Female sports fans can’t catch a break - again
A tired fan’s response to Sky Sports and The Financial Times - words by Niamh Beattie.
Within the past two months, female sports fans have been under the spotlight yet again, thanks to two mainstream media names, and we are so incredibly tired of having to defend our place in the world of sports fandom.
At the beginning of October, an article was published in The Financial Times detailing female involvement in the British ice hockey community and its link to the increasingly popular sports romance novel genre - specifically stories focused on ice hockey, such as Icebreaker by Hannah Grace. The article, which I will discuss in more detail later in this piece, garnered exasperated reactions from female fans online protesting the harmful assumptions it suggested. The article even received a comment from the Elite Ice Hockey League on X coming to the defence of their devoted fanbase.
In a similar vein of exhausting audacity, earlier in November, Sky Sports premiered a new social media channel on TikTok: ‘Halo’, a new page designed specifically for the ‘girlies’ littered with pink text, matcha and ‘hot girl walks’. It lasted all of three days before being taken down. However, not before it received a monumental tirade of furious fans who felt it infantilised and excluded them from the main sports fan community.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the majority of mainstream sport is dominated by male players, drivers or athletes; we literally have no choice but to become fans of these men as a result of this. We don’t often have another option except for those sports which have begun to highlight their female-led counterpart, except that these series don’t get nearly enough coverage in comparison. That’s a topic for another day. However, the notion that women and those who identify as female are only fans based on a physical attraction to the male athletes is consistently spouted by misogynists in the sports fanbase.
So how does this relate to the Financial Times article? Writer Kitty Drake ultimately owed ice hockey’s rise in Britain to a trend populated by a portion of women who so happened to read and enjoy romance novels surrounding ice hockey players. In fact, the original title of the article, ‘How romance readers found British ice hockey’ featured the word ‘rescued’ in the place of ‘found’, a suggestion that the fanship and effort of female fans for years within the British ice hockey scene have contributed nothing towards its success.
The language used within the article bordered on a level of discomfort that made me wince as I was reading. Drake, while attending a game, uses the words ‘gaggle’ to describe the women she was surrounded by in the rink, and that they ‘scream’ and make ‘strange’ sounds for the players. These terms echo too closely to the negative and recycled opinions I have heard over the years about female fans, continuously harking back to the age of ‘Beatlemania’; a misogynistic link which lacks any nuance about how modern women engage in fandom.
Drake makes it seem like ice hockey’s female fans’ enjoyment in the sport depends wholly on the fantasy aspect they can create in their heads based on the novels they read, commenting that if they didn’t, they would “just be watching a bunch of masked men chase a target through an empty space”. She dedicates a large portion of the article to focusing on this notion, and even goes so far as discussing an actual player she meets in this fantastical sense. Nottingham Panthers’ Mitch Fossier is devalued to a character in the piece rather than an actual human, and Drake describes him in the context of romance genre tropes such as ‘cinnamon roll’ and ‘puppy-dog energy’.
Thus, in writing this article, Drake achieves both dismissing female fans by suggesting they have little stake in the sport other than their daydreams about the players, and managing to frame the actual players as fictional objects of women’s fascinations. It’s disappointing to see female writers fail to support other women in areas where they face such high levels of backlash.
The dismissal of female voices in sports was similarly reflected in Sky Sports’ ‘Halo’ channel on TikTok. Doused in pretty pink aesthetics and referencing viral social media trends, the account attempted to become a space specifically for female fans, with Sky Sports (before its release) describing it as the “lil sis” to the main channel, praising it as an “inclusive, dedicated platform for women to enjoy and explore content from all sports, while amplifying female voices and perspectives”. The minimal content posted on the channel before its shutdown featured mainly male athletes, as well as a video including the ‘ship name’ of two tennis players. Within three days, the channel was axed, and the backlash came in hordes.
Where to begin on this one? The idea of a content channel specifically for female fans is not inherently wrong, as it shows that the female viewership of sports in 2025 is significant enough to warrant a public community platform for the discussion of female voices. On the other hand, one questions why efforts cannot be made on the official Sky Sports page to amplify, integrate and support the involvement of female fans. The notion that we must have our own space rather than being integrated with everyone else leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The approach to the channel was so unbelievably tone-deaf that I’m surprised it passed through any of the meetings about its release. Firstly, the ‘little sister’ notion immediately demotes female fans to being separate and lesser than our male counterparts, requiring content that is dumbed down for our benefit. The pink sparkly font... the reference to popular trends such as matcha and ‘hot girl walks’... It’s almost as if we women cannot understand something unless it is phrased and styled in a way that will key into the ‘female brain’, aka stereotypes and ancient assumptions. The whole saga felt incredibly patronising.
What we deserved from this channel was authenticity. It should have featured women’s sports more heavily, especially given its growing popularity. This is not to say that girls can only be fans of women’s teams; however, the content about men’s teams gave in to sexist tropes similar to those highlighted in Drake’s article: specifically, that female fans view male sports teams and players from a fictional viewpoint so that they can engage in their fantasies. The account should have strayed away from these harmful perspectives and stuck to the same type of content featured on their main channel, with a long-overdue focus on women’s roles in the industry. Thankfully, ‘Halo’ got nipped in the bud before it did more harm than good in representing female sports fans.
Although unintended, both of these cases present opinions about female sports fans that aren’t unique. Even in 2025, we still have to battle with the stereotypes that surround our motivations and intentions for getting involved in sports fandom. From a personal perspective, as a passionate Formula One fan, experiencing the seemingly never-ending drivel spouted by male internet users based on Netflix’s Drive to Survive docuseries knocks years off my life. They refuse to shake their opinion that we’re in it for the pretty boys, drama and expensive fashion looks, and as a result, we don’t care about the performance of the cars or technical specifications. Because obviously, all women are attracted to men, and no woman in the world is smart enough to grasp a concept such as aerodynamics. It’s a shame that this example can be applied to nearly every popular sport, and that mainstream news platforms such as The Financial Times and Sky Sports are adding fuel to the fire.
Ultimately, I put a lot of my faith and hope in the hard work of female sports content creators and influencers, as well as female presenters and sports writers who work to amplify our rightful places in the world of sports. We’re here to stay, and we should be taken just as seriously as everyone else.
Find Niamh on:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/fortunatelyfixated?igsh=M2R2cXVmamsycnA1
Thanks for reading.
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