It's nice to beat you

On Sophia Smith, Nike, and WOSO marketing

Sophia Smith is everywhere. On the team bus, on billboards, in the locker room. You see her when you close your eyes. She body doubles with your coach, telling you that you’re next. Soon, she’ll be on the field, scoring against you. There’s nowhere to hide. Sophia Smith is your nightmare.  

In “Nice to Beat You,” a new television advertisement, Nike introduces millions of viewers to the reality of playing against the 22-year-old Portland Thorns and United States Women’s National Soccer Team forward from Windsor, Colorado. For casual women’s soccer fans, those who tune in for the quadrennial chase for the World Cup trophy, Sophia Smith may be a new face to grace their screens. To more informed fans, Sophia Smith is nothing new. In her first three seasons since being drafted first overall out of Stanford by the NWSL’s Portland Thorns, Smith has bagged 31 goals and nine assists in 52 matches, averaging .91 contributions per 90 minutes on the field. She is also the reigning NWSL MVP. In just thirty appearances for the USWNT, Smith has 17 contributions. Smith likely slots in at the World Cup as a starter either at striker or on the wing.

Smith is a new addition to the pantheon of Nike-sponsored greats. Smith joins contemporary USWNT players Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and older predecessors like Abby Wambach and Mia Hamm as central figures in Nike’s depiction of women’s soccer in America. Unlike these familiar stars, Smith has yet to play at a World Cup and is less than three years removed from her national team debut.

In releasing this new advertisement, Nike announced that Smith will lead a new generation of American women’s national team players. Much has been written about the chasms between the USWNT’s old guard and its up-and-coming youngsters. Sportswriters and fans have asked (and rightly so) if Smith, Trinity Rodman, Andy Sullivan, and others have what it takes to continue the winning legacy of the USWNT and bring home a third consecutive World Cup trophy. To accomplish such a feat is no easy task, one that has never been accomplished in the history of the men’s and women’s games.

Nike, though, has never particularly cared about victories on the field. Instead, as former Nike executive Joe Elsmore told me, the company deals in stories. Wins are nice, but stories keep consumers engaged once the final whistle blows. Nike’s marketing treatment of Smith and other global women’s soccer stars in their new advertising series “What the Football” suggests there is a new chapter in the celebrity story of women soccer players.

Nike’s role in marketing women’s soccer dates to 1994 when the company signed recent University of North Carolina graduate Mia Hamm. When Nike signed Hamm, she was only the second women’s team sport athlete to sign with the company. Women’s international soccer was in its infancy. The USWNT won the inaugural 1991 World Cup, but in the following years, the United States Soccer Federation disinvested in the program, hanging the country’s best players out to dry. By 1994, the USWNT had never played on American television. Only two of the team's players, Michelle Akers and Carin Gabarra, had endorsement deals, earning the women small stipends in the thousands of dollars.

By 1996, Mia Hamm was the face of women’s soccer in America. To accomplish this rapid change, Nike applied a familiar formula. First used by the company with Michael Jordan in the 1980s, Nike did not focus on Hamm’s athletic ability but instead set out to create narratives. While Jordan was an out-of-this-world superstar, dunking away with Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon character from She’s Gotta Have It and playing basketball with children, Nike and their creative agency Wieden and Kennedy wrote Hamm as the face of a new generation of empowered women in sport. Hamm was not a soccer star but the girl next door. She had fought through social resistance to play sport, to sweat, and to compete where previously impossible. Although Hamm would later have her own branded set of cleats, Nike did not encourage viewers to buy any specific product like other companies may have. Instead, Nike marketed Mia Hamm and her national team teammates as synonymous with their brand.

Sports scholars have often criticized Hamm and her Nike image for being reductive. The scholars argue that Nike’s narratives isolated individual sporting performance from the social settings which limited women’s historical participation in sport. Scholars found evidence in Hamm’s reticence to speak publicly outside of her marketing. Hamm was a reserved star, rarely speaking to the press or expressing political sentiment. More than anything else, scholars find qualms in Nike’s choice of Hamm for her physical appearance. Hamm was an easily palatable image of athletic success — white, heterosexual, meeting standard notions of beauty — as a generation of Title IX women became athletic apparel consumers. By choosing Hamm, scholars argue, Nike limited the public’s notion of women’s soccer and constricted the diversity of the sport in its foundational years.

