BOS Nation Apologizes For Ill-Advised Rollout, Not For Being Named BOS Nation

Good news: It’s been more than 24 hours since the NWSL announced the name of its latest expansion team, and everyone is still talking about it. Bad news: Everyone is still talking about it because they are making fun of it, to the extent that the team has been forced to issue an apology for how it handled its media rollout.

The people charged with introducing BOS Nation to the world ran into a problem that many organizations do these days, which is that at some point they found themselves in a room with an advertising exec or brand consultant who said something along the lines of, “Why should we be scared to be bold?” These things tend to happen when you hire an advertising agency with an About page that looks like this. As a result, BOS Nation announced itself with a promotional video built around a strained joke about testicles, which included the phrase “goat balls.”

In other words, BOS Nation got a little too epic. The backlash from NWSL players and fans came swiftly, and the team responded by releasing an apologetic statement this afternoon. “While we had hoped to create a bold and buzzworthy brand launch campaign, we missed the mark,” the statement began. “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.”

Though the team’s statement addresses the disastrous rollout video, it offers no explanation for the fact that the team’s name remains BOS Nation.