Sydney Sweeney returns topless in new ad after backlash over sports prediction campaign

After losing roughly 200,000 Instagram followers and drawing criticism from athletes, Sharon Stone, and Claire Stoermer, Zendaya’s mother, Sydney Sweeney has doubled down with another ad for her latest sports prediction partner. The thing is: for PSPs and operators, this is less celebrity gossip than a reminder that anything touching sports, betting, and prediction markets can turn into a reputational fire drill very quickly.

1. In the new commercial, posted to Sweeney’s Instagram account, she appears in lingerie with the company’s logo on the waistband, then cuts to a topless shot with her hair covering her chest. Within two hours, the video had more than 300,000 likes.
2. The ad has Sweeney joking that “grown men are making spreadsheets to bet on the color of my underwear,” before she lists what she calls other controversial markets on prediction platforms: insider information about dictators’ deaths, bot armies manipulating outcomes, and people betting their retirement savings on a war.
3. She ends the spot by repeating the company’s slogan and again using two American footballs to cover parts of her body, echoing imagery from a previous campaign that had already drawn criticism.
4. The earlier campaign showed Sweeney nude and covering herself with sports equipment from different disciplines. That ad was accused of sexualizing sports and athletes, and it triggered pushback from sports fans as well as public figures.
5. Among the critics was Ariarne Titmus, the Australian Olympic champion and former swimmer, who said monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport was “a slap in the face” to women who devote their lives to the discipline. Claire Stoermer also shared posts aimed directly at the ad.

For companies in sports betting, prediction markets, and adjacent high-risk payments flows, the practical point is obvious: celebrity-led marketing can drive attention fast, but it can also pull the whole vertical into a controversy that spills into payment relationships, partner reviews, and merchant risk scoring.