We live in a sporting era, witnessing unprecedented growth of women’s sport on a global scale. In the UK, this was kickstarted by the Lionesses’ 2022 European Championship victory on home soil, which saw a record 87,192 watching at Wembley and a further 17.4 million tuning in on BBC One. In cricket, India’s first Women’s World Cup victory a few weeks ago, saw viewership records tumble in India, as the 185 million viewers on JioHotstar equalled the record set by the 2024 Men’s World Cup final, also won by India. The 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup in England saw 444,465 tickets sold and 5.8 million tune in to the final, the most watched women’s rugby match in the UK ever.
You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I came across the Sky Sports launch of their new platform Halo. In their now deleted launch post on X, the broadcaster labelled the platform as a dedicated space for “all sports” and for “championing female athletes”. The broadcaster’s intention was to provide women a space within sport. Instead, the project’s launch centred around criticism, labelled as patronising and sexist, as it appeared to completely disconnect from the very audience it was attempting to empower. Sky shut it down within days, issuing a brief admission that they “didn’t get it right”.
Her Game Too, the campaigning organisation dedicated to tackling sexism and supporting female sports fans, welcomed the removal of Halo. However, it stressed the issue couldn’t simply “be brushed under the carpet”, vowing to contact Sky Sports directly to highlight where the launch went wrong and how the broadcaster must commit to real improvement.
The meltdown was fast, albeit not surprising. The brand was kickstarted by the now infamous line “lil sis to Sky Sports”. This was instantly problematic, positioning the platform and women’s sport as secondary to the main Sky Sports brand. In an era where women’s sport has fought for decades to be treated with the same respect as men’s sports, the framing of the platform as the “little sister”, reinforced the exact hierarchy fans are trying to dismantle.
Five of the first eleven now deleted posts featured men’s athletes, leaning on trends, filters and pink text. For a platform promoted as a space to “champion female athletes”, the early output sent the opposite message. Instead of elevating women’s sport, Halo appeared to recycle generic TikTok tropes and place sport-shaped content inside them, often without women at the centre. It became apparent that this space was not just dedicated to platforming the women’s game, but instead segregating female fans from Sky’s main accounts.
“What stood out most to many was the content.”
As someone who covers women’s sport day in day out, what struck me most was how instantly obvious the disconnect felt. I could not recognise myself, or the communities I spend so much time in, anywhere within Halo’s aesthetic. Halo seemed built on an outdated assumption, that women in sport need content to be softened before they can engage with it. In an age where female fans are consuming in-depth analysis and long-form journalism with the same enthusiasm as male fans, this stereotype went beyond being outdated.
Halo highlighted a fundamental truth, that visibility without understanding is not progress. Halo’s attempts felt less like representation, and more like a caricature of what someone who does not follow women’s sport imagines women want.
Charlotte Ashton, a women’s cricket journalist and creator, echoed this sentiment when we spoke. Her immediate reaction to Halo’s launch was disbelief. “I was shocked to be honest. I thought it was a bit of a joke—I didn’t think it was a real account. I had a look through and was really confused... It seemed really inconsistent from a marketing and comms perspective, but also from a fan’s perspective; it was just bizarre.” It wasn’t simply the tone of Halo’s content that worried Charlotte, but what it revealed about how women’s sport is still perceived inside the biggest media organisations in the country.
“It was baffling.”
“We all enjoy a funny joke and a meme online... but to infantilise everybody like that and use every post in the same manner was very strange. It felt very much like we were going back twenty years in perception of women with this very 2000s pink aesthetic”. Ashton pointed out how odd it was to see content like “hot girl walks” and trending audio used as placeholders for actual sport. “You could line up six different women who look nothing alike, who have very few things in common, but all love sport. We’re all interested, we’re all passionate, so it’s weird their content wasn’t even related to sport in a sense.”
The frustration cut deeper, because for so many women working in sport media, the disconnect Halo embodied is something we have felt long before its launch. You learn quickly in this industry that being a woman in press boxes, newsrooms, or mixed zones means navigating a level of scrutiny and dismissal that rarely touches your male counterparts.
So, when Charlotte said “They don’t listen to fans, they don’t engage with it... there’s no representation there in the big broadcasters”, it landed with a weight that goes beyond one poorly judged campaign. Because she’s right. Halo is exactly what happens when decisions about women’s sport are made in rooms where women are present but not in roles of influence.
“They’ve tried to dumb it down.”
For me, Halo did not just feel misguided, it felt eerily familiar. It reminded me of the many occasions where I’ve been the only woman reporting from a domestic fixture, and have had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. These experiences are not headline-grabbing, but they build into a quiet fatigue that sits under the surface of nearly every woman working in this industry.
Halo, unintentionally, brought all of that to the surface. Charlotte articulated the standard that so many of us have been asking for: “Good, respectful coverage of women’s sport looks like coverage on par with men’s sport... don’t infantilise the women.” The ask is not complicated. It’s not revolutionary. It’s simply equality of tone, depth, and respect. “Yeah, we can have a funny question”, she said, “as long as it’s the same funny question you would ask a man in sport”. What women’s sport doesn’t need is segregation. What it certainly does not need is sugar-coating. What it needs is serious journalism, investment, curiosity, and ambition. And treating women equally.
“Halo promised representation.”
What it delivered, however briefly, was a reminder of how easily women’s sport can be misrepresented when those pulling the levers fail to engage with the communities they claim to serve.