“It’s just sports”

Football season is back, and so is Sydney Sweeney. 

In a recent advertisement for Novig, a sports prediction market app, Sweeney is nude with sports equipment strategically placed in front of her while she jokes about how the viewers aren’t watching for her body, but for sports. Just sports.

Some audiences weren’t happy, criticizing the ad’s exploitation of the female body. Many female athletes claimed Sweeney made a joke of women’s sports and sexualized them more than they already are, in a time where women are fighting for more modest garments, reported on in an article by CNN. 

Others responded with videos performing their sport saying Sweeney doesn’t understand the lifestyle. But it seems Sweeney doesn’t want to, nor has to, understand the lifestyle of a female athlete. 

Sweeney’s focus in recent years has been showcasing her body, creating an odd tension between female empowerment and her repeated pleas for the public to stop sexualizing her.

In May 2025, Sweeney was featured taking a bath in a Dr. Squatch advertisement. After comments flooded asking for the bathwater she used, the company sold limited edition bars of soap called “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss,” marketed as containing her actual bathwater. 

According to People Magazine, 5,000 bars of soap were sold.

Many criticized her appeal to the male gaze, saying there is a difference between female empowerment and hypersexualizing women.

The chief marketing officer of Novig, Catherine Dougherty, must have known this ad would spark controversy and still, the team proceeded with the idea.

Athletes want to be acknowledged for what they can do with their talent, not what their bodies look like. The ad doesn’t try to encapsulate an athlete, instead it portrays women as objects.

Former U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer wrote on Instagram: “I’ve spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been oversexualized, reduced to our bodies and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do.”

This ad pushes back the efforts to take women in sports seriously, and by using her body, Sweeney is using the controversy to distract from what she’s really up to. 

Sweeney is a “strategic partner and equity holder” at Novig, with an unknown stake in the $500 million company. This fact’s been lost in the discourse, and details are intentionally vague.

Novig intends to operate in all 50 states and advertises themselves as a prediction market, not sports betting. Prices are set by the consumer demand, not the house, and players buy and sell contracts instead of standard wagers. 

Through prediction markets, gambling is much more accessible than ever. Instead of slot machines, people place their money in a World Cup game or on an electoral victory from the comfort of their beds, without taking a trip to a casino.

Sweeney, with seemingly little integrity or care for female athlete empowerment, took a deal with Novig, a company prioritizing money over the well being of the population.

They’re a match made in heaven. 

Sweeney has responded to the backlash with a series of Instagram story posts of ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue,” showcasing nude athletes. According to the series’ website, the articles have celebrated athletic bodies for 11 years, shifting the conversation to what athletes look like and not the societal expectations imposed on them. 

Sweeney claims her ad has the same effects. 

But she isn’t pictured performing any of the sports with the vulnerability aspect ESPN’s series does, nor is there a body of work alongside the visuals detailing her story. 

“It’s just sports,” she said in the ad.

This sports gambling ad was never intended to empower a female athlete nor acknowledge the barriers they’ve worked so hard to break down throughout history. 

It was always for someone willing to poke the bear and act surprised when it growls.