Sydney Sweeney isn’t just the star of Euphoria – she’s now the star of a new highly sexualised ad campaign for sports betting app Novig that has officially gone viral.
It shows the 29-year-old in a variety of sporty poses, including sitting naked on top of a basketball hoop, using footballs to push up her cleavage and wearing just shoulder pads with a football placed over her crotch area.
“Sports”, “sports”, “sports,” she says on repeat. “Think you like sports? Prove it,” is her catchphrase, encouraging the viewer to start betting.
It comes only a year after her American Eagle campaign, which featured the slogan “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” and was criticised for appearing to use the language of eugenics.
Her latest ad is instead being accused of sexualising women in sport and is also offending a lot of people, including several high-profile athletes. Retired four-time Olympic gold medallist Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus said she was “infuriated” by this “bulls***” brand marketing.
“How do we live in a world where monetising a women’s [sic] body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?” she wrote on Instagram.
We want to encourage girls to do sport, not pile more pressure on them
Ex-Olympic runner Hannah Williams called it a “disgrace for women in sports”. British track star Amy Hunt also went for the jugular at the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship on Sunday, saying: “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women’s sport looks like!”
She added: “When you’re a woman in sport, it’s not pretty. It’s not glamorous. It’s not sexy all the time, definitely” - it’s “hard work, blood, sweat, tears”.
But Sweeney isn’t sorry. Instead, she has “responded” to the backlash by sharing a series of Instagram Stories on Sunday that highlight professional sports stars who have posed naked or semi-naked in the former American monthly sports magazine ESPN, seemingly in a bid to prove double standards.
The images she shared include tennis players Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki and even former American football player Jason Kelce, the younger brother of Taylor Swift’s husband, Travis.
Sweeney might have been trying to point out a double standard, but her insinuations of snobbiness doesn’t wash for me.
The aim of Sweeney’s latest ad is to get men to download the sports-only market predictions app, and it’s plain dishonest to wrap it up in some kind of tongue-in-cheek support for women in sport.
And it’s the last thing mums of daughters like me need. Seeing naked Sweeney all over sports like an OnlyFans performer is not a great role model for my young daughters, especially given the trend of girls dropping sports after puberty.
By age 14, girls drop out of sports at two times the rate of boys, according to US research shared by organisations like the Youth Sport Trust, and it’s driven by body changes, declining body confidence, and a fear of being judged that knocks their confidence.
More than 1 million girls in the UK lose interest in sport as teenagers, according to research by Women in Sport
More than 1 million girls in the UK lose interest in sport as teenagers, according to research by Women in Sport in 2022 – and it’s low self-belief and body image concerns that are doing the damage.
That’s why Sweeney, a Gen Z poster girl, shouldn’t be sexualising women in sport – which she’s doing with 100 per cent success.
It sets an impossible bar which will result in tweens and teens – and even grown women – feeling inadequate and not attractive enough on the playing pitch or in the PE class.
As girls approach puberty, there’s already a gnawing worry about how you look as your body changes and your hormones run wild. Sweeney’s epic naked marathon isn’t going to help with any of that, and I doubt the creators of this campaign gave it a second thought. But it matters, and here’s why.
If my 10-year-old daughter Lola, who plays netball at school, saw the photos of Sweeney sitting in the basketball hoop naked, the message she would likely take is that sport is about looking “hot”.
We want to encourage girls to do sport, not pile more pressure on them. But despite the visibility of women’s sports since events like the 2023 Women’s World Cup, according to the UK’s charity Women in Sport, it’s still boys who dream of being top sportspeople – 53 per cent of them last year, while for girls it dropped from 38 per cent in 2024 to just 23 per cent in 2025.
Too many girls are disengaging from sport as it is, so please, Sydney Sweeney – stop trying to double down on your choices and pretend that you’re the one who is a victim of hypocrisy and double standards. We don’t need to hear about how unfair it is that you’re degraded for posing in nothing but football socks, while a famous man would be praised.
Because reducing women in sport to visual objects is just another way of packaging women’s bodies to be commodified and objectified. It places physical attractiveness on a pedestal rather than celebrating talent.
I hope my girls don’t see this ad – and focus instead on remembering their PE kit and their enjoyment of taking part in sport, which takes them out of their heads. What girls and teens need is healthy self-esteem, positive body image, and self-belief – not harmful stereotypes and Sweeney’s objectification of women in sport.
