Sydney Sweeney’s “Just Sports” Ad Divided the Internet, Enraged Athletes, and Turned a Startup Into a $2 Billion Company

Sydney Sweeney has a talent for making the entire internet talk about her. In September 2026, she did it by stripping down for a sports betting commercial, and a month later the argument is still going strong.

On September 9, 2026, Novig, a sports-only prediction market, released an ad starring the Euphoria actress. The concept was simple. Sweeney appears nearly nude, with sports equipment strategically placed to keep the commercial legal for broadcast, while repeating one line over and over: Novig is “just sports.”

The pitch was aimed squarely at the competition. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket let users trade on politics, current events, and almost anything else. Novig wanted the world to know it was only about sports. So Sweeney, in the ad’s own words, gave the audience “just sports.”

The timing could not have been more dramatic. Hollywood has had no shortage of surprises this month, from Anne Hathaway’s Verity leaving Tom Cruise’s Digger behind at the box office to the season’s biggest casting shakeups. But few stories have split public opinion like this one.

The athletes were not laughing

If Novig expected applause, it got the opposite. Female athletes around the world responded within days, and their message was blunt: the ad sexualizes women’s relationship with sport and sets back years of hard work.

Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, an eight-time Olympic medalist, wrote on Instagram that the spot was “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft.” She asked, “How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”

She was not alone. Former UCLA gymnast Gracie Kramer said the ad was infuriating for someone who spent her whole life competing in a sport where female athletes are oversexualized. Australian sprinter Bree Rizzo and swimmer Brianna Throssell shared similar reactions, posting their own competition footage alongside their criticism.

British sprinter Amy Hunt delivered the line of the week. Speaking to BBC Sport in a post-race interview after finishing fourth in the 200m final at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest, she looked at the camera and said, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like.”

The Australian Institute for Sport joined in too, posting a compilation of women competing at the highest level with the caption, “THIS is sports.”

Sweeney’s silent answer

Sweeney did not apologize. Instead, she posted a series of cover images from ESPN Magazine’s “The Body Issue” to her Instagram story, without a single caption. The covers featured Serena Williams, Myles Garrett, and Ronda Rousey, among others.

The implication was clear: partially nude photos of athletes have a long history in sports media, and ESPN built an entire annual issue around them. Critics fired back that the comparison missed the point. ESPN’s Body Issue frames nudity around athletic achievement, strength, and muscle. The Novig ad borrowed the same visual language, they argued, but in service of selling a betting app rather than honoring what athletes’ bodies can do.

What the CEO said

The pressure landed on Novig’s chief executive. Jacob Fortinsky addressed the controversy on September 15, 2026, on stage at the Front Office Sports Asset Class event in New York.

“As a company, we’re hugely supportive of women’s sports,” Fortinsky said. “We never intended to portray female sports.” He described Sweeney as “the biggest movie star in the world,” and said the story the ad told was simple: Novig is a prediction market focused on sports.

Then he revealed something interesting. Sweeney is not just the face of the campaign. She is an equity holder in Novig, and she drove much of the creative direction herself.

“It was a very exciting process to work with her, on the commercial side and the creative side,” Fortinsky said. “It really was Sydney who’s driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging.”

The goal, he explained, was to introduce Novig to the nation ahead of football season and close the brand awareness gap with prediction market leaders Kalshi and Polymarket. “We asked ourselves who would be the best person to grab the attention of the public and make Novig a household name,” he said. “Sydney approached us, but from there it was a very obvious decision.”

The money won

Whatever you think of the ad, it worked as a business move. Before the campaign, Novig sat at number 50 on the App Store. After the ad dropped, it climbed to number 11. Search interest for the term “Novig” reportedly doubled the combined interest for Kalshi and Polymarket in the week following the release.

Then came the number that ended the debate in the boardroom. The Wall Street Journal reported that Novig raised new funding at a $2 billion valuation, as the New York Post reported. That is four times the $500 million valuation set in its $75 million Series B, which closed in February 2026.

The bill came due anyway

Success has a cost, and Sweeney paid part of it in public. Variety reported that she lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers after the commercial was released. She still holds nearly 26 million followers, so the loss barely registers in percentage terms, but it is a visible mark of how the campaign landed with a slice of her audience.

The debate also spilled into the biggest venues in women’s sports. Coverage of the controversy revived discussion of how women’s athletics are portrayed on screen, with commentators contrasting the ad against guidelines that urge broadcasters to focus on athletic performance rather than bodies. More reporting on the fallout was carried by the USA Today network.

Why this story matters beyond one ad

Hollywood has seen plenty of celebrity endorsements go wrong, but the Sweeney-Novig episode is different because both sides of the fight got exactly what they wanted. The athletes who criticized the ad got a global stage to talk about the sexualization of women’s sports. Novig got a $2 billion valuation and a brand that millions of people can now name. Sweeney got a bigger audience, a bigger stake, and another week at the center of the cultural conversation.

The only people who lost were the followers she shed along the way. And in the arithmetic of modern celebrity, that may not count as losing at all.

For more celebrity stories like this one, keep reading CineVibe, your daily stop for Hollywood and European celebrity news.