How Halo misjudges sport fans

Sky Sports has released its new Tiktok channel aimed at women who are sports fans. Called Halo, the backlash on X was immediate. “All they’ve done is talk about matcha, hot-girl walks and WAGs,” says an X user - and despite this being a rather incongruous statement, it’s a pretty good summary of the type of content on there.

Who is it trying to address?

The channel is aimed at women who follow sports at large.

One of Sky Sports' studies shares that 59% of the UK's women’s sports fans say they are committed to at least one women’s sport, but many also follow men’s sport.

EY’s Sports Engagement Index shares that 66% of women aged 18–24 actively engage with sport (watching, playing, following) - and that's growing across sports. For example, women make up 39% of the running engagement base, 36% in cycling, and 44 - 46% in racket sports like tennis and badminton.

So, women follow multiple sports - both men’s and women’s - which in principle makes a multi-sport Tiktok channel like Halo a reasonable idea.

How Halo gets it wrong

The problem is in the execution. The channel mixes male and female sports personalities. That’s obviously fine on paper, but, while the launch says that Halo will be “championing female athletes”, many of its first posts centre around male athletes.

With the tone it’s taken, it also ends up being neither a serious women’s sport channel nor a channel centred on strong female role models. It leans into a fluffy, Tiktok-friendly sports-lite vibe, as if women can’t cope with the reality of sports.

The Barclays Women’s Super League Tiktok proves that fans respond to dedicated content: 56m Tiktok views in early 2025, with a mix of match highlights, game clips, and some player moments. Sure, there are memes. But good sports content blends variety with substance.

The Halo launch post felt like a downgrade of women’s fandom. Grouping everyone into a “Lil sis of Sky Sports” category, as their launch post implied, is patronising - especially when it’s promoting the same sports as on the main channel but a “dumbed down” version of it.

Misjudging the fans

Even if Halo was intended to target casual or younger fans, it still feels like a misjudgment.

The female supporters I know, for example, are far from casual: they tend to follow a single sport in depth, and that sport - football - can make or break their weekend.

At the recent match vs Chelsea, the atmosphere was epic. The noise from the 50,000 fans was overwhelming at times (Loop earbuds for the win), and they booed the referees off the pitch after a series of errors that led to a legitimate goal being disallowed.

Whether you agree with the booing or not, the point is that people - women - care, passionately. And, in the football space, this new channel accentuates the narrative around infantilising the women’s game. Worse, it reflects how misogynists online perceive women.

Halo feels generic, surface-level, and detached from the culture of any of the specific sports it’s supposedly celebrating. It almost feels satirical.

The likes to quote ratio show the level of outrage (one positive take: it’s doing quite a lot to unite fans across rivalries, demographics, sports, etc…).

The follower count for the channel as I click publish has barely hit 1.5k 24 hours in, which appears to reflect the generally negative view of those that the account was meant to be targeting.

From my experience, women want content that respects the sports they follow and respects them. Halo does the opposite. It generalises and dilutes. From where I'm sat, the channel fundamentally misunderstands that fan audience altogether.