Matcha & Hot Girl Walks: How Sky Sports (Halo) Got Their Female Audience So Wrong
Image Credit: Sky Sports Halo TikTok profile picture via Wikimedia Commons
Lasting only 3 days, Halo was a female focused TikTok channel created by Sky Sports with the vision of creating a platform dedicated to ‘amplifying female voices’ and ‘championing female athletes’ through featuring women’s sports and perspectives. In a media space that is heavily dominated by men, the initial intention was to create a community for young female fans to connect and engage with sports content. This, however, was executed poorly.
Introduced by Sky as ‘Sky Sports’ lil sis’, a complementary channel to its mainstream media, the channel was inherently problematic, by suggesting women need a separate space to understand sports, suggesting an incapability of consuming the same media as men. This condescending introduction reinforced the gendered infantilisation that plays up to male superiority in the sporting world.
When looking at the content that was briefly uploaded by the account, it appeared to be the TikTokification of women’s sport. Rather than focusing on factual reporting of professional women’s sport matches, or explaining sports terms in a non-degrading way, the account was centered around gossip and ‘relatable’ content for girls.
Additionally, for an account that was created with the aim of elevating women’s sport, many of the channel’s videos featured male sports stars. For example, with a video of Charles Leclerc featuring the caption ‘he’s a good man Savannah’. Content involving Manchester City star Erling Haaland also featured, captioned ‘How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits’, reducing women’s knowledge of sport to aesthetics and lifestyle trends. Halo’s approach reduced women to a monolithic audience, assuming that they are not already knowledgeable about sport and don’t already consume mainstream sports media.
The account was instantly met with backlash from TikTok users and key advocates for women’s football. GirlsontheBall, a women’s football website, posted on X: ‘Can’t imagine this is what women sports fans want and taking a brief look at the comments it seems like we’re not alone’. A similar reaction was seen by the women’s football magazine SheKicks, commenting ‘It is clear that Sky Sports are trying to grow their brand in women’s football but the new Halo channel seems to be going the wrong way about it’. Outrage ensued from Sky’s ‘dumbing down’ of sports content for female viewers, with their use of pink branding, hearts, and glitter on the posts’ captions and subtitles controversially reinforcing gender stereotypes. In turn, this sparked an influx of TikTok videos that satirised this concept, with multiple videos uploaded with captions such as ‘How am I going to understand the offside rule without pink captions?’
Although it is clear that Sky Sports attempted to take steps to provide women’s sport with a larger platform, the approach was evidently unsuccessful with female fans. So what is it that female sports fans actually want and could benefit from? Does female sports content need to be tailored differently, and is a separate platform truly needed?
It’s clear that women’s sport is still incredibly underrepresented in mainstream media, with minimal headlines featuring female athletes. Whilst creating an alternative channel for women’s sport isn’t required, pushing it towards a bigger platform in mainstream media is. This includes more televised games, improved broadcast quality, and greater commentary. Women don’t need pink subtitles and matcha references, we need clear representation of female sports games, opinions, and news.