Today was a big day for the Boston’s National Women’s Soccer League team, set to hit the field in 2026 — today they announced their team name, BOS Nation, and unveiled their first promotional film, a 60-second  advertisement that peddles in lazy gender essentialism and also is tacky and bad.

The thesis of this advertisement is that Boston has Too Many Balls. Get it? Too many balls????!!? The ad explains through visual learning that, like every major city in this country, Boston has several sports teams: the Boston Celtics (basketballs), the Boston Red Sox (baseballs), the New England Patriots (footballs) and the Boston Bruins (hockeyballs). All of these teams are men’s teams. It’s cisgender men who are playing the games with the balls, and they have “balls.” (Testicles.) So the result of that, you see, is that there are too many balls in Boston. This is apparently a big problem in Boston preventing the city from experiencing the unity and joy expressed by latter visuals in the advertisement.

After reminding us of the aforementioned men’s sports teams, the narrator cites the city’s legacy of “trophies, banners, rings and BALLS.” When the narration transitions into “and balls,” the music wanes a little. There are “sad trombone” vibes. Then in a tone I can only describe as vaguely sexual, the narrator laments (in a hot way) that her city is home to “old balls, new balls, steel balls, and cold balls.” The “cold balls” are hockey pucks. Get it? Also “goat balls,” but let’s just not. At this point I think everyone at home has maxed out on the word “balls.”

hahaha

Then the narrator declares that “Boston loves its balls… but maybe there are too many balls in this town.” The music then picks up to sound more like stock music for an iPod Nano advertisement because now we are leaving balls behind, now we are in a hopeful new era! She regales us with great news — someone is adding “a new chapter to this city’s legacy,” and that “new chapter” is a National Women’s Soccer team. This is an odd positioning for a city that already had an National Women’s Soccer team, the Boston Breakers, from 2007 through 2017.

Furthermore, as pointed out by Coach Jackie on TikTok, this ad also completely erases that Boston actually already has a women’s hockeyball team, The Boston Fleet.

The city also is home to a women’s professional tackle football team, the Boston Renegades.

The advertisement’s flashy visuals betray its weak foundation — a joke that isn’t funny and also doesn’t really hold up as a metaphor when we are in fact discussing a game played with a ball. (This is noted at the end of the advertisement, but by then it’s too late, we’ve had enough!) There’s a section where we’re shown images of young people of color and also of various neighborhoods while being told that this team will be uniquely welcoming to “every person, from every neighborhood, across every square mile” of Boston, which is bold but unproven.

Conflating gender with genitalia and reducing athletes to their genitalia is something trans rights advocates have been begging people to stop doing for decades now! It’s cis-normative and sexist and juvenile. At a time when many athletic leagues are excluding and accepting participants based solely on physical markers like genitalia, and legislation against trans inclusion in sports is taking off across the country, this is an irresponsible message to promote.The NWSL’s own policy has been widely and justifiably criticized, but even in its current insufficient state, it is open to trans women players, although the parameters and criteria for that inclusion is part of what it’s been criticized for. (Not every NWSL player identifies as a woman, there are non-binary players in the league as well.)

I don’t think anyone on the creative team here were aiming to be intentionally trans-exclusionary. But it’s important to have people in the room who can alert you to the unintentional messages you’re sending.

Also as my colleague Drew pointed out, “cis men love talking about their genitals and I still cant imagine the announcement of a mens sports team making ball jokes because it’s hacky and unprofessional??”

There’s also truly no need to only discuss women’s sports in relation to men’s sports, or to pit them against each other. We don’t need a women’s soccer team in Boston because the city has a rich legacy of men’s sports teams. We need a women’s soccer team because women’s soccer is awesome and people like to watch it.

Then there’s the name — “Bos Nation,” an anagram of Bostonian. In her aforementioned TikTok about the ad, Jackie also notes that, “Bos Nation FC is not a good name for a sports team, and basically everyone online is in agreement on that. I’ve not seen one positive opinion on just the name itself.”

The world we live in is teeming with LGBTQ+ marketing professionals and consultants, and it’s stunning to wonder why so few of them were present in the room when 2024 Ad Age Small Agency of the Year Colossus was constructing this ad, or when it was sent to the Bos Nation team for approval or feedback. In September, when announcing Colossus’ to lead the team’s branding, public art, visual language, social activation, etc., the firm’s GM of design told Little Black Book: The visuals themselves, words aside — look fantastic. But it’s difficult to put those words aside.

The National Women’s Soccer League is incredibly popular with LGBTQIA+ people specifically, and the league itself has many queer players. An advertisement so entrenched in gender essentialism, making a joke about balls that might be funny to three second grade boys at most, seemingly unaware of the city’s true history with women’s sports — this is not the best place for this hotly anticipated expansion team to start!

The only thing I can imagine making this worse would be if anybody in the world actually buys this t-shirt and wears it to a game:

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