How Halo misjudged sport fans

Sky Sports released its new Tiktok channel aimed at women who are sports fans in November 2025. 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.

Some evidence: one clip showed Manchester City men's player Rayan Cherki setting Erling Haaland up for a goal. The caption read: “How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits”. Other videos were of a similar vein.

Within three days, the channel was unceremoniously downgraded to simply featuring a statement from Sky: "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 as committed as ever to creating spaces where fans feel included and inspired."

Who was it trying to address?

The channel was 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 got it wrong

The problem is in the execution. The channel mixed male and female sports personalities. That’s fine as a concept but, while the launch says that Halo was aimed at “championing female athletes”, many of its first posts centred around male athletes.

With the tone it took, it also ended 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: it had 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 shared, is patronising - especially when 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 - normally football - can make or break their weekend.

At the recent match, Arsenal Women vs. Chelsea, the atmosphere was electric. 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 accentuated the narrative around infantilising the women’s game. Worse, it reflects how misogynists online perceive women.

Halo felt 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 did quite a lot to unite fans across rivalries, demographics, sports, etc…).

The follower count for the channel when I initially published this article (updated since it went off air!) had barely hit 1.5k 24 hours in, reflecting the generally negative view of those that the account was meant to be targeting.

From my experience, women want content that respects them and the sports they follow. Halo did the opposite. It generalised and diluted. From where I'm sat, the channel fundamentally misunderstood that fan audience altogether.