Written by Chloé Cerisier
You may have seen Sky Sports’ newly-launched TikTok page ‘Halo’ for female sports fans. Or maybe you didn’t, as it was taken down merely three days later.
Sky Sports Halo was described by the company as the “brand-new TikTok channel created specifically to engage and entertain female sports fans […] providing an inclusive platform for women to enjoy all sports, while amplifying female voices and perspectives.” Andy Gill, Sky Sports’ head of social media and audience development, added that it was, “NOT a women’s sports account; it’s sports content through a female lens”, meaning “fun, trend-led, and relatable content.”
If some were intrigued by the initial premise, they were quickly disillusioned. Described as Sky Sports’ “lil sis”, Halo’s first few posts were all made up of pastel-coloured captions, bubble-letter graphics, pink sparkles, and heart-strewn edits. And despite positioning itself as a women-focused space, nearly half of its first 11 videos on the account featured male athletes. The first Halo post included a clip of Manchester City striker Erling Haaland scoring against Bournemouth, with the caption “how the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits”. In a comment under the post, one user wrote: “Can’t believe this is what you think female sports fans like.” Halo responded with: “Can’t believe you brought that kind of energy.” Heavily criticised for being patronising and misogynistic, parodies of Halo’s posts sprung up everywhere, with Bracknell Town FC adding pink bows and Labubus to footage of their gameplay, or Manchester City player Kerstin Casparij making a satirical video of her grasping the offside rule only once it appeared in pink lettering.
As a result, and not even three days after its launch, the Sky Sports Halo account deleted all its posts and issued a statement that read: “We’ve listened. We didn’t get it right. As a result, we’re stopping all activity on this account.” The account is now private.
So why did female sports fans even need to be siphoned off into their own TikTok channel? Why couldn’t Sky Sports just create social media content that everyone can enjoy?
The TikTok bio set the scene from the very first post: “Sky Sports’ lil sis”. Women are positioned as the younger sibling. Not equal, but adjacent. Halo becomes an annex to the main product rather than a space with genuine editorial weight.
The content follows the same logic. Sport is packaged as soft, easy, pink and polite. Women are imagined as an audience that needs it translated into sparkly captions, as if a female football fan, basketball fan, or boxing fan has never engaged with the sport beyond Instagram Reels.
Sky Sports runs separate TikTok channels for football, golf, Formula 1, and so on. But somehow, female fans are treated as some monolithic block, with their very own all-encompassing account. Why should content about the Lionesses and Ellie Kildunne be exiled to Halo rather than treated as equally thrilling as the men’s sports? And what do any of these sports have in common, bar the fact that all the players are the same gender?
Halo’s content once again pushes the stereotype that female sports fans are only there for the trends and good-looking players, without actually caring about the rules or nuances of the games.
Women are already discussing game strategies and team politics. They are the engineers, journalists, strategists and fans who do not require anything diluted for them. It is patronising, not empowering, to have the main broadcaster in the UK assume they need to be eased into sports. Sky Sports isn’t just any brand; it’s the biggest media platform in British sport. What it publishes shapes culture, and signals who it thinks sport is for.
Women do not need simplified content. They do not need pink fonts and ‘girl-friendly’ explanations from a media company with decades of broadcast power behind it. They need respect, representation, and most importantly, backing in the places where discrimination actually lives. They need space where their knowledge, criticism and excitement are treated with the same seriousness given to male fans.
If Sky Sports wanted to support women, they could have hired more female analysts and presenters, given more airtime to female content creators, boosted female journalists, or worked actively at shutting down harassment in their own comment sections. Instead, it settled for being cute.
Women in sports want to be seen as knowledgeable fans, skilled athletes, and influential voices, not reduced to trends and pastel colours. If Halo wants to earn its audience’s trust, it needs to treat women not as a marketing niche or a “little sister”, but as what they truly are: skilled, passionate fans who do not need their sport served with pink bows.
