Sky Sports Halo entered the scene with a clear proposition, package sport alongside hot girl walks, matcha and emojis, and women would follow.
This assumption completely backfired as women sports fans felt they were being ‘infantilised’ and that we require pink font to better understand sports.
Due to the backlash, the channel was quickly axed after 3 days. A statement was posted on TikTok saying: “Our intention for Halo was to create a space alongside our existing social channels for new, you, 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 committed as ever to creating spaces where fans feel included and inspired.”
Sky Sports has axed its new woman-focused brand Halo just three days after launch, following fierce criticism of the “patronising” TikTok channel.
Sky announced on Saturday that it would cease activity on the social page, which the broadcaster had dubbed its ‘lil sis’, and… pic.twitter.com/AkUMpoU5QA
— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) November 16, 2025
It elicited a strong reaction from many female sports fans including The Name One Player Podcast who dedicated an episode to this controversy, interviewing Charlotte Rose who has worked in sports coverage for 6 years.
She commented that “there is a real inference for me that it’s taking women outside of that realm of sports, it kind of feels like disengagement from the main accounts and women can’t be in those spaces or comment on them.”
“When you are using this verbiage, you’re dumbing down sports for women and being like you can only understand this man’s success if we put it in a term that females use on TikTok.”
Sports influencer Laura Kirk-Francis also gave her opinion stating that “the biggest mistake that Sky are making here is they are not treating their target audience with respect as sports fans. They’re not talking to them with the acknowledgment that people watching know what they’re talking about.”
Jennifer Keating, the only female sports reporter for the Limerick Voice shares her thoughts:
Being a female sports fan is simply just being a sports fan. Women do not need to be put in a separate box or for specialised content to be made for them. Female sports fans can and should just simply exist in the same spaces as all other sports fans.
It’s clear from Sky Sports’ above response that they know this missed the mark on this one and made a mistake. However, they did not react like this straight away. They took a different approach at first, by replying to fans comments on TikTok.
In response to one fan on TikTok by the username of m9luvrr that said, “can’t believe this is what you think female sports fans like”, Halo replied “can’t believe you brought that kind of energy”. Sky Sports quickly realised this was not the avenue to take when they faced immediate backlash.
It is quite hard to fathom how this was approved by the various boards at Sky Sports, but the one thing that is clear is that they did not consult any actual female sports fans on this project. If they did, I do not believe Sky Sports Halo would have launched in the first place.
Overall, Sky Sports Halo just feels like another way to try and diminish female sports fans and reduce them to pink loving, matcha-drinking women. It was an extremely poor decision from Sky Sports, and one I believe they now regret quite a lot.
Female sports fans have to constantly prove themselves in many different avenues, and Halo just further compounded this. We will wait and see if something like this pops up again, but I would not hold my breath that it will not.