Sydney Sweeney defends nude sports betting ad by citing athlete precedent

Sydney Sweeney spent Sunday morning on Instagram making a point. The 29-year-old actress, fresh off a week of online criticism for appearing nearly nude in an advertisement for Novig, a sports trading app, posted a series of magazine covers. They featured Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, and Caroline Wozniacki—all of them naked, all of them athletes, all of them published by ESPN. The message was implicit but clear: she was not the first woman in sports to bare her body for a camera.

The backlash had arrived quickly. On Wednesday, Sweeney had helped launch Novig with a video campaign in which she appeared nearly naked, holding only a pair of footballs across her chest. The spot was designed to be playful, irreverent—a way to cut through the noise and focus attention on sports themselves, as she would later explain. But the internet had other interpretations. Some users accused her of sexualizing a field that women had fought for years to be taken seriously in. "As a former athlete and a woman who has personally experienced sexualized comments, I'm genuinely disgusted and deeply disappointed by this campaign," one commenter wrote. "We've spent years fighting to be seen and respected for our talent, strength, and achievements—not reduced to our bodies." Another called it "a slap in the face to every professional female athlete."

But the response was not monolithic. Supporters emerged just as quickly, calling it the best sports advertising they had seen in years. One user praised the campaign's confidence and humor. Another defended it as harmless fun, questioning why people cared more about performative outrage on social media than about actual parenting. The divide was sharp and familiar: one side saw empowerment and precedent; the other saw a step backward.

Sweeney's statement, released through her representatives, framed the campaign as straightforward. "The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports," she said, according to Variety. "The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor and a playful edge." By posting the ESPN covers, she was offering historical context—a reminder that major sports publications had long featured nude or near-nude images of female athletes as cover art. The precedent existed. The question was whether that precedent justified the choice, or whether it simply showed that the problem had been there all along.

This was not Sweeney's first time navigating the line between provocative and controversial. Her role in HBO's "Euphoria" had drawn criticism for its explicit content. She had posed in lingerie for her intimates brand, Syrn. And earlier in 2025, she had starred in an American Eagle campaign called "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans," in which she crossed out the word "Genes" on a billboard and replaced it with "Jeans." That campaign too had split opinion. Some users flagged the tagline as tone-deaf, noting that the phrase "great genes" carried historical weight as a celebration of whiteness and conventional beauty standards. Others dismissed the criticism as overwrought, insisting it was simply an advertisement for clothing.

What emerged across these moments was a pattern: Sweeney's willingness to occupy spaces that made people uncomfortable, and her audience's inability to agree on what that willingness meant. Was she reclaiming female nudity as a form of power and choice? Was she participating in the same old machinery that had always reduced women's bodies to objects? Was she simply selling products? The Novig ad had forced the question into the open, and her response—pointing to ESPN's own archive—suggested she believed the precedent was on her side. Whether that settled anything remained unclear.