Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and Lionel Messi will all gather in one place on Sunday, but no one has come to see them – instead all eyes will be locked on a mesmerising escapologist on the brink of history, writes OLIVER HOLT

President Trump took a break from airing his plans to turn the Gaza Strip into Palm Beach this week to talk about Super Bowl LIX.

Many of his pronouncements may cause widespread consternation but when he praised Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, he was on safe ground.

Trump will become the first sitting US president to attend a Super Bowl when he takes his seat in the Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday for the climax of the NFL season between the Chiefs, who are bidding to become the first team ever to win American Football’s showpiece event three times in a row, and the Philadelphia Eagles.

And when he was asked which team would win, President Trump restricted his answer to a reference to Mahomes.

‘I don’t want to say,’ Trump responded, ‘but there’s a certain quarterback that seems to be a pretty good winner.’

No one could argue with that. Mahomes may not have quite the same crossover appeal of Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ veteran tight end and the boyfriend of Taylor Swift, but he is the best player in the NFL and, already, at the age of 29, one of the most decorated quarterbacks in the history of the sport.

Everyone who loves the NFL has their own favourite quarterback. Mine was Brett Favre, who had a cannon of an arm and a southern swagger that appears to have been his undoing in life after sport.

Others preferred the elegance of Dan Marino. Even more would profess an allegiance to Tom Brady, the greatest of them all.

Mahomes is very much in that company. There are a few, beautifully rare, moments in a life watching sport when you understand, incontrovertibly, that you are in the presence of greatness.

The moment of realisation about proximity to genius, Marlon Brando’s character says in Apocalypse Now, is like being ‘shot with a diamond’.

That realisation was there at the Olympic Games last summer when I squeezed into the press box at the Stade de France and saw Antoine Dupont seize the Rugby Sevens final when he came on at half-time and won gold for the hosts.

I saw it from high in the stands at the Lusail Stadium in Qatar in the winter of 2022 when Lionel Messi ran a ring around Josko Gvardiol in Argentina’s semi-final win over Croatia and set up a tap-in for Julian Alvarez.

And I saw it again this time last year, from the back row of the section allocated to foreign press at the Allegiant Stadium, a few hundred yards from the Las Vegas Strip, when Mahomes led the Chiefs to their second straight Super Bowl victory.

There was a certainty about Mahomes doing what he did that bright afternoon in the crisp desert air. On the sport’s biggest stage, when everything was on the line, when his team was behind, you simply knew that one of the greatest players in the history of the NFL was going to come through in the clutch.

Everyone knew that, for all the excellence of the Chiefs’ defence, the difference between the two teams in the end was going to come down to the genius of Mahomes.

When it came to the crunch, the San Francisco 49ers’ second-year quarterback, Brock Purdy, could not get the job done. Mahomes? It was never in doubt.

It was a strange feeling. Sport is often defined by its unpredictability but even though Mahomes still had to move his team most of the length of the field to win the game in Sin City, there was no doubt in the mind that that at the end of it, he was going to hit the jackpot.

It was like watching the spin of a roulette wheel, knowing that the ball was going to come to rest on red.

Mahomes rallied the Chiefs in regulation, dragging them back from a six-point fourth quarter deficit to force the game into overtime.

And when the 49ers’ first drive in overtime only yielded a field goal, the Chiefs’ safety Justin Reid told reporters that he said to himself: ‘It’s over.’

‘We’re going to get the ball back to 15,’ Reid thought, referencing the number that Mahomes wears on his back. And, sure enough, No 15 stepped up, orchestrating a superb, gutsy, 75-yard drive that showcased his rushing ability as well as his passing style.

Time and again, Mahomes came through when the pressure was at its highest and heaviest, rushing on fourth down early in the drive when everything was on the line. And making it.

The drive ended with a short toss from Mahomes to Mecole Hardman that sealed a 25-22 Chiefs’ triumph.

‘He is the best, he is the standard, he is Michael Jordan,’ former Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo said on CBS as the NFL genuflected before Mahomes and his red bandana.

And now, on Sunday, with Messi watching on from a box at the Superdome and the Swift-Kelce romance revved up for another moment in the spotlight, Mahomes and the Chiefs are back again to try to achieve what no quarterback and no team has ever achieved before in the sport.

