Bonnie Brown had been posting lingerie shots of herself on X for four months before she decided to pose in one of her 20 Leicester City shirts, which she had collected over a lifetime of following the club. In the subsequent three months, she said she gained 30,000 followers. “It’s the perfect money-maker. Men just love women in football shirts,” Brown told The Athletic. “If you get pushed (on social media) as a girl in a football shirt, you’re more likely to get seen by football fans. My main m
“It’s the perfect money-maker. Men just love women in football shirts,” Brown told The Athletic. “If you get pushed (on social media) as a girl in a football shirt, you’re more likely to get seen by football fans. My main market is men. It makes sense to tie in with what they like, doesn’t it?”
Scores of sex workers have in recent years been using social media as a platform to pose in football shirts and lingerie, sometimes reacting to matches in innuendo-laden videos. Many profiles link to the subscription-based content service OnlyFans, on which users pay monthly fees or tips for access to creators’ videos, photos and live streams, and creators can earn additional revenue for private and custom content.
The Athletic spoke to five sex workers for whom football is a significant part of their online brand. They offered wide-ranging views and experiences on an industry as broad as it is polarizing.
Among them is Brown, who said she initially suffered mental health issues on launching her page, becoming fearful of leaving her house. “I was worried I’d bump into someone and they’d be like: ‘You’re that girl. That’s disgusting,’” she said of her initial experience. Alex Le Tissier, the daughter-in-law of Southampton legend Matt Le Tissier, says she launched an OnlyFans page to get her husband out of debt. For Swedish-born Hull City fan Elsa Thora it was a means to make money when she struggled to find work after her A-levels. Many spoke of relishing the freedom they had to be creative, of having gained financial security, of choosing their own working hours. Others cautioned of damage to familial relationships or fears over their long-term job prospects.
In the social media age, the enduring ethical anxieties about sex work feel more pronounced.
Mainstream media and online discussion around OnlyFans often veers into a moral panic, lamenting that the extremity of some creators’ work, in an age when outrage and engagement lead directly to revenue, may have a corrupting influence on audiences. More broadly, any discussion about sex work also encompasses ideas around autonomy and victimhood — the extent to which these women are making informed choices free from direct or indirect exploitation — and how pornography can change how men view and interact with women more generally. The women at the centre of it all have varied experiences, which highlight the difficulty of fitting sex work into one simple narrative.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Alex Le Tissier says her husband, Mitch, suffered a mental breakdown and could no longer work. He also had a gambling addiction and the couple were, she said, in “a lot of debt.”
Before launching her OnlyFans page, she said she had never watched porn, nor met any sex workers or sent nude photos. “I just learned the ropes, really, by myself,” she said. It took her “two solid years” to begin making what she calls “good money.”
A 2023 UK regulatory filing by OnlyFans’ parent company Fenix International revealed that the average OnlyFans creator earned £984 a year; 2025 figures from the OnlyFans management platform Supercreator had the site’s top 0.1 percent of earners taking home £73,000 per month and the bottom one percent £1.54 per month.
What makes Alex’s situation unique is her surname: Her husband is the son of Matt Le Tissier, one of the greatest Southampton players of all time, a former England international, and a star of the Premier League in the 1990s.
“I know the reason why I make a lot of money is because there’s a lot of Southampton fans that want to see Matt Le Tissier’s daughter-in-law naked,” Alex said. “I can look at myself in the mirror and say that.”
Four years ago today Mitch ended his gambling addiction. In those four years I haven’t once felt anxiety or distrust. I feel that gambling addiction is not spoken about as much as it should. The secrets, the lies, the enablers, the financial impact it has on those around them. So…
— Alex Le Tissier (@AlexLeTissier) May 8, 2025
Initially, she avoided posting Southampton-themed content because her “in-laws were so angry.” Far and away the biggest request, though, was for videos in Southampton kits. In November 2023, Le Tissier posted a video to X of her bouncing on a bed in a Southampton shirt and underwear. The clip has since been viewed more than 12 million times.
“Wearing the kit causes so much outrage,” she said. “They think that I’m destroying the Le Tissier name, that I’m taking my husband for a mug, that I’m using my surname for money. They don’t see behind the scenes. I have completely financially bettered his life. I’ve paid off all his debt.
“I feel like I’ve come to a bit of an epiphany moment. Maybe I’d just indulged in everyone’s projection about (sex work). For a really long time, I felt really bad shame — that I was a really bad person for doing it. You get hundreds of comments every day: ‘You’re a disgrace!’ ‘That’s disgusting!’ You are going to start believing it.”
The link to Southampton continues to bolster Le Tissier’s work. Her subscriptions “skyrocket” when she attends matches. Her most successful working day was Southampton’s promotion to the Premier League in May 2024. Matt Le Tissier had posted a photo from Wembley with his wife and daughter; social media users noted Alex’s absence and his post went viral, driving traffic to her page.
“I’ve never seen that amount of money, ever, in my life,” Alex says. “I don’t know an industry where women are the most financially secure, (out of) men and women. If people were honest with themselves, that’s probably the trigger point. They see these women driving around in Ferraris. That triggers people because they’re not used to women being so financially stable and having money.”
Le Tissier’s profile is such that it would now be difficult, she conceded, to move into another industry.
“I think that’s why a lot of women don’t want to have the press (coverage),” she said. “But, from my point of view, my husband can’t get a job because of what I do. So I’m trapped — like, fully trapped. I’ve got to make the most of it.”
