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Sky Sports patronises female fans with sexist new TikTok channel

Sky Sports has launched a new TikTok channel, and less than 24 hours later, thousands of female sports fans are mad.

Sky Sports

Firstly, what makes Sky Sports think that ‘female sports fans’ want to watch videos of male athletes?

At the time of writing, the account had posted 12 videos, six of which featured predominantly male athletes or politicians.

@skysportshalo the ultimate combo 🍵 #haaland #footballtiktok #matcha ♬ original sound – Cierra | The Perfume Geek

And secondly, they must think women can only relate to sports when the caption is “How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits”

And some of the comments ate:

Actually, no wait, can someone explain to me what a grand slam is as the caption is no longer written in pink , so I’m confused 🤔

 

I don’t understand?? 😭😭😭 can you explain it in Dubai labubu chocolate terms for the girls please 🎀💗

 

wow i love how women catered this is! how insightful! what a way to amplify female voices and perspectives!

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting. How can we encourage more women to engage with sports content on social media? Of course, make the captions pink.

Not only is it sexist as fuck, but the language and tone are patronising.

And the page’s main presumption seems to be that women are not intelligent enough to understand sports in the same way as men.

I would have put a large amount of money on a middle-aged white man being behind the account.

However, She Kicks reported that Jo Osborne – head of Women’s Sport for Sky Sports, is in fact the woman behind it, alongside Andy Gill, audience development and social media head.

And I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.

Social media stars

Female athletes are already dominating social media. In the Women’s Super League (WSL), 35% of total social media engagements came from players’ personal accounts. In comparison, in the Premier League, that number is only 27%.

And of the world’s 50 most marketable athletes, female athletes accounted for 61% of all TikTok views.

Yet, in 2022, only 13% of sports coverage hours across the main sports channels (BBC One, BBC Two, Sky Sports Main Event, Channel 4, and ITV) were dedicated to women’s sport. Although this was an increase from 10% in 2021 – it is still pathetic.

In the same year, 8.4m people watched live WSL football. None of those people watched any Premier League games.

Additionally, 1.3 m only watched women’s matches at the Rugby League World Cup.

This shows the appetite for women’s sports is there. Yet still, the major sports channels only allocated 13% of their airtime to women’s sports.

A better way

Of course, women want to be included and have access to a variety of sports content. But is a shitty TikTok channel with pink text really the way?

Instead, Sky Sports could increase the amount of time they spend broadcasting women’s sports, along with the variety of sports they are showing. Additionally, if they had actually engaged with female fans or potential fans before launching the channel, they might have realised it was a bad idea.

Of course, Sky Sports’ commercial interests will always come first. However, they could play the long game. England winning the Women’s Euros back-to-back has shown us that when you increase the visibility of women’s sports, people start to take a greater interest.

Feature image via HG

By HG

This post was originally published on Canary.