Dear Sky Sports, We Already Know Ball

On Nov. 13, the major media conglomerate Sky Sports launched a TikTok page created to appeal to female sports fans. However, the extremely sexist and tone deaf page only served to belittle the interests and knowledge of the same fans they were targeting. The three day long ordeal turned into a masterclass on how NOT to appeal to women. 

‘Halo’ was introduced as the ‘lil sis’ of Sky Sports, and was marketed as a platform to champion female athletes where they are often overlooked and promote “culture, community, and connection” between female fans. 

These are all admirable causes to push for, but their execution…I’m not too sure it was seen that way.

When faced with the question of how to promote female athletes and create space for women fans to feel more represented in their passion for sports, Sky Sports answered with this: 

“How about making it pink?”

“I think women like matcha, how about matcha?”

Women have been dominating in sports so much recently, with the likes of Olympic gymnasts like Simone Biles, WNBA stars like Angel Reese, and an entire new Formula series ‘F1 Academy’ dedicated to building up young female drivers. 

However, on the Halo page women like these were not the sole focus. They were pushed to the side for posts about men and their accomplishments. 

Where they had the chance to bring and appreciate the talented women across all sports, they decided to make posts about hot girl walks and being ‘rizzed’ up by Zohran Mamdani. 

The separation in how they see women vs men involved in sports is startlingly clear as their normal content is straight forward with no clear angle but promotes leading men in sports. To separate the two groups is almost to say that women couldn’t possibly be able to ingest content ‘made for men’ and connect to it the same. 

This was all a huge slap in the face. 

The backlash that Halo received in those coming days from women speaking out about feeling like they were being belittled and the content ‘made for them’ was just making it seem like they were ‘dumb women’ who are only watching sports because Taylor Swift made them, or to scout attractive men. 

The fact that the only way that Sky Sports could come up with content for women is to dumb it down. 

I also feel like no one was asking for this. Women have consumed sports content for decades just fine and, to my knowledge, no one has shared a need for a ‘girl-friendly’ play-by-play. 

We understand what goes on perfectly, we can enjoy sports the same way men do. 

This is something that hits extremely close as a female sports fan. Whenever I show interest in a sport to a man, I end up being questioned about what it is that I like about it. 

The main accusation is that I must think one of the players is cute and that’s how I got into it. This is such a common sentiment held against women that there is no way we could have genuine interests in “boy things”. 

This is extremely degrading and this gendered way of thinking is something that has and will continue to cause separation unless something is done about it. I felt we as a society had started to make steps forward, but things like this controversy show me that we still have a long way to go.

• athletes
• culture
• Sky Sports
• sports