Sydney Sweeney Novig Ad Controversy: Why Women Athletes Spoke Out
On September 9, Novig, a New York sports prediction market, released a 42-second ad starring Sydney Sweeney. She appears nude or nearly nude throughout it, using football pads, a basketball, hockey gear, a tennis racket and a pool table to cover herself as she drifts between mock sports. "Think you know sports? Prove it," she says. Later: "Novig is just sports. So, they wanted to show just sports." It ends on a punchline: "You can't trade this. I just look good here."
The Sydney Sweeney Novig ad controversy sparked criticism from women athletes over its portrayal of women in sport.
Within a matter of days, the ad had garnered tens of millions of views, varying from somewhere between 22 million and 33 million on Instagram, compared to less than a million on YouTube, depending on the source and date of the information.
The ad had also attracted waves of fury from women athletes who were either Olympic or world champions and stated that the ad was doing just the opposite of what the slogan stated. Four-time Olympic champion swimmer Ariarne Titmus described it as "an absolute joke" and added how she felt "infuriated" seeing the ad. British sprinter Amy Hunt, shortly after competing for the fourth position in the 200m final in the World Athletics Ultimate Championships in Budapest, directly accused Sweeney in front of BBC Sport viewers: "This is what women in sport look like. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat and tears."
The ad was supposed to be about sport. It became a story about how women in sport are seen and about the gap between what a brand calls attention and what an athlete calls respect.
What Sparked the Sydney Sweeney Novig Ad Controversy?
Novig is not, technically, a sportsbook. It is a peer-to-peer exchange: users trade contracts on sports outcomes directly against each other, with prices set by supply and demand rather than odds set by a bookmaker. There is no house taking the other side of every bet, which is also where the name comes from a play on "vig," the commission a traditional sportsbook builds into its lines. Novig charges no commission to retail users and makes its money from institutional traders instead.
In June 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Novig's application to operate as a federally regulated Designated Contract Market, which the company says was the fastest such approval in CFTC history.
That federal designation, rather than a state-by-state gambling license, is what let Novig launch nationwide on August 4, live in 47 states. It puts Novig in the same emerging category as Kalshi, the market leader, and Polymarket, alongside sportsbook giants like DraftKings and FanDuel, who are building their own exchange products to compete in what has become a fast-growing, tightly contested market for sports-linked trading.
Novig's pitch is narrow. Where rivals let users trade on politics, weather, entertainment or geopolitical events, Novig trades only sports contracts. In the ad, Sweeney recites a line that echoes something Novig CEO and co-founder Jacob Fortinsky had posted on social media: "No wars. No death. No politics. Just sports." Fortinsky told Front Office Sports that Sweeney was drawn to the company partly because she was "uncomfortable" with the broader menu of markets offered elsewhere in the industry.
Novig also markets itself as the only prediction market enforcing a 21-and-over age requirement. The campaign launched deliberately ahead of NFL kickoff, aimed at sports bettors deciding, for the first time in a crowded field, which app to trust with their money.
Why Sydney Sweeney's Role in the Novig Campaign Matters
The most consequential fact about this campaign may not be the ad itself but who Sweeney is to the company that made it. According to Fortinsky, speaking to both the Wall Street Journal and Front Office Sports, Sweeney did not simply take a fee to appear. She approached Novig as an investor interested in prediction markets, and the relationship grew from there. She is now an equity holder and a strategic partner "We're very excited to have her on the cap table," Fortinsky said though neither side has disclosed the size of her stake or what she was paid to appear.
Fortinsky told the Journal that Sweeney took "a huge part" in building the campaign, contributing to "not only the creative process, but also the messaging," reportedly while filming Gundam in Australia. Sweeney described it the same way to Complex: "I don't like to just put my face on something. I really want to be able to get into the weeds of it with an amazing team," calling the campaign "a very simple and playful idea" meant to "bring the concept of 'just sports' to life."
That distinction matters. A celebrity paid to read a script is one thing. A shareholder who helped write the script, and who benefits financially if the company grows off the back of the attention it generates, is another. It does not make the ad dishonest—equity deals with founders and creators are common in consumer brands now—but it does mean Sweeney's interest in the ad's success is not just reputational.
Why Women Athletes Criticized the Sydney Sweeney Ad
The backlash arrived fastest and loudest from athletes, and it followed a pattern: not simply outrage that Sweeney had posed nude, but frustration that a sports campaign had chosen a famous woman's body, rather than any actual sport, as its central image.
Titmus, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, wrote on Instagram that she wasn't going to comment but "can't keep my mouth shut." "Not only is this a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity," she wrote, asking "how do we live in a world where monetising a woman's body and sexualising women's sport is still a thing?"
