Fun fact: Players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup will be earning, on average, just 25 cents for every dollar earned by men at the 2022 Men’s World Cup, which is how I’ll refer to it because having The Regular One and The Women’s One is part of what got us into this situation in the first place. (Incidentally, that’s up from less than eight cents per dollar in 2019, so… progress?)
Anyway, some people like to justify the pay disparity by saying women’s soccer is boring compared to men’s soccer, and I guess if you think winning zero World Cups is super exciting and winning four World Cups is a real snoozefest, that might be the case. If you do have better sense, however, you agree with telecom company Orange (which is French for “orange”), a sponsor of the French Women’s World Cup football (which is French for “football,” which is Foreign for “soccer”) team. They worked with Publicis agency Marcel on a film celebrating the awesome on-field skills of… Well, you can watch it yourself.
(Here’s the English-language version, if you’re too English-speaking to bother speaking French.)
The video shows the excitement of watching French soccer stars on the French men’s national team doing exceptional French soccer things in front of screaming crowds and tells us, “Only Les Bleus can give us these emotions.”
“But that’s not them you’ve just seen.”
That’s right, suckas: In one of the coolest and non-gratuitous-est uses of VFX technology of late, Marcel has replaced the stars of the women’s team with the stars of the men’s team, showing how the awesome moves and, like, goals and whatever (pretty much everything I know about soccer I learned from Ted Lasso) are no less impressive in their original form, where the head that knocks the ball past the leaping goalkeeper has a ponytail attached to it. And if you have something to say about the relative merits of men’s and women’s footsoccer, “the women aren’t as exciting to watch” probably shouldn’t be it.
“At Orange, when we support Les Bleus, we support Les Bleues.”
Hell, yeah, you do.
Thanks, Orange. Nicely done, Marcel. And suck it, soccer sexists.
Socxists.
I’ll keep working on it.