Bella Mia is struggling to shake off the stigma of sex work and find a place amidst football creatives who think her ties to the sex industry permit certain behaviors.
“We’re all exploited in one way or the other, the workers in the industry, especially if you’re not earning that much money,” she said.
“There’s lots of things that I said yes to when I first started that I would never, ever be comfortable with doing now. You’re put in that position where you’re like: ‘Everyone’s saying they’re making loads of money, so I assume this is what they’re doing.’”
A lifelong Arsenal fan, she had wanted to be a YouTuber, and quit her day job — and its 12-hour shifts — to make videos. Someone suggested that making football content for OnlyFans would open a niche for her and help fund her YouTube videos.
“I realized quickly that nobody takes OnlyFans girls seriously at all,” she said. “So I was like: ‘Oh s—, what am I going to do now?'”
Previously, she had worked as a special effects makeup artist. To break into football, she went to the Emirates Stadium wearing body paint of the Arsenal kit (she covered her nipples and wore knickers) and interviewed fans before the game for YouTube videos. The gag was that she would speak about football “whilst acting like I didn’t have bodypaint on.” It worked: some videos garnered over 70 million views on X.
“It was shock value at first, and then it was: now I’m going to go to the games in normal clothes, speaking to the fans, getting updates,” she said. But not everyone accepted her.
She would reach out to YouTubers or TikTok influencers to discuss collaborating, only for them to ask if they could sleep with her first. Mia alleges that one man interrupted her work at the Emirates, threw money at her and yelled at onlookers about her OnlyFans page. Another shared footage of Mia at the stadium and called her a pedophile.
“It ruined my life,” she said. In the past, Mia had suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and intrusive, distressing thoughts. “So when that happened, I absolutely spiraled because I was like: ‘There must be something wrong with me.’” She did not set foot inside the Emirates for five months.
She took a year off OnlyFans, but “lost so much money and got way more hate.” She has since had her own awakening, she said, letting go “of the prejudice I had towards myself.”
“I do what I want to do on my personal OnlyFans,” she said. “That’s my choice. The creative side of my job is entirely up to me — what I want to push, what I don’t. I love that side of it. I create content, what I want to create. I know a lot of girls feel pressure to create content they don’t want to create. I think that’s why they hate it.”
Mia’s experiences are a reminder of how often men act as gatekeepers of football’s online space. In turn, some female fans have their own grievances with OnlyFans models, chief among them a perceived inauthenticity. Hull City fan and OnlyFans creator Elsa Thora, who began playing football aged six, noted the double standard. “I’ve never seen anyone comment about a man who profits from football,” she said. “It’s only when women profit that there’s an issue.
“Me in a football top or me in normal clothes get similar attention (on X). The only difference is if I’m wearing a football top, I get a lot more men who might not like it as much. Some love it, but I get a lot of men saying: ‘Stick to OnlyFans!’ A lot of them call me a fake fan, say I’m not actually into football, call me (names).
“Because of OnlyFans, I think it is even worse for me — but I think it’s also a general thing about women and sports. It’s just sexist.”
In the OnlyFans sphere, some posts provoke outrage in an attempt to increase engagement and revenue. In 2021, the Chelsea content creator Astrid Wett deleted a post of herself choking on a black sex toy with a caption about Germany and Real Madrid defender Antonio Rüdiger. Wett, who also posts skits with lookalikes of managers and players and has taken signs bearing X-rated messages to matches, did not respond to The Athletic’s requests for interviews.
“We’re in a world where OnlyFans creators are trying to one-up each other when it comes to the most outrageous stunts,” said Mia. “People are genuinely starting to actually hate us.”
“Girls will behave outrageously, but you kind of see it from both sides,” Le Tissier said, “because to stand out, you’re having to do the most now.”
Brown, meanwhile, has never been approached at matches; she goes to games in “a hat and a hoodie, kind of like in disguise” in case anyone were to confront her. She never felt shame over her work but someone else took umbrage, telling Brown’s parents within weeks of her launching the page. “It was awful,” she says. “I wish I could have told them first. For the first year, my mental health was awful.”
Football’s presence on the internet, from message boards to social media to illegal streams, changes rapidly. Data from Similarweb showed that the advent of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which requires social media sites and search engines to prevent children from accessing pornography and porn sites to verify users’ ages via credit card, bank or mobile phone networks, prompted a 45 percent drop in UK users visiting Pornhub. In March this year, OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, was fined £1.05 million by the UK media watchdog OFCOM for providing inaccurate information over its age verification checks.
Demand for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), allowing users to bypass those age restrictions, has surged. It makes for an uncertain future for the industry and the women working in it.
Katy, who did not want to use her surname, decided to pose in Newcastle shirts having witnessed the “really good engagement” on others’ social media platforms. However, she says it would be “naive” to think she could make money through OnlyFans forever.
“I don’t think stuff like OnlyFans, or any other site where you upload adult content, is going to drop off anytime soon, but it will at some point,” she said.
“With content creation and social media, there’s only so much money that companies can put out to different people. Everyone’s wanting to get into it, thinking it’s an easy kind of route to get millions. I’m not sure how much longer it lasts.”
For Brown, she says she is now happy and has never felt shame over her work, though she concedes it is not as easy to make money because the market is saturated.
“I’m so comfortable and used to it, it doesn’t faze me. But I know there are probably a lot of girls in my industry who aren’t fine, and they’ve probably not got the right support network or doing it in the right way, or doing what they actually should be doing — in their comfort zone.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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