Former UCLA gymnast and NCAA champion Gracie Kramer posted footage of herself competing with the caption, "Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing but this is what a woman in sports looks like" a line that other athletes then echoed. Olympic swimming champion Lani Pallister posted a training montage captioned: "Don't know what Sydney thinks sport looks like, but THIS is what sport looks like."
Australian Olympic water polo player Tilly Kearns said, more bluntly, that she hated the ad. Professional big-wave surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN the campaign was "very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport," adding: "We want to be valued for what we can do, not what we look like."
WBC world champion boxer Skye Nicolson made the sharpest version of the argument, and it is worth sitting with, because it is not the lazy one. "There's a big difference between looking 'sexy' because you do sport compared to using sex to sell 'sport,'" she wrote.
Nicolson was not objecting to female athletes being attractive, feminine or confident in their bodies she said as much directly: "There is nothing wrong with looking good and doing sport and there's nothing wrong with embracing your femininity while also being a badass athlete." Her objection was to sequence and purpose: an athlete looking good while doing her sport is incidental to the sport; an ad using a body to sell a product about sport, with almost no sport actually shown, inverts that order.
The Debate Isn't About Women Being Sexual
That distinction is the whole argument, and it is worth stating plainly: none of the athletes who criticized the ad said women shouldn't be sexual, glamorous or nude. Sweeney's own apparent reply made a version of this point. In the days after the backlash, she posted a series of images to her Instagram Stories from ESPN Magazine's Body Issue nude photographs of athletes including Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe. Several outlets read this as a quiet response to her critics, though neither Sweeney nor Novig confirmed that framing publicly.
If it was intended as a rebuttal, it also illustrated the critics' point rather than undercutting it. The Body Issue photographs athletes nude specifically to celebrate the working, competing body shot in the context of the athlete's own sport, with the athlete's control over how she's presented. The objection to the Novig ad was never that a body was shown. It was that the ad, ostensibly selling a sports product, showed almost no sport at all.
A Familiar Argument
None of this is new to women's sport. In 2004, FIFA president Sepp Blatter suggested women's football could market itself better with "tighter shorts," reasoning that "female players are pretty." In 2021, the European Handball Federation fined Norway's women's beach handball team for wearing shorts instead of the bikini bottoms.
Its rules required bikini bottoms, a rule the sport changed within months under global pressure, while men had always been allowed to wear shorts. Academic research going back to a widely cited 2002 study of Sports Illustrated coverage, and reaffirmed in newer analyses, has consistently found that female athletes are more often photographed in posed, "feminine" images than in action, and that women's sport still receives a fraction of the broadcast attention men's sport does even in years when a single event, like a World Cup, briefly spikes the numbers.
Sweeney has also been here before. Her 2025 American Eagle campaign, built around the tagline "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," was criticized for language that echoed eugenics; she later said she was "honestly surprised by the reaction" and that staying quiet had "widened the divide." The Novig ad is not a repeat of that controversy, but it is a second instance of a Sweeney campaign generating exactly the kind of attention that made her useful to the brand that hired or in this case, partnered with—her.
Attention, Whatever the Cost
That is the uncomfortable commercial subplot here. Fortinsky told Front Office Sports that the Sweeney partnership "forces us into national discourse" , a frank acknowledgment that controversy was doing real marketing work.
Press coverage citing Meltwater data reported that weekly mentions of Novig jumped roughly twelvefold in the week after the ad's release; that figure comes from secondhand reporting and hasn't been independently verified here, but it is consistent with the scale of coverage the campaign generated across sports, business and entertainment media within a single week. Industry commentary also noted the campaign overshadowed a rival ad, released the same week, in which Polymarket rolled out a roster of male athletes and celebrities including LeBron James.
Whether that counts as success depends on what Novig was trying to buy. Measured in raw attention, the ad worked: a company competing against a dominant leader in a crowded new category bought its way into headlines that money alone rarely buys.
Measured against its own stated message that Novig deserves attention because it is a serious, focused, sports-only product the ad's actual content argues against itself. Nothing in 42 seconds of a woman posing with sports equipment demonstrates anything about trading, pricing or sport. The controversy became the product.
What the Novig Ad Says About Women in Sports
Women's sport has spent years arguing that it deserves more coverage, more sponsorship and more serious treatment—and by several measures, in 2026, it has more of all three than it did a decade ago. That is exactly what makes this argument sharper, rather than smaller.
The athletes who criticized the Novig ad weren't arguing from the margins, ignored and unheard; several of them are Olympic and world champions with global platforms of their own, using those platforms to say, in near-identical words, that they did not recognize themselves in an ad ostensibly built around what they do for a living.
Novig wanted a campaign about "just sports." What it produced was a case study in a much older question: when a woman's body is used to sell attention to a sport, is that a door opened for the sport, or a door closed on the athletes actually competing in it? Nobody involved has to answer that the same way. But it is the question the ad actually raised whatever it was trying to sell.
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