Post-Sydney Sweeney & Novig, who gets to shape the story of women’s sport?

The backlash surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s recent Novig campaign has ignited an all too familiar debate around the sexualisation of women’s sport.

Much of the conversation has focused on Sweeney herself, feeding the cycle of rage-bait that tends to dominate online discourse when a controversial topic begins to trend. However, the more important question for the sports media and marketing industries is this: who is actually responsible for the way women’s sport is represented?

Yes, Novig’s positioning is clearly designed to appeal to the male gaze. They knew what they were doing, and they were bold enough to do it. More importantly, the backlash that has followed highlights the rapid growth of women’s sport audiences and how we shouldn’t underestimate the power of women to shape the conversation. While Novig chose to lean into the male audience by reducing women in sport to their appearance, brands, agencies, broadcasters and sporting organisations now have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to think more carefully about how women are represented across the industry.

Broadcasters and rights holders have a particularly important role to play here. The way women’s sport is depicted influences the way audiences perceive it. Coverage that foregrounds the diverse personality, strength and growth of women’s sport creates a much richer picture of the athletes involved.

The commercial reality is that in a trend-led, rage-bait obsessed online world, controversy works. The fact that brands like Novig can so freely depict women’s sport through a degrading lens, and profit off that, as we’ve seen with the Sydney Sweeney advert, represents a much bigger industry problem. How women’s sport is represented shouldn’t be reduced to how it’s portrayed in an advert like Novig’s. What the industry can do now is listen to the nuanced experiences of women’s sport in response.

The advert is an insult to those in the industry who have worked so hard to not only increase visibility for women in sport, but create a safe and equal playing field too. When we think about all the major milestones that have happened in women’s sport in recent years – from the 2025 Women’s Euros final attracting over 16 million viewers as the most-watched UK TV broadcast of the entire year, to the Paris Olympics achieving gender parity for the first time with an equal number of male and female athletes competing - campaigns like this are completely at odds with that progress.

Women in sport, and women who enjoy being active, should also be free to express themselves in a way that works for them. If sport represents something more glamorous and feminine to one woman, but more powerful or competitive to another, those experiences all matter and should be treated respectfully - without the fear that these experiences will be exploited.

Women in sport are increasingly able to tell their own stories, showing audiences not only the training, setbacks, personalities and physical demands behind elite performance, but everything in between - whether that’s how they balance motherhood and family life with training, or the ways in which every woman can feel connected to sport and move their bodies confidently, not just on an elite level.  That shift matters because it gives women greater ownership over their own representation.

The criticism surrounding the Sweeney campaign has generated enormous reach, engagement and brand recognition. For a company such as Novig, the backlash itself can become part of the media value. Outrage drives conversation, conversation drives visibility, and visibility can ultimately serve a commercial objective. In an attention economy, provocation can be highly effective - even when the conversation surrounding it is deeply critical.

The answer, therefore, is not to make Sydney Sweeney the scapegoat for an industry-wide problem.

We should be able to have a legitimate conversation about the sexualisation of women’s sport, and question the creative choices brands make, without placing the responsibility for those choices primarily on another woman.

Instead, this should be a moment for the industry to look inwards. They should be asking these questions: Are broadcasters giving women’s sport the same creative ambition afforded to men’s? Are agencies challenging outdated assumptions about what makes women commercially attractive, or simply feeding into them - like Novig has? Are brands genuinely understanding women’s sport audiences, or simply looking for the quickest route to attention? And are rights holders giving athletes enough ownership over how their stories are told?

As the market continues to grow, so should the sophistication of the storytelling. The opportunity is to move beyond using women’s bodies as shorthand for attention and instead build campaigns and content around everything that makes women’s sport compelling: skill, strength, physicality, personality, ambition, vulnerability, rivalry and achievement, and the list goes on.

The Sydney Sweeney debate should therefore be bigger than Sydney Sweeney. As women rightfully demand better representation in response, it’s time to start listening.

Eva El Khoury is a senior account manager in the sport and fitness team at The PHA Group