On October 16th, the Bos Nation Football Club leadership issued an apology for the inane and trans-exclusionary “Too Many Balls” campaign they unleashed upon the world yesterday. They removed the spot from their social media accounts, retired the “toomanyballs.com” website and then declared themselves the “most inclusive league in the world” while pledging to “do better.”
For those of you who missed what led up to this apology, let’s get into it. On October 15th, the Boston’s National Women’s Soccer League team, set to hit the field in 2026 — announced their team name, BOS Nation, and unveiled their first promotional film, a 60-second advertisement that peddled in lazy gender essentialism and also was tacky and bad.
The thesis of this advertisement was that Boston has Too Many Balls. Get it? Too many balls????!!? The ad explained 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. Here’s a copy of the ad that still exists:
After reminding us of the aforementioned men’s sports teams, the narrator cited the city’s legacy of “trophies, banners, rings and BALLS.” When the narration transitioned into “and balls,” the music waned a little. There were “sad trombone” vibes. Then in a tone I can only describe as vaguely sexual, the narrator lamented (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 was maxed out on the word “balls.”
Then the narrator declared that “Boston loves its balls… but maybe there are too many balls in this town.” The music then picked 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 regaled 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 was an odd positioning for a city that already had a professional Women’s Soccer team, the Boston Breakers. The original Boston Breakers played for the WUSA from 2001 to 2003, and then played in the WPS from 2007 until the league folded in 2012, and then joined the Women’s premier Soccer League Elite for a year, and then played in the newly-formed NWSL from 2013 through 2017.
Furthermore, as pointed out by Coach Jackie on TikTok, this ad also completely erased that Boston actually ALSO already has a women’s hockeyball team, The Boston Fleet.
ALSO, the city is home to a women’s professional tackle football team, the Boston Renegades.
The advertisement’s flashy visuals betrayed its weak foundation — a joke that wasn’t funny and also didn’t really hold up as a metaphor when we were in fact discussing a game played with a ball. (This is winked at at the end of the advertisement, but that’s too little, too late.) There was a section where we were 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 a currently unproven thesis.
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, suggesting that only women with specific genitals are welcome in the league. 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.
It gets worse: when non-binary NWSL player Quinn commented on the launch post criticizing its transphobic message, their comment was hidden. At a press event on Tuesday, controlling owner Jennifer Epstein told reporters, “The whole intent behind the brand was to be inclusive, and so we take that very seriously. And I would look forward to talking to that player and thinking through why this made them feel that way.”
I don’t think anyone on the creative team here was 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, and that clearly didn’t happen here.
Also as my colleague Drew pointed out, “cis men love talking about their genitals and I still can’t imagine the announcement of a mens sports team making ball jokes because it’s hacky and unprofessional??”
There was 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.
The world is teeming with LGBTQ+ marketing professionals and consultants, but it’s unclear if 2024 Ad Age Small Agency of the Year Colossus spoke to any of us while constructing this ad, or when it was sent to the Bos Nation team for approval or feedback. As someone who’s been in that role for various advertisers and agencies, I can attest that this is a frequently mishandled area of representation. The visuals themselves, words aside, looked fantastic. But it was difficult to put those words aside.
Sports journalist Frankie de la Cretaz attended the Tuesday night launch event at Dick’s House of Sports (yep) and spoke to queer and trans fans about their reaction to the campaign. “As a trans person, it hurt,” Dorchester resident TL Pavlich told Out of Your League. “I’ve faced much worse transphobia, heard much worse things, but it shows to me that the ownership is not thinking about all of us, all the Bostonians that their values statement references. They are thinking about a very specific group of cisgender women only.”
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 was not the best place for this hotly anticipated expansion team to start!
Bos Nation even went so far as to sell Too Many Balls t-shirts on its website:
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.”
Thus far, there’s been no response from the club regarding its name, but the response to their apology post was replete with demands for them to consider doing so.
In The Athletic, Meg Linehan wrote an extensive breakdown of everything wrong with the team’s branding, concluding, “Between the name and campaign, this is the worst NWSL launch I’ve ever seen in the history of the league.”
The NWSL Boston Independent Supporters Association responded to the apology this afternoon on X, saying they are “encouraged that the team has listened to feedback and recognized the hurt they’ve caused. Going forward, we hope this signals an openness by the team to work more collaboratively with the community to create an identity that reflects our diverse fans and city, starting with a name that we can wear across our chests with pride.”
This post was originally published on October 15th and has been updated to include recent developments.
