Billboards around town dropped the “balls” copy, a video was removed from the team and NWSL’s websites, and the toomanyballs.com domain name was scrubbed.
The rollout of the advertising campaign, which began Sunday and was slated to continue until Oct. 29, was intended to be a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek introduction to the soccer team’s new “BOS Nation FC” name that was revealed Tuesday and herald the arrival of a new era in a Boston sports scene that has leaned for more than a century on the pro men’s teams.
To make its point, the team used a campaign featuring billboards proclaiming “There Are Too Many Balls in This Town” and a video listing the “old,” “new,” “steel,” “cold,” and “GOAT” balls (the last one featuring a video clip of Tom Brady saying, “Wait, what?”).
Brady’s response was an understatement compared with the way how the campaign landed.
Backlash was swift, rivaling a simultaneous negative reaction to the choice of the team’s name.
The intended audience of local soccer fans, as well as at least one NWSL player, reacted with dismay, anger, and disappointment over how widely the campaign missed the mark.
Katya Engalichev, 25, Madbury, N.H., who started a change-the-name petition, was clearly put off by the campaign and was pleased to see the team put it to rest.
“Using an opportunity to platform women’s sports as instead an opportunity to make jokes about testicles seems pretty much like missing the mark,” said Engalichev. “Whereas the name is kind of a superficial thing, the promo video actually could be interpreted as degrading and exclusive. It was, in my opinion, poorly done and in a lot of people’s opinions not representative of what we want this team to be.
“I strongly believe both the explicit and latent transphobia in that ad were relevant to the future of this team and this league. First of all, womanhood is not simply the absence of testes. Secondly, in the NWSL and other professional sports leagues that are characterized as women’s leagues, we do have many amazing trans-nonbinary or otherwise genderqueer athletes and that is why the club’s apology post referenced the inclusivity of the league.”
One commenter on the Change.org petition said, “While my 7 year old daughter is thrilled by the idea of a professional women’s team in Boston, I cannot share this public branding with her. It is disappointing that the franchise focuses on Boston’s mens teams in an inappropriate manner rather than uplifting their own purpose.”
Before the promotional campaign was pulled, the NWSL Boston Independent Supporters Association cast a clear “no” vote for the team’s branding decisions, posting on Instagram, “Like many, we are disappointed in the choice of name and advertising campaign that the team has chosen for their brand reveal. Our hope is that the team will listen to the concerns raised by its fans and thoughtfully reconsider their branding choices moving forward.”
One player, the Seattle Reign’s Quinn, who identifies as nonbinary transgender, expressed their concern on Instagram with the comment, “Feels transphobic. Yikes.”
At Tuesday night’s launch event at Dick’s House of Sport in Boston, Jennifer Epstein, controlling manager of the ownership group, addressed the reaction from Quinn.
“The whole intent behind the brand was to be inclusionary, and so we take that very seriously,” said Epstein. “I would look forward to talking to that player and thinking through how and why this made them feel that way.”
The club worked with Colossus Creative Co. in the South End on the branding campaign as well as the team name. An Instagram post from the company lauding Tuesday’s reveal was no longer there on Wednesday.
Reached for comment, Jonathan Balck, managing director at Colossus, told the Globe, “Please direct all inquiries to our clients at BOS Nation.”
Meanwhile, discourse on social media about the new name continues to run against the BOS Nation FC moniker, with Engalichev’s petition gathering more than 1,200 signatures by Wednesday afternoon.
Linda Henry, CEO of Boston Globe Media, is among the investors in BOS Nation FC.
Michael Silverman can be reached at michael.silverman@globe.com.