Sydney Sweeney appears to have found her answer to the backlash over her nude-adjacent sports commercial: a quiet Instagram history lesson on athletes who have done the same thing.
According to a Daily Mail report cited by Breitbart News, the Euphoria and White Lotus star posted photos to her Instagram Stories showing Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe and Caroline Wozniacki posing nude for magazines. She also highlighted several male athletes who have stripped down for sports coverage, including Myles Garrett, Rob Gronkowski, Karl-Anthony Towns and Jason Kelce.
The posts came after Sweeney, 29, faced a wave of criticism for her role in a provocative advertisement for Novig, a sports prediction market and trading app. In the spot, the actress appears scantily clad in various athletic uniforms while repeating the word “sports.”
The comments that set it off
Sweeney has not directly addressed the negative comments on the Instagram post where she shared the ad. But the Stories, as the Daily Mail noted, read as a subtle reply to social media users who said they were “disgusted” and “disappointed” by the commercial.
“As a former athlete and a woman who has personally experienced sexualized comments, I’m genuinely disgusted and disappointed by this campaign,” one Instagram user wrote in the comment section.
Another critic argued that women’s sports have spent years fighting for recognition on the basis of ability rather than appearance, writing that athletes have worked “to be seen and respected for our talent, strength and achievements, not reduced to our bodies.”
A third commenter took aim at the premise of the ad itself: “It’s too bad she couldn’t do an ad like this with her clothes on. It’s meant to be controversial just like Brooke Shields years ago. That’s what sells unfortunately.”
Others were blunter. “This is sad at this point,” one wrote. “Can’t sell or be a normal girl if she doesn’t use her body as a tool. Sexualizing sports like this is crazy.” Another simply asked, “How do we cancel this?”
Sweeney’s own framing of the campaign
The actress offered her public explanation before the backlash peaked. In a statement to Variety last week, she described the spot as a deliberate exercise in attention economics.
“The campaign was about embracing a fun idea,” Sweeney said, according to the statement reported by Variety. “The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor and a playful edge.”
That framing — provocation as a marketing strategy rather than an accident — is roughly what her critics accused her of. The disagreement is less about what the ad was doing than about whether it should have done it.
A commercial with regulatory fine print
Novig is a sports prediction market and trading app that carries a 21-and-over age requirement. According to Breitbart News, the platform launched nationwide last month under a federally regulated framework.
That context matters to the broader argument. Prediction markets occupy a hybrid space between sports media, gambling and financial trading, and their advertising has drawn increasing scrutiny as the category expands. A celebrity-fronted spot built on sexualized imagery lands differently in a sector already under a regulatory microscope than it would for, say, a sneaker brand.
Sweeney’s response, such as it is, avoids that terrain entirely. She did not defend the ad in new terms, did not name her critics, and did not explain the choice to surface images of Williams, Rousey, Bird, Rapinoe or Wozniacki. She let the juxtaposition do the arguing: if these athletes posed nude, why is this different?
It’s a rhetorical move with an obvious counter — that a magazine photo shoot chosen by the athlete is not the same as a paid commercial performance — but Sweeney hasn’t engaged with that distinction publicly, and her representatives have not issued a further statement on the Stories.
Where this leaves things
For now, the episode follows a familiar arc: a deliberately provocative campaign, a round of outrage in the comments, a statement about confidence and humor, and a response that answers criticism with imagery rather than argument. The ad remains live, the platform remains on sale to users 21 and older, and the comment threads remain what they were.
Whether the Instagram posts changed any minds is an open question. As a piece of messaging, though, they were legible enough: Sweeney’s critics say she reduced sports to bodies, and she answered by showing the bodies sports has already celebrated.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/09/14/sydney-sweeney-responds-to-backlash-over-nude-sports-ad-by-sharing-photos-of-naked-athletes/