There are two issues at play here: the demand for more platforms for women’s sports, and the treatment of female fans in wider sporting culture. It’s worth noting why a separate space might feel necessary: a 2022 study found that more than two-thirds of male football fans held hostile, sexist or misogynistic attitudes towards women’s sport. But the content Halo seemed to be putting out suggested it was using a female lens to understand the men’s game.

Perhaps Sky could’ve reached out to a number of the many successful sports content creators that exist: Tiannah Pedler, Charlotte Northover, Rhyanna Parara, Nieve Petruzziello AKA Stuntpegg – to consult or even lead on their content. Sky Sports – who are, to their credit, the biggest investors in women’s sports in the UK and Ireland – has already worked with many of these on their coverage, so they wouldn’t need to look far.

Some predicted that Halo’s misfire was the fault of an older, male team, but Director of Sky Sports News Mark Allford responded to criticism by explaining that a “young (100% female) project team” were behind Halo, with the goal of “engag[ing] as many new sports fans as possible.”

And in a way, I can see what they were aiming for. There’s a style of deliberately unserious, self-deprecating content that brands such as Ryanair have leaned into, building huge audiences by winking at their own absurdity. Halo was presumably mapped out with a Gen Z, very online audience in mind, whose humour is more ironic and referential than previous generations – and my guess is they wanted to transmit this kind of meme fluency, a play on the all-pink era of female branding. But they misread the room in terms of how female fans feel sidelined within the world of sport.

Sky Sports isn’t just any old brand, it’s the biggest media platform in British sport. What it publishes shapes culture and signals who it thinks sport is for. The infantilisation of women has been creeping back into mainstream culture, reclaimed by women with trends such as ‘I’m just a girl’, ‘girl math’, but there’s a harmful side to this, as we’ve seen the far right weaponise it to attack trans people and immigrants.

And Halo, unfortunately, isn’t the only recent example of female sports fans feeling misrepresented. Last month a Financial Times article attempted to draw a parallel between the popularity of viral romance novel Icebreaker and increased female attendance at hockey matches. Instead, genuine hockey fans voiced their annoyance, saying they felt their interest had been reduced to “finding the men hot”. In a recent post celebrating three women entering their F1 Academy programme, McLaren used an outdated term by captioning the picture: “Committed to supporting the next generation of females in motorsport.”

If Halo wants to earn its audience’s trust, it needs to treat women not as a marketing niche, and definitely not a “little sister”, but as what they already are: knowledgeable, passionate fans who don’t need their sport served with pink bows.