This Now-Viral Soccer Ad Makes a Powerful Statement on Gender Equality in Sport

Thanks partly to good old-fashioned misogyny, women athletes are sometimes undervalued—and underpaid—in sports. So once I watched a now-viral soccer ad end in a surprising way that challenged those deeply entrenched misconceptions, I used to be all for it.

The 2-minute ad, created by the French division of the telecommunications company Orange and the marketing agency Marcel, launched within the lead as much as the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup and uses the facility of video editing to dispute those thoughts. It starts off with a highlight reel of what appears to be the French men’s soccer team pulling off seriously impressive feats: dazzling displays of footwork, amazing aerial finishes, and lightning fast sprints down the pitch. Dramatic music plays within the background, commentators excitedly narrate the scenes, and throngs of fans erupt in cheers. About halfway through, the screen goes black and text appears: “Only Les Bleus [the men’s national team in France] may give us these emotions.”

Then, the plot twist. On-screen text reveals the players weren’t the lads’s team—the video rewinds to indicate all that footage was actually from women’s games. With advanced editing techniques, the ladies’s faces and names on their jerseys were swapped for the lads’s; side-by-side comparisons show the authentic footage against the fake clips. All those amazing plays you only watched? They were performed by female athletes.

The ad concludes with the text: “At Orange, we support Les Bleus.” Then, an editing tool comes into frame to make a small but essential change: It adds in an “e” to the last word to spell “Bleues”—to suggest the French women’s national team. (You possibly can take a look at an English version of the video on YouTube here.)

Across social media, viewers expressed their awe over the ad. “They did an incredible job revealing biases that exist around men & women athletes,” Twitter user brilewerke wrote. “I got just a little misty-eyed while watching that,” said Reddit user koreawut.

By highlighting the undeniable fact that women’s soccer may be just as exciting as men’s—and that the athletes are only as talented, athletic, and able to drawing an emotional response from fans—the ad undermines the notion that girls’s sports aren’t as entertaining or fun to look at, which is commonly used as a justification for why women athletes often aren’t paid as much as their male counterparts.

Recently, though, there was progress in the precise direction, especially in pro soccer. After a six-year battle, the US women’s national soccer team (USWNT) won a $24 million settlement in 2022 from the US Soccer Federation—plus a pledge that the organization pays the lads’s and girls’s national teams equally in competitions. Also encouraging: More individuals are showing interest in women’s sports than ever before. The 2019 Women’s World Cup, for instance, attracted a record 1.12 billion viewers, in keeping with FIFA. And the upcoming 2023 Women’s World Cup is on target to be essentially the most attended standalone women’s sporting event in history, with greater than one million tickets sold as of last month, per FIFA.

Still, there’s more work to be done to dismantle the gender bias in sports. Researchers from a recent study published in Sports Management Review found that individuals rated videos of elite men’s soccer players higher than women’s, as Time reported. Nevertheless, when the players’ genders were obscured, they rated the 2 groups similarly.

“Whether one looks at revenue, investment, or coverage, men’s sports do higher than women’s. Many assume that absolute differences in quality of athletic performance are the driving force,” the authors wrote within the study. “Nevertheless, the existence of stereotypes should alert us to a different possibility: gender information might influence perceived quality.”

The ad’s release couldn’t have come at a greater time: With the Women’s World Cup kicking off this week in Australia and Recent Zealand, there will probably be loads of opportunity to see just how incorrect these gender biases are—and the way truly exciting women’s sports may be.

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