer fears being a target in the same way as right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed during an on-campus event at Utah Valley University.

“She is petrified after what happened to Kirk,” an unnamed music industry executive told RadarOnline. “There is no way she will stand in front of 100 million people at the Super Bowl now. [She] thinks she would have a bullseye on her back.”

Swift, meanwhile, has apparently declined to appear over the league’s long-standing policy of not paying half-time performers. When the singer requested to retain ownership of the performance and be able to promote her own projects, she was shut down by the NFL.

“They expect the biggest artists in the world to do it for ‘exposure’ — but Taylor Swift doesn’t need exposure,” a source was quoted by Yahoo!, while another insisted that ‘she wanted a deal that reflected her value’, especially in terms of the eyeballs that she would bring to the half-time over and above those watching the actual game.

The singer’s fans, the notorious ‘Swifties’, read a lot into what they considered to be clues to a Super Bowl appearance that supposedly littered her appearance on the Kelce brothers’ New Heights podcast — from ‘thinking about sourdough 60 percent of the time’ allegedly referencing Super Bowl 60 at the home of the San Francisco 49ers, whose mascot is nicknamed Sourdough Sam’, to commenting that Jason Kelce screamed ‘for like 47 seconds’ at the start of the show, a supposed reference to the 47^th stop on her recent Eras Tour at the 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium…