If you’ve ever had a rough day at work, you can be safe in the knowledge that it doesn’t come close to that of the team behind Halo: the female-focused TikTok channel from Sky Sports, which launched on Thursday last week and imploded almost instantly.
One post featured the words “How the matcha + hot girl walk hits” in a pink font over a clip of Erling Haaland charging towards the goal. It was a spectacular failure to read the room, an implication that women don’t understand sports on a technical level. Within days, the team issued an apology and shut down the account. “Genuinely would’ve expected a stunt like this pulled by the losing team in an episode of The Apprentice,” one commenter observed.
Positioning itself as the “lil sis” (yes, really) of Sky Sports, the channel caused immediate and widespread backlash. Parodies sprung up everywhere: Bracknell Town FC added pink bows and animated Labubus to footage of their gameplay, while the partner of Man City’s Kerstin Casparij made a satirical video of her grasping the offside rule once it appeared in pink lettering. “Girlbossing my way through stoppage time,” read another post. “Manifesting VAR intervention”.
The England goalkeeper, who saved the Lionesses from defeat to become crowned European Champions in July, speaks to Glamour’s Lucy Morgan about resilience, creating change and proving people wrong
All but two posts have been deleted from the Halo account. One post is a statement from Sky, which reads: "Our intention for Halo was to create a space alongside our existing channel for new, young, female fans.
“We've listened. We didn't get it right. As a result, we're stopping all activity on this account. We're learning and remain as committed as ever to creating spaces where fans feel included and inspired.”
Glamour has reached out to Sky for a comment, but it had nothing further to add.
So how did they get it so wrong? The idea of carving out space for female sports fans is, in itself, welcome and overdue – many women still feel shut out, talked over or treated as an afterthought in sporting culture. And yet, women’s sports viewership is rising fast – 2024 was the most-watched year ever for women’s sport in the UK. But there’s still a huge gender gap within sports as a whole: a YouGov survey found that 35% of British men describe themselves as “very interested” in sports, while only 9% of women do. Men’s football is still dominated by male viewership: as a Watford season ticket holder, I’m among a noticeable minority of women in the stands (although I’m grateful for the shorter toilet queue).
There are two issues at play here: the demand for more platforms for women’s sports, and the treatment of female fans in wider sporting culture. It’s worth noting why a separate space might feel necessary: a 2022 study found that more than two-thirds of male football fans held hostile, sexist or misogynistic attitudes towards women’s sport. But the content Halo seemed to be putting out suggested it was using a female lens to understand the men’s game.
Perhaps Sky could’ve reached out to a number of the many successful sports content creators that exist: Tiannah Pedler, Charlotte Northover, Rhyanna Parara, Nieve Petruzziello AKA Stuntpegg – to consult or even lead on their content. Sky Sports – who are, to their credit, the biggest investors in women’s sports in the UK and Ireland – has already worked with many of these on their coverage, so they wouldn’t need to look far.
She joins her Chelsea teammates wearing ‘period-stained’ shorts for their first game of the Women's Super League to fight period stigma.
Some predicted that Halo’s misfire was the fault of an older, male team, but Director of Sky Sports News Mark Allford responded to criticism by explaining that a “young (100% female) project team” were behind Halo, with the goal of “engag[ing] as many new sports fans as possible.”
And in a way, I can see what they were aiming for. There’s a style of deliberately unserious, self-deprecating content that brands such as Ryanair have leaned into, building huge audiences by winking at their own absurdity. Halo was presumably mapped out with a Gen Z, very online audience in mind, whose humour is more ironic and referential than previous generations – and my guess is they wanted to transmit this kind of meme fluency, a play on the all-pink era of female branding. But they misread the room in terms of how female fans feel sidelined within the world of sport.
Sky Sports isn’t just any old brand, it’s the biggest media platform in British sport. What it publishes shapes culture and signals who it thinks sport is for. The infantilisation of women has been creeping back into mainstream culture, reclaimed by women with trends such as ‘I’m just a girl’, ‘girl math’, but there’s a harmful side to this, as we’ve seen the far right weaponise it to attack trans people and immigrants.
And Halo, unfortunately, isn’t the only recent example of female sports fans feeling misrepresented. Last month a Financial Times article attempted to draw a parallel between the popularity of viral romance novel Icebreaker and increased female attendance at hockey matches. Instead, genuine hockey fans voiced their annoyance, saying they felt their interest had been reduced to “finding the men hot”. In a recent post celebrating three women entering their F1 Academy programme, McLaren used an outdated term by captioning the picture: “Committed to supporting the next generation of females in motorsport.”
If Halo wants to earn its audience’s trust, it needs to treat women not as a marketing niche, and definitely not a “little sister”, but as what they already are: knowledgeable, passionate fans who don’t need their sport served with pink bows.
We chatted to the England legend about heritage, the Lionesses, and the importance of grassroots clubs.
