A new women’s soccer franchise in Boston received criticism for its “boring” team name and controversial marketing campaign.
BOS Nation Football Club, the National Women’s Soccer League’s 15th expansion team, was announced on Oct. 15. The city previously had a women’s professional soccer team, the Boston Breakers, that folded in 2018.
However, the team immediately received backlash for its name after it was released. “BOS Nation” is an anagram for “Bostonian,” meant to recognize the team’s fan base, according to Boston Unity Soccer Partners, the group leading the football club.
A Change.org petition titled “Give the Boston NWSL Team a Decent Name — Rebel Against ‘BOS Nation’” was made the day of the team launch and received more than 1,800 signatures.
Katya Engalichev, the creator of the petition, said she doesn’t think the anagram name “lends any value” to the team culture.
“I couldn’t believe after all the hype and all of the buildup to launching this NWSL team in Boston, finally, the name they had come up with was so boring and so unoriginal,” Engalichev said.
Engalichev, a neonatal nurse from New Hampshire, said the name is also flawed because “nobody calls Boston ‘BOS,’” and calling the team “nation” is bizarre. Sports team fanbases are referred to colloquially as nations, such as Sox Nation or Pats Nation, she said.
“If this is to go forward, we could, by that same logic, be referred to as ‘Nation Nation,’ which is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Engalichev said.
The football club also received backlash for the “Too Many Balls” marketing campaign that accompanied its launch, which was criticized for being misogynistic and transphobic.
Billboards with sayings like, “There are too many balls in this town” popped up across the city. The team reserved the domain name toomanyballs.com, and a video was released that noted the different types of balls — “old”, “steel” and “GOAT,” to name a few — ending with New England Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady saying, “Wait, what?”
Boston University senior Eliana Ioane, captain of BU women’s club soccer, said the video takes away from the “whole point of having this NWSL team,” which is to promote women.
“It’s still centered around men in this aspect,” Ioane said. “You made your entire advertising campaign based on the amount of men that are in sports, instead of focusing on women.”
Engalichev said the campaign could have focused more on Boston’s existing women’s sports teams or on platforming the NWSL in general. The league has had recent success, including sending players from eight different NWSL clubs to play for the United States Women’s National Team, which won its fifth gold medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It was kind of tone deaf and transphobic in terms of insinuating that the only thing that makes a man a man is having testicles,” Engalichev said. “It was just absurd and a very strange thing to focus on when we’re trying to brand a team and a franchise.”
Ioane said the team has to shift its focus toward taking accountability and giving women a platform in order to “wipe this campaign away.”
Engalichev said the backlash BOS Nation received is “a bad look” for the NWSL as a whole, as women’s sports are subject to more scrutiny than men’s sports.
“Coming up with team names that sound like a joke and putting out a brand launch campaign that is literally a joke is not helping the future of women’s sports [and] the validity of the NWSL as a whole league, and it’s not exciting for the fanbase at all,” Engalichev said.
When asked for comment on the campaign’s backlash, the NWSL referred The Daily Free Press to a statement from NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman welcoming BOS Nation to the league.
“Boston is one of the most iconic sports cities, and the return of women’s soccer to this market is an exciting step that is responsive to the fervent demand for women’s sports there,” Berman said in a statement. “We look forward to watching BOS Nation Football Club take the pitch in 2026.”
Colossus Creative Co., the company that helped develop the marketing campaign for BOS Nation, deferred to its client at the NWSL Boston when asked to comment.
Following the backlash, BOS Nation wrote in a statement the team “missed the mark” in its attempt to “create a bold and buzzworthy brand launch campaign.”
“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,” the statement said.
The club wrote it will “do better” and thanked those who held them accountable. The team said it was proud to be part of the most inclusive sports league in the world and was committed to upholding the unifying values that define the NWSL.
Engalichev said she appreciated that BOS Nation addressed the backlash and “the more serious criticism” about the marketing campaign. She said she hopes there will be a second half to the apology which recognizes fans’ discontent with the team name.
“It’s not something you want on a T-shirt,” Engalichev said of the team name. “Just recognizing that and saying it straight out would be the best possible response we could get from them, and then I feel like we can all move on.”