For much of the past three decades since Hamm signed, Nike has sold the national team in similar ways, reproducing femininity and collective women’s empowerment. In the 1995 “Soccer Vows” commercial, the USWNT recited a marriage vow tied to winning the World Cup. Prior to the 1999 World Cup, Hamm was joined by teammates in a dentist's office for the “I’ll Have a Filling” commercial. And in 2015, Nike montaged the USWNT training for the World Cup with clips of young girls playing soccer to the tune of “American Woman.” 

“Nice to Beat You” and the “What the Football” campaign suggests a new era in Nike’s marketing approach to women’s soccer. In contrast to the previous collectivity espoused in their advertisements, Sophia Smith’s commercial has nothing to do with empowerment but is rather a non-gendered and humorous horror-style approach to selling Smith as one of the world’s greatest soccer players. In addition to Smith, the Campaign series features cartooned heroes of American Megan Rapinoe and China’s star Wang Shuang, there’s Brazil’s Debinha juggling through a convenience store, and Norway’s Ada Hegerberg dribbling through “everyone.” These new commercials step away from empowerment and embrace the kinds of humorous narratives that have long been used for male athletes, which produce mythological celebrity personas for the players.

Not all companies, however, have chosen to follow Nike’s new approach. Many friends, family members, and colleagues have sent me the worldwide hit advertisement by the European phone company, Orange. Orange’s new advertisement harnesses the emerging ability of AI to replace French women’s national team players with their male colleagues in a series of highlights. As the highlight clip finishes, the advertisement replaces the men with the women, urging its viewers to support the two teams equally. There has been an overwhelmingly positive reception to the piece from across the world. With nearly five million YouTube views in three weeks, it has certainly brought a marketing pay-off for the company. The positive reception to the piece centers on the notion that men’s and women’s soccer is not so different, but misogyny gets in the way of many supporting the women’s game. This takeaway is not far off from academic research, which has used similar methods to the Orange ad and proven that gender bias plays a significant role in those who claim not to like women’s soccer but cannot detect its difference from the men’s game when watching a digitally altered clip.

Not all of the reception for the Orange advertisement has been positive. Many women’s soccer fans across the internet have written of their frustration with the piece’s premise: that men’s and women’s soccer is not inherently different and that objectors to the women’s game should tune in. For critics of the advertisement, such a premise is doomed from the beginning. Men with internalized misogyny will not watch women’s soccer, even if shamed. For the most part, I agree with them. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of how popular the piece has been and the conversations on women’s soccer it's created, especially from non-soccer fans. If the advertisement works to change the opinions of only a few, then I think it’s a success.

Disagreements aside, the state of women’s soccer advertising for this summer’s Women’s World Cup is a new chapter in the history of women’s soccer marketing. “What the Football” has modernized the celebrity treatment of women soccer players. I’m eager to see where this goes in the future. It’s “nice to beat you,” Sophia Smith.

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I’m headed to New Zealand on Sunday for the World Cup and will do my best to write about my travel and game experiences while there. If you’d like me to focus on anything specific, please write me, either as a comment here, via email, text, or wherever we communicate. Because of this travel, the tone of the newsletter will shift for the next few weeks but will later change back to more of the kind of material you’ve seen here this week.

New fan and want to know more about the World Cup and its storylines? Here are a few suggestions for places to start:

Read:

The New York Times’ Rory Smith breaks down contenders:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/sports/soccer/womens-world-cup-favorites.html

Listen:

The Athletics’ Women’s Football Podcast

The Double Pivot: Soccer analysis, analytics, and commentary: analytic level breakdowns and other info

Counter Pressed with Flo Lloyd-Hughes and Friends, detailed breakdowns on The Ringer’s typical fun-centered pod.

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