The last time Ed Sheeran played Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field three years ago, he drew a record-breaking crowd of almost 78,000 fans.
When he returned there on Saturday to perform his chart-topping hits, he opened with a speech that felt more suited for an apology tour than a victory lap.
“I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes, and I’m so so sorry,” Sheeran told the crowd before he sang a single note.
The British singer-songwriter, who’s enjoyed a relatively scandal-free career thus far, landed at the center of a media firestorm last week when his opener, Macklemore, was removed from Sheeran’s Loop Tour for making pro-Palestinian comments onstage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.
The rapper was dropped from the tour at the behest of Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, who threatened to cancel Sheeran’s tour stop at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, if Macklemore remained on the bill. Kraft also encouraged other stadium owners in the US to follow his lead.
Suddenly Sheeran, who’s known for gooey ballads and boilerplate crowd-pleasers more than bold political views, was forced to make a statement — and it didn’t go well.
“Macklemore’s contract for the tour was with the promoter, not me,” Sheeran told his followers in a bulleted statement on Instagram, concluding that he was “not complicit.”
The backlash was swift. Social media users urged each other to boycott Sheeran’s music, headlines fussed over falling resale ticket prices for Sheeran’s forthcoming shows, and the rest of his tour openers dropped out in solidarity with Macklemore and the Palestinian people. The blowback was intense enough that speculation began swirling that Sheeran could be forced to cancel the Loop Tour entirely.
Then Sheeran stepped onstage at his next tour stop in Philadelphia with an apology and a message.
“Honoring my commitment to my fans is also completely essential to who I am, and that is why I’m here tonight on my own and continuing my current tour, ” he said, seemingly reading from a teleprompter.
It’s one of the oldest proverbs in show business: The show must go on. If Sheeran’s situation is any indication, that’s especially true when stacks of cash are on the line.
Save for his opening apology speech, the show in Philadelphia was mostly business as usual. Sheeran bumped up his set time to accommodate for the lack of an opener, then proceeded to play the hits as planned, from “Castle on the Hill” to “Shape of You” and “Bad Habits.”
While a small group of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the venue, one satisfied concertgoer told Rolling Stone, “It’s so wonderful that people care that much and that they are so passionate, but the concert still happened. There’s still a ton of people here.”
Sheeran is one of the most reliably valuable performers in the music industry. His last outing, the Mathematics Tour, grossed over $875 million from 2022 to 2025. The Loop Tour, which kicked off at the top of this year in Auckland, is scheduled to continue through North America and wrap in December in Mexico City; Sheeran’s next stop is Gillette Stadium on Saturday.
Though there’s talk of more protests, one music industry professional said there’s no need for Sheeran to step away now.
“This is a huge issue that he needs to navigate, but you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars earned over the course of an entire tour,” said Randy Nichols, who has experience with both digital marketing and live event strategy as an artist manager at Fly South Music Group. “You’re not going to cancel that tour.”
“Could he have potentially gone and hid for six months? Sure,” Nichols added, “but I don’t think he needed to.”
For Sheeran, it turns out PR crises online may be smaller than they appear.
Sheeran upset the internet, but not the fans who make him money
Tara Goodwin, a crisis communications expert and founder of Goodwin Consulting, described Sheeran’s initial Instagram statement as “impersonal,” “callous,” and “incredibly defensive.” But she said his onstage speech in Philadelphia helped revive his reputation with the people who matter most to his bottom line: real, merch-buying, ticket-holding fans.
Despite his desire to stay out of politics, Sheeran’s speech got a little more specific and a lot more emotional, and both tactics helped win over fans, Goodwin said. He condemned the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people in Israel. He also described the Israeli government’s war in Gaza, which has killed over 73,000 Palestinians and counting — including tens of thousands of children, according to UNICEF — as “catastrophic, unjustifiable, and disproportionate.”
Sheeran also largely dropped the defensive posturing, Goodwin noted, and grew noticeably teary while thanking concertgoers for their support.
“That’s exactly what he should have done the first time,” Goodwin told Business Insider. “He should have been human.”
“The public has an amazing capacity to forgive,” she added, “but you have to be humble, and you have to ask for it.”
It probably helps that Sheeran’s audience hasn’t been primed to expect pluck or any particular conviction from the singer. Although the narrative surrounding the Loop Tour has turned volatile online, Sheeran’s PR crisis is not one of brand contradiction.
He’s long followed the blueprint of a generic, noncommittal pop star, designed to appease more than enlighten. The most outspoken critics of his both-sides-ism were likely never his fans to begin with, and some of the most viral tweets about Sheeran from the past week admit as much: “How do I boycott Ed Sheeran when my previous consumption of his work was zero,” reads one such example.
“He’s very much built his brand to be ‘music for everyone,'” Nichols said. “He just wants his shows to be a time for people to unwind and not think about other problems.”
The data shows Sheeran’s fandom is alive and well
That promise of escapism can be broadly appealing, even amid a bout of negative press. While a mad rush to resell tickets is a compelling data point amid a scandal, Nichols said the price fluctuations for Ed Sheeran tickets on resale sites are consistent with stadium-sized shows and with Sheeran’s recent track record — and they certainly don’t constitute what he’d consider a “career crisis.”
“I just don’t think that there’s a drastic change in the demand to see him,” Nichols said. “Not to knock Sheeran, because he’s a superstar act, but he’s on the fringes of being a stadium act. He gets to stadiums by selling a lot of tickets at a lower price, whereas some artists who are a little bit bigger than him are charging a much higher premium on their tickets. So the fact that you’re seeing a lower price — it’s no different than earlier on in his tour, before this controversy.”
Not that resale prices would matter much to Sheeran, anyway. Artists don’t get a cut from tickets sold in a secondary market. “If the show’s sold out and not all the resale tickets sell, which happens often, that doesn’t change how much money he makes,” Nichols explained.
Perhaps more tellingly, Sheeran’s streaming numbers have remained stable since news broke about Macklemore’s tour removal. Citing data provided by Luminate, Billboard reported that Sheeran pulled in about 3.7 million on-demand streams on the day he shared his poorly received bullet points on Instagram — and just under 3.7 million the day before. He is still the 16th-most-popular musician in the world on Spotify.
Public backlash can be loud, but memory is short — and Americans have a demonstrated affinity for separating the art from the artist. After all, musicians like Chris Brown and Ye continue to book stadiums across the country, despite accusations of abuse, assault, and, in the latter’s case, habitual antisemitism.
“He’s probably too well-established for one controversy to define a career,” Goodwin said of Sheeran.
Sure, some people will still boycott Sheeran’s concerts and his music. But in the long run, Goodwin said, he’ll probably be just fine: “I think that this too shall pass.”
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