Sydney Sweeney’s latest advertising campaign was supposed to be about sports. Instead, it has become a debate about women’s bodies, commercialisation, sexual agency and who gets to decide what female empowerment looks like.
The Hollywood star appears nude in a 60-second advertisement for Novig, using American footballs, basketballs, soccer balls, a tennis racket, helmets and other sporting equipment to cover her body. The concept is presented as a playful attempt to put the focus on sport itself. At one point, reclining on a pool table, Sweeney says: “You can’t trade this one, I just look good lying here.” She also tells viewers: “Think you know sports? Prove it. Novig is only about sports, so all they want to show you is sports.”
The message, however, has been received very differently by a group of female athletes. Within days, criticism spread across social media, with athletes arguing that the campaign does not remove sexuality from sports but instead uses sexuality to sell a sports-related product.
Australian four-time Olympic gold medalist Ariarne Titmus was among the most prominent critics. “I genuinely cannot describe how angry I am seeing this ad,” she wrote. She argued that the campaign was a “slap in the face” to female athletes who had dedicated their lives to their craft and to women who valued the teamwork, camaraderie, dedication and excellence associated with sport. “Why are we still living in a world where you can profit off women’s bodies and continue to sexualize women’s sports?” she asked.
American gymnast Gracie Kramer responded differently but just as directly, posting videos of her competitions and training alongside the message: “I don’t know what Sydney Sweeney is doing, but this is what women in sports look like.” The post attracted nearly a million likes, while Olympic diving silver medalist Kassidy Cook expressed support.
Australian sprinter Bree Rizzo similarly argued that women’s involvement in sport “goes far beyond appearance”, describing it instead in terms of “strength, skill, dedication, resilience, confidence, and everything they are capable of.”
World boxing champion Skye Nicolson drew perhaps the sharpest distinction. “There’s a huge difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you’re an athlete and using sex to market ‘sports,’” she said. Female athletes, she added, could embrace their femininity without the problem being their appearance. The issue, in her formulation, was using women’s bodies as a tool to sell sport.
That distinction is central to the controversy. Sweeney was not appearing in the advertisement as an athlete demonstrating sporting achievement. She was appearing as an actress and celebrity promoting a sports prediction platform. Novig launched nationwide in August 2026 and is restricted to users 21 and older. The company positions itself as a platform combining financial exchange mechanisms with sports prediction markets. Sweeney is not merely the face of the campaign: she has joined Novig as a strategic partner and equity holder.
That fact has complicated attempts to separate the actress from the advertising strategy. While some social media users argued that criticism should be directed at Novig, Sweeney has a direct commercial relationship with the company. Her own explanation of the campaign was that it sought “to cut through all the noise and focus entirely on sports itself”, using “confidence, humor, and playfulness”.
The campaign has nevertheless succeeded in doing something that advertising is designed to do: it has attracted extraordinary attention. According to Social Blade, Sweeney initially gained approximately 50,000 Instagram followers during the first three days after the advertisement’s release. By Sunday, however, she lost 136,848 followers in a single day, followed by roughly 68,000 more on Monday. More than 200,000 users therefore unfollowed her over the two days.
The figure is striking but remains relatively small compared with her total following of more than 25 million. The loss represents less than 1 per cent of her original Instagram audience. Yet the speed of the decline has made the campaign’s social-media consequences impossible to ignore.
Sweeney has not responded with an apology. Instead, she continued promoting the campaign, sharing photographs and videos from the advertisement. She also posted images from ESPN’s Body Issue featuring nude and semi-nude male and female athletes, including Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe.
That response points towards the more complicated argument beneath the immediate controversy. Nude images of athletes have previously been presented as celebrations of the athletic body. The ESPN Body Issue was explicitly associated with that idea, while athletes including Rapinoe and others have spoken about nudity in terms of physical achievement, visibility and identity.
The comparison raises an uncomfortable question. If nudity can represent athletic pride, body confidence, sexual autonomy or a challenge to conventional beauty standards in one context, why does the same act become objectionable when performed by a conventionally attractive actress selling a commercial product?
There is an equally important counterargument. The contexts are not identical. A naked athlete presenting the body that performs at the highest level of competition is not necessarily doing the same thing as an actress using sports equipment to cover her body while advertising a prediction market. Female athletes have spent years arguing that audiences should value their performance rather than their appearance. For them, the distinction between celebrating an athletic body and using sex to market sport is not semantic.
Sweeney’s critics therefore object not simply to nudity but to the commercial setting and the meaning created by that setting. Yet the campaign also raises the question of personal agency. Sweeney deliberately participated in it and holds an equity stake in Novig. The campaign was presented as a creative choice involving confidence, humour and playfulness rather than as something imposed upon her.
This is a debate feminism has confronted for decades: when does a woman displaying her body exercise sexual agency, and when does that display become objectification? Sweeney’s case adds another complication. Her appearance fits closely with a conventional image of female attractiveness: blonde, blue-eyed, thin, curvy and widely regarded as conventionally attractive. The controversy therefore exposes a peculiar tension in contemporary arguments about female empowerment. Women are encouraged to reclaim their bodies, challenge restrictive beauty standards and define their own sexuality. But when a woman already conforms closely to traditional standards of beauty, her decision to display that body can be interpreted less as resistance and more as participation in the very system being criticised.
Sweeney has encountered this tension before. Her 2025 American Eagle campaign, built around the phrase “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, provoked accusations that its wordplay evoked “genes” and carried racial or eugenic overtones. The actress later acknowledged that her silence over the controversy had “widened the divide”, while saying: “I’m against hate and divisiveness.”
The Novig controversy is different, but it again places Sweeney at the intersection of celebrity, sexuality, advertising and cultural politics. Her decision to respond by highlighting nude images of female athletes shifts the argument away from whether women should be allowed to display their bodies and towards the more difficult question of who determines the meaning of that display.
The commercial may have been designed to persuade audiences to think about sports. Instead, it has produced a much larger argument about women. The athletes criticising it say sports should be recognised for strength, skill, dedication and achievement rather than sexual appeal. Sweeney’s response points towards another principle: that a woman’s decision to display her body should not automatically be stripped of agency simply because the audience finds her attractive.
For Novig, Sweeney and their critics, the campaign has achieved something indisputable: everyone is looking. The unresolved question is what, exactly, they are seeing.
