Boston's new NWSL team already got a kick in the balls

how BOS Nation botched their launch campaign

Thanks for being here! I am a full-time freelance sports writer. I decided to make this post free because I believe this reporting is important. However, paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to dedicate more time to this work. You can upgrade here:

---

Women’s soccer fans in Boston have been waiting for a new NWSL team since the tragic end of their beloved Boston Breakers in 2018. When it was announced last September that a new team would be coming to Boston in 2026, the woso community was excited and immediately began investing in this franchise, forming fan groups and attending events.

Which is what made yesterday’s brand rollout for NWSL Boston so heartbreaking—and infuriating—for so many of those fans. The long-awaited announcement of the team’s name—BOS Nation FC, an anagram of “Bostonian”—was accompanied by an entire campaign that centered around… balls.

And I don’t mean soccer balls.

They even purchased the now-defunct URL TooManyBalls.com to host their announcement. And then hosted their launch party for their “balls” campaign at Dick’s House of Sport. You can’t make this up, folks. They announced their women’s pro sports team with a campaign that was basically, “ew, balls!”

In addition to being offensive—to trans women, to cis men—it erases all the existing women’s pro sports teams that are already in the city. It was roundly mocked online, including by other NWSL players and on the CBS Sports “Morning Footy” show. It’s baffling that they didn’t see this reaction coming.

“I’m a trans woman, and I’m offended,” one fan, who asked not to share her name publicly, told me at Tuesday night’s launch party. “I always tell everybody that women’s soccer is a safe space for queer and trans people but this doesn’t feel like that.”

On Wednesday afternoon, BOS Nation released a statement apologizing for the campaign. “While we had hoped to create a bold and buzzworthy brand launch campaign, we missed the mark,” the statement read.

“We fully acknowledge that the content of the campaign did not reflect the safe and welcoming environment we strive to create for all, and we apologize to the LGBTQ+ community and to the trans community in particular for the hurt we caused.”

bosnationfc

A post shared by @bosnationfc

That’s a start. But the fact that this misstep happened at all presents a lot of questions that the ownership group and new front office is going to have to answer if they want this team to work.

---

“When it comes to managing a brand in the public eye in the hopes of creating fandom, people need to understand, number one, the audience. Number two, the realities of the place that the team is playing, and then three, the intersectionality of it all,” Rachel Parrish, the CEO of Rae Christine Agency, an integrated marketing and communication agency focused on brand storytelling, tells Out of Your League.

“That's how you're going to get people to have an emotion behind the story that you're selling, which is what creates a fan.”

The “Too Many Balls” campaign, created by the Boston-based design firm Colossus Creative Co., missed the mark on a variety of levels. While much has been celebrated about the all-women ownership group—which now includes Aly Raisman and Elizabeth Banks—looking at the branding and attending the launch party makes me wonder who this team is supposed to be for.

“Thanks to our brave clients for having the guts to be wildly provocative with this launch,” Colossus Creative said in the caption they posted alongside the now-deleted video on their Instagram page. Their website proclaims that “breaking through the noise is hard” and “takes time, risk and a willingness to be a bit uncomfortable”—which, I guess they succeeded in that part of the brief. It also says that they “believe in endless curiosity [a]nd in asking a lot of questions,” though I feel like this campaign could have benefitted from asking a few more questions (Colossus Creative Co. did not respond to request for comment).

The values statement that BOS Nation has posted on their website and that they read aloud at Tuesday night’s event attempts to speak directly to their fanbase.

“To the Bostonian, allow us to introduce ourselves,” the statement reads. “A nation made up entirely of you — the many stories, cultures and passions that make up our city. We are BOS Nation. Unified not only by our similarities, but also our differences.”

As Meg Linehan writes at The Athletic, “All of it feels like the first step of ideation, where you throw a million ideas up on a board before whittling them down to one that works.”

For many LGBTQ+ fans, the campaign felt like it wasn’t for them at all. “I think reducing such a monumental moment to a juvenile gender-essentialism joke about balls is disappointing and hurtful to say the least,” Dorchester resident TL Pavlich tells Out of Your League¹.

“As a trans person, it hurt. 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 women’s soccer community—both the fandom and the players themselves—is largely queer. The NWSL currently has at least one openly trans player, in Seattle Reign FC’s Quinn. The disconnect in Dick’s Tuesday night between fans and supporters and the front office and investors was palpable and many fans I spoke to commented on it. One fan even mentioned that the choice to hold the event in the shiny flagship Dick’s location rather than the brand new queer bar directly across the street sends a message about who the team is trying to appeal to.

And in a league like the NWSL that has struggled mightily to get out from under toxic sports culture and continues to have sexual harassment and abuse scandals and workplace abuse scandals, fans worry it doesn’t bode well that the newest team to join this league managed to girlBOS so hard that they ended up with a TERFy campaign.

