Footballer Sydney Leroux demands EA ‘deflates her boobs’ on FIFA
Footballer Sydney Leroux has asked FIFA 23 to ‘deflate’ her boobs after seeing her digital counterpart.
The Angel City FC player appears in the latest instalment of the EA Sports game and is among the many women included since 2016.
Despite breaking down barriers, the 32-year-old is unimpressed with how she was animated, saying the creators had made her ‘chesty’.
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Though FIFA 23 hit the shelves late last year, Leroux had been unaware of the additions made to her digital double.
Upon seeing how she and other players were represented though, the Canadian player took to Twitter and hilariously poked fun at the BAFTA-nominated video game.
This included Welsh midfielder Jess Fishlock, with Leroux tweeting about her less-than-flattering appearance in FIFA.
Sharing a screenshot of the game, Leroux wrote: “Can someone please tell me why @JessFishlock has a 5 o’clock shadow?“
In a series of side-splitting tweets, she continually poked fun at the game’s graphics and uploaded another photo of Kailen Sheridan’s character.
Captioning the post, the footballer pointedly wrote: “I know you expect women to just be thankful and grateful that you’ve given us a little sliver of publicity but please stop wasting our time. Some of us are bald.”
Leroux even took time to poke fun at herself, with several tweets about her character.
Sharing a screenshot of her animated self with her 2.1 million followers, the footballer asked the game's publisher EA to make several changes.
Half-joking, she wrote: “They had the headband, the braid, the neck tattoo, the overly plucked brows and someone even made me CHESTYYYY!!!! Deflate my boobs a bit and put a different jersey on.”
Leroux added a crying emoji and quipped: "I’ll keep the brows at this point.”
Whilst her character may have more in common with the love interest from Grand Theft Auto, the busy mum-of-two wasn’t quite done with her savage roast just yet.
The former Vancouver Whitecaps player also joked that the character was going to ‘scare her children’, as she shared a photo of her character looking, um, less than impressed.
In another tweet, she shared a rather awkward celebration by her digital double and wrote: “Please tell me I did not do an entire body scan for that.”
While the tweets are mostly tongue-in-cheek, there have been a number of female footballers who've complained about how the FIFA series has represented them on screen.
It raises important questions about whether developers prioritised the animation of stars like England's Harry Kane and Argentina’s Lionel Messi over their female counterparts.
Katherine Sidnell