Charley Hull isn’t afraid to speak her mind. This week, the Solheim Cup star turned her attention away from golf entirely, weighing in on the online firestorm surrounding actress Sydney Sweeney’s latest advertising campaign.
In an Instagram Story, she made her thoughts known: “My opinion on the @sydney_sweeney advert? People are genuinely getting pissed off because an actress/model is… modelling in an advert. 😂 That is quite literally her job.”
Hull believes people should not take the advert seriously: “Not everything needs a 45-minute psychological breakdown and a public inquiry. Sometimes a pretty woman in an advert is just a pretty woman in an advert. The world will keep spinning, I promise. 😂”
Sweeney recently campaigned for sports trading platform Novig–where she is a strategic partner and equity holder–which launched ahead of the football season and has drawn significant backlash in recent weeks. The campaign features Sweeney in a series of images of sports equipment covering her body, with the actress repeating the word “sports” throughout while promoting the platform’s “Just Sports” tagline. The campaign drew backlash, largely from athletic professionals, for misrepresenting women athletes.
Prominent female athletes and Olympians, including swimmer Ariarne Titmus, sprinter Amy Hunt and gymnast Gracie Kramer, criticized the campaign, saying it sexualizes women in sport and shifts attention away from their athletic achievements, strength and dedication.
Many athletes responded to the campaign on social media and in post-race interviews by sharing footage of themselves training and competing, emphasizing the physical demands of women’s sport and declaring, “This is what women in sport look like.”
World champion boxer Skye Nicolson publicly criticized the ad. She posted a training clip captioned “Respectfully Sydney Sweeney, This is sport… Stop sexualising women in sport,” along with Olympic track cyclist Sophie Capewell, Wales rugby international Lisa Neumann, Team GB rugby player Ellie Boatman, and Australian Olympic water polo medallist Tilly Kearns.
The Australian Institute of Sport also posted about the controversy with the caption “THIS is sport.” Novig co-founder Jacob Fortinsky later addressed the criticism, telling Front Office Sports the company was “hugely supportive of women’s sports” but that it “never intended to portray female sports,” explaining that Sweeney was “driving the visuals and messaging” of the campaign herself. Sweeney has not directly addressed the backlash, though she appeared to respond indirectly by posting Instagram stories of past ESPN “Body Issue” photoshoots of professional athletes.
This isn’t the first time one of Sweeney’s ad campaigns has generated this level of controversy. In summer 2025, she starred in an American Eagle denim campaign built around the slogan “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” a play on “genes” and “jeans” which drew accusations from critics that the messaging promoted eugenics and echoed white supremacist rhetoric. Sweeney addressed that backlash months later in a GQ interview, saying she was surprised by the reaction and had largely stayed off her phone during the height of it while filming.
Charley Hull, for her part, has kept her comments limited to that single Instagram Story. She presented her view as a lighthearted response to the wider controversy rather than a direct comment on either side of the criticism. Her blunt and straightforward style is familiar to fans, and she has often spoken openly about topics, whether related to her golf or, in this case, an unrelated online controversy.