“If you are unable to articulate your ‘why,’ then you're unable to get people to buy in,” says Parrish. Unlike the rollout of a product, where people just need to be curious to try something, sports fans have to believe in the story you’re selling them about a franchise. “Especially in a city like Boston, you want them to eat, breathe, dream this team,” Parrish says. It’s hard for them to do that if the story you’re selling either doesn’t make sense, or seems to directly exclude them.

At the launch event, TL Pavlich brought their grievance directly to the team, holding up a sign that said, “No home for transphobia” during the prepared remarks from Boston mayor Michelle Wu and team owner Jennifer Epstein, who said during her speech that building a legacy “requires passion, participation and sometimes holding each other accountable to our shared values.”

“I've been excited about the team since they first announced Boston was next up for expansion,” Pavlich says. “I've gone to all the events, bought the merch, I even paid the season ticket deposit this morning despite everything. I brought the sign today because I love this team and when you love someone, it's important to support their growth and learning. I brought the sign to show my support for all trans fans and trans athletes. I brought the sign to remind the people there that ‘Bostonian’ and ‘BOS Nation’ should include us all.”

There were a lot of people from the team’s supporter group present last night, many of them expressing disappointment about the launch. One person had come in order to speak her disapproval directly to the team’s owners, which she says she was able to do.

“As an independent supporters organization, we are wicked excited to have an NWSL team in Boston again,” the NWSL Boston Supporters Association posted on social media. “Like many, we are disappointed in the choice of name and advertising campaign that the team has chosen for their brand reveal.”

But it’s not just the team’s fans that were critical. Quinn commented on the post on the NWSL’s Instagram account, “Feels transphobic. Yikes.” After their comment was hidden by Instagram, they commented again, saying, “Calling out transphobia shouldn’t be hidden! This doesn’t represent the league and it is such poor messaging.”

To their credit, the team does seem to be listening. The team’s Director of Community Engagement, Michael Omenazu, spoke to Pavlich about their sign and seemed genuinely interested in hearing their grievance.

“The whole intent behind the brand was to be inclusionary, and so we take that very seriously,” controlling owner Jennifer Epstein told reporters at the event on Tuesday. “And I would look forward to talking to that player and thinking through why this made them feel that way.”

The “TooManyBalls” URL was gone this morning and the video has been deleted from most social media platforms. BOS Nation released their statement in a timely manner, which is something that Parrish says bodes well when it comes to having an effective response to public criticism. Parrish, who refers to herself as “Olivia Pope IRL,” works in crisis PR and helped shepherd the NWSL’s Chicago Red Stars through their own scandal.

“What side of history do you want to be on when it comes to being called out?” Parrish asks. “You've seen time and time again where teams run and hide, or they're scared of media, scared of criticism. This is a great time to just be authentic and say, ‘Listen, we missed the mark. We're here to listen.’”

---

Many of the fans I spoke to remain hopeful that the team will ultimately do the right thing. But in order for that to happen, there has to be a real understanding of and accountability for the harm done. The public statement is just the first step in that process.

“We are in a time when trans people and trans athletes are facing so much hate and harassment,” says Pavlich. “Microaggressions like this, left unchecked, grow into things much worse.”

Trans women are being banned from women’s sports at nearly all levels. There are bills in 25 states that bar trans girls from being able to play scholastic sports. Those bills have been gateways to even more restrictive legislation, like bans on gender affirming healthcare (which 24 states have attempted to pass) and bills that seek to limit which bathrooms and locker rooms trans people can use (which 13 states have passed some version of). These attempts to legislate trans people out of public existence contribute directly to the epidemic of violence that the trans community faces. As of this writing, at least 27 trans people have been victims of fatal violence, with most of those killed being trans women of color.

Parrish says action is what will matter now, and that she’d love to see the team put programming in place to show that they are committed to learning, in addition to monetary donations to local trans organizations or other advocacy groups that support trans athletes. Other steps they could take include bringing in an organization like GLAAD or Athlete Ally to do a training with BOS Nation staff.

“I'll be interested to seeing how they can continue to evolve their story so that it more closely reflects the people that are going to be advocating for the team,” Parrish says.

For now, it seems the team still has time to fix this mistake, and LGBTQ+ fans are willing to extend them the goodwill and the grace to do so.

“For an organization that says it wants to be focused on community, it really felt like they didn’t bother to run this name or campaign by actual members of the community before launching them, and that was a mistake,” Megan, a member of the BOS Nation supporter group, tells Out of Your League. “I’m hopeful they’ll learn from this and do better going forward.”

1. Disclosure: Pavlich is a friend of mine.