The idea had been in the works for several months and Sky Sports considered it so significant to their corporate mission that at least two staff were seconded to it full-time; one of them from Sky Sports News.

And though few beyond that small group seem to have had any handle on what the output would be, there was a frisson of excitement in the higher echelons of the broadcaster’s ‘Sky Central’ base in west London last week, about the new ‘Sky Sports Halo’ TikTok channel.

The entire Sky business was encouraged to get behind the new platform. A cheery global internal email to all staff, introducing them to it soon before last Thursday’s launch, told them it was ‘a channel for female fans of all sports'. The England netball team’s match against New Zealand on Sunday was to be the first live action on which ‘Halo’ would provide a running ‘take’.

Before that could even happen, the channel was suddenly pulled at 9pm on Saturday night, after three days of ridicule and derision for excruciating output, littered with pink hearts, which referenced ‘hot girl walks’, ‘matcha’, Barbies, and Labubu collectible cuddly toys. Five of the first batch of posts from a channel supposedly aimed at women featured male sports stars.

The damaging episode, which raises the question of why a women’s sports audience required a dedicated TikTok channel in the first place, left senior Sky executives Mark Alford, the 45-year-old Sky Sports News director, and Andy Gill, their head of social media and audience, with some explaining to do on Monday. 

Meetings with staff to discuss the Halo fiasco became ‘heated’, according to one source, as angered employees demanded to know how content got through. Female members of Sky staff, who have worked hard to establish the broadcaster’s credibility for women’s sport, are believed to have been particularly upset by a fiasco which damages that credibility.

Alford – or, ‘Alfie’ as he has always encouraged staff to call him - seems to have felt the reputational damage, given that he has now deleted his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

But Gill is the executive with the direct oversight on a project which he claimed ownership of when telling his LinkedIn community last week: ‘I couldn't be prouder and more excited about this launch. Proud, because this has been driven by the women in our team and embraced and supported by ALL across the business.’

The women in Sky Sports’ production teams appear to have ‘embraced’ it in only the loosest sense, given that the project was beyond their own output. The project attempted to tap into a different type of perceived ‘girl’ culture, rather than that of what Sky Sports calls the ‘superfan’. The deeply flawed assumption being that dedicated fans of women’s sport would not view it at all.

The broadcaster’s head of women’s sport Jo Osborne, a former executive producer on the network, is not thought to have been behind the idea. But she, like other sports staffers, has found herself blamed for it online.

Experienced Sky journalists would have had something to say had they seen the output being planned for what Gill described as ‘sports content through a female lens’ in his jargon-filled introductory post. Gill, who returned to Sky two years ago after 18 months at Facebook, said he wanted ‘content types which wouldn't pop up on my FYP’ – which less digitally aware Sky staff discovered meant his ‘For You Page’, the landing screen which has replaced 'Following' as the default feed users see.

The description of Halo in an introductory post as the 'lil sis' of Sky Sports carried the immediately patronising sense that this female audience was somehow less informed than those of the established Sky channels. But it was the infantilising of the target audience with clips which drew the backlash.

For tennis, there was a 'Sincaraz core' post, following the 'bromance of the century' between tennis stars Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. Barbie doll figures of professional women's sports stars did not go down well. A clip of an Erling Haaland goal carried the pink caption, ‘How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits’, unfathomable even to the Gen A demographic (born after 2010) which was a key part of Halo’s target audience.

For the uninitiated, a ‘hot girl walk’ is a trend to describe women walking 10,000 steps while meditating and ‘matcha’ is a powdered green tea popular on Instagram. The relevance to Haaland running onto Rayan Cherki’s through-ball to score against Bournemouth is unclear, but the inference from this content and more was that women can only understand sport if it’s memeable.

What has infuriated some Sky staffers most was that their film-making teams’ superb record of creativity and innovation created a ready-made intellectual core to tackle a project targeting new viewers.

‘There was no need for this madness,' says one. 'We know what this stuff ought to have looked like. People see this and associate it with us.'

The business logic behind Halo was that the predominantly young audience who follow Sky Sports on TikTok – currently 4.5million on the main account, 2.6million for their football channel and 811,000 for boxing – may ultimately subscribe to their broadcast channels, though the network has driven more revenue by providing clips which the social network uses to attract advertising.

Sky say they were also seeking to create a channel for female fans which would not attract the foul, misogynistic reactions that make posting about sport such a negative experience for them. Many female fans and journalists can attest to what a deeply unpleasant experience it can be.

Alford was involved in a drive to tackle this five years ago, after the launch of Sky Sports’ Women’s Football Show during lockdown saw the bigoted abuse of some guests. Female staff within Sky Sports saw value in this aim for Halo. It is not thought that the concept was derided or considered ill-advised by women within Sky HQ. Many younger female members of staff were among those consulted internally on the strategy.

Any initiative aimed at bringing new people to sport and making them feel more immune from hate is welcome. But Sky, who broadcast over 70 per cent of all televised women’s sport in the UK, were so sure of themselves that they didn’t even bother testing the new channel on a focus group before going public. Industry professionals are astonished by that.

Instead, it was the testing ground of X which told them all they needed to know. GirlsOnTheBall, the respected women’s football platform, voiced immediate frustration with the output. 'The branding (one day can we please be past the pink/peach stage?!), the premise, the copy...’

Another social media response read: ‘So condescending. Creating a dumbed-down sports channel for women is unbelievably sexist. Incredible that it was approved.'

And another: 'Truly a slap in the face of every effort in the last 50 years to get women in sports - whether participant or spectator - taken seriously and treated with respect. Criminally tone deaf.'

By Friday, when it became clear that Halo had not landed in the way Gill and Alford, who has ultimate oversight, had anticipated, crisis talks took place to address the fire that Sky Sports were taking. The view was that it would blow over and that the site should not be pulled.

Alford was bullish – responding to at least one critic on social media that a female team had been involved in the content creation.

When one respondent on the Halo site stated, ‘I can’t believe you think this is what female sports fans like’, the official Halo account offered an extraordinary, tone deaf reply: ‘I can’t believe you brought that energy.’

But as the pink-filled fluffy content kept