Brady, the former quarterback of the New England Patriots and the Tampa Bay Buccaneeers, won seven Super Bowls and appeared in 10 altogether and is regarded as the greatest of all time. But neither he, nor any team, has ever managed a fabled three-peat.

Brady, John Elway, Troy Aikman, Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Bob Griese and Bart Starr all achieved back-to-back wins. No one has done it three times in a row.

In English football, Manchester City set a new mark by winning the top flight four times in row but the NFL’s draft system makes consistent success that much harder and that much more remarkable. The success of Mahomes and the Chiefs needs to be put in that context.

Mahomes’ genius is not especially hard to define. He is extremely good at a lot of the different disciplines that go into making a great quarterback but in a sport where every play is meticulously planned, there is a spontaneity and flamboyance about him that sets him apart from more metronomic passers like Brady.

You do not need to be a student of the game to be mesmerised by him. His mobility is one of the things that makes him stand out. Sometimes, when he is in the pocket, he works like an escapologist, twisting one way and another to stay out of the clutches of the behemoths bearing down upon him.

His reading of the game, his awareness of the threats he faces before they even materialise, is second to none. The sight of him spinning out of trouble and wheeling away to the right, throwing on the run, is one of the great sights in the NFL.

He is versatile, too. He has a strong arm. He can go long easily. He can keep it short and disciplined when he needs to. It is not all about flamboyance. He recognises that his team has other strengths and that sometimes the best way to win is to play to those strengths.

Mahomes has been pragmatic in possession this season. Last week, the analyst Skip Bayless accused him of ‘playing like a grandpa’ and said he had become boring to watch.

But Mahomes is not about making exciting plays for the sake of it. He is there to win. Time and again, the Chiefs won matches this season by narrow, one-score margins.

But Mahomes never loses his talent for innovation and flair. He improvises. He can throw left-handed when he has to. He can flip it, he can throw it back-handed, he can loop it over an opponent with a straight-arm lob that looks like a bowler letting go of a cricket ball at the start of his action.

He is not quite in the league of Michael Vick or Lamar Jackson when it comes to rushing quarterbacks but he is not too far behind. He can damage an opponent running with the ball and he has a knack of doing it when his team needs it most, as he did in Super Bowl LVIII in Vegas.

If Mahomes and the Chiefs win in New Orleans, not only will they become the first side to three-peat but Mahomes will join Bradshaw and Montana as the only quarterbacks with four Super Bowl rings. Above them, there is just Brady. None of those players achieved their success as early as Mahomes, at 29.

With great success, of course, comes resentment. It was that way with Brady and the Patriots, too. Some say that the Chiefs, who will be appearing in their fifth Super Bowl in the last six years, have become the team that America loves to hate.

Others have grown bored of them winning and bored of the soap opera that surrounds the relationship between Kelce and Swift. They rail against the broadcasters’ obsession with cutting away to footage of Swift celebrating touchdowns at games with the other wives and girlfriends.

Mahomes has managed to remain relatively untouched by the circus, although part of the reason for Trump’s admiration of him may be connected with the fact that Mahomes’ wife, Brittany, once an accomplished soccer player, indicated support for Trump during the US presidential election campaign last year.

Mahomes has not allowed any of it to become a distraction. In fact, he seems to get better and better the longer a season goes on and the more important a game becomes. Like so many of the great ones, he has mastered the art of finding a way to win.

Maybe Mahomes does not quite have the profile of Kelce or the explosiveness of Eagles superstar running back Saquon Barkley but he is not only the best player in the NFL but also, with veteran coach Andy Reid, the glue that holds the Chiefs together.

There is no sign that he is slowing down. If anything, his hunger for success seems to be growing. Even when he talked about Messi coming to the Super Bowl, that hunger shone through. ‘He’s someone else that I can look up to,’ Mahomes said, ‘and try to get on his level someday.’

If the Chiefs win on Sunday, then Mahomes will take a giant leap closer to that level. If the Chiefs win, the three-peat will set him apart, even from Brady, for the rest of history.

The Eagles will not roll over but the bookmakers have the Chiefs as slight favourites. The money says that, somehow, Patrick Mahomes will find a way.