After only three days of being a live TikTok account @skysportshalo has already been shut down, with all posts deleted due to ‘sexist’ and ‘patronising’ posts towards women and young girls.
‘Sky Sports lil sis’ as they claimed to be, posted multiple TikTok’s aimed towards a female audience, to be more inclusive and expand their audience. Instead they managed to offend and patronise hundreds of thousands of women, and received thousands of comments and videos of backlash on the internet.
The Head of Social Media and Audience Development at Sky Sports, Andy Gill, wrote: “Today we launched Sky Sports Halo, a new TikTok channel for female sports fans. Importantly, this is NOT a women’s sport account; it’s sports content through a female lens.” – which was done inappropriately and wrong. The posts include pink writing, hearts and comments about female based trends such as ‘matcha and hot girl walks’ – typically nothing to do with the sports world.
The account put out a statement on TikTok apologising for their posts which states “We’ve listened. We didn’t get it right.” and “We’re learning and remain committed as ever to creating spaces where fans feel included and inspired.”
Many people found the “little sister” account, which spoke and “match and hot girl walks”, patronising and demoralising to women in sport. One of their posts included a video of Erling Haaland scoring against Bournemouth, with the caption “How the matcha + hot girl walks hit” in pink glowing writing. Female sports journalism students from the University of Salford shared their views.
Izzy, 18, said, “I just laughed out loud when I first saw it, it was quite demoralising to women, especially as a woman in sports journalism.”
Abby, claimed, “I thought it was really degrading, obviously we’ve fought for 50 years to bring women’s sports back, so to have to login in to TikTok and see that (Sky Sports Halo) it was really irritating and all our hard work has been pushed back.”
Angel, 18, said, “When I first saw it I didn’t think it was the actually Sky Sports account, I thought it was a parody account. I thought why’ve they done this, it wasn’t needed.” – “They should’ve done more about the successes in women’s sport and not what they ‘think’ women want to see.”
Overall, the whole page has received negative feedback from multiple audiences, with people making parodies of their TikToks and people criticising the page. The account was aimed women but most of their posts included men and things around men.