French football ad with a twist turns gender stereotypes on head

A Women’s World Cup advertisement featuring only male players feels like a nonsensical way to promote female sport. But a major plot twist halfway through will convert even the most cynical who believe women’s football is too slow and boring.

Telecom company Orange has released an ad that begins with Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann, among other high-profile Les Bleus, scoring screamers, running on the ball at lightning speed and engaging in technical trickery that has crowds in pubs cheering in delight.

Then, midway through the two-minute ad, up pops a message which reads: “Only Les Bleus can give us these emotions. But that’s not them you’ve just seen.”

The footage rewinds and viewers are walked through a video-editing process revealing that the heads of those famous footballers had, in fact, been superimposed onto the bodies of the women’s France national team.

The process involved weeks of searching through footage to find skilful moves from women’s players such as Selma Bacha and Sakina Karchaoui that they could match exactly to moves in men’s games.

And the identical nature of the movements, along with the shock of realising they were performed by women of the fifth-ranked France team about to compete at the tournament in Australia and New Zealand, challenges incorrect perceptions of a gender skill gap.

The advertisement has gone viral, variously being called “the coolest sports ad ever created”, “fan-freaking-tastic” and “pure genius”.