Sky Sports Needs To Cover Women’s Game and Not Just Talk About It

Date: 24th October 2022

This past weekend was a Scottish Women’s Premier League Cup weekend or to give it its proper current title – The Sky Sports Cup. 

Yet the sponsor didn’t actually choose to broadcast any of this round’s fixtures live. That meant that they actually missed the mighty Spartans team courageously knocking out current cup holders Celtic in the shock of the round. 

Now obviously the Women’s game will be happy to have that wee bit extra in the bank that the recent Scottish football TV deal with Sky has brought including the sponsorship of the league cup competition but receiving more  coverage is just as important in terms of progression as more funds. 

Look how Sky Sports covers the equivalent game down south, the English women’s Super League games coverage is on par if not better than what we get in Scotland for the men’s Premiership coverage. Surely it’s not strange to ask for better when it comes to covering women’s football up here too? 

Your name is on the cup and you have multiple channels in which you could put a tie on, yet you stop your coverage at a tweet or two or a round up on your website or on your news channel. It’s extremely bizarre and just tokenism if I’m being honest.

In Scotland, the Scottish people don’t pay less in their subscription fees yet the investment back by SKY in any sort of field is always considerably less than our counterparts down south.

Sky can’t even guarantee showing ten Scottish women’s games, whether it be league or cup competitions, per season. They have that as an option but will only commit to half of those. That’s quite frankly ridiculous. We can’t expect to see growth in the game if one of our main broadcasting  partners can’t be bothered to shine a light on the up and coming product and help it out by giving it the exposure it really needs. 

To be called the Sky Sports Cup and to have a round with zero fixtures actually on Sky Sports is a disservice to all those in the women’s game in Scotland who are working their socks off to grow the sport.

They definitely deserve better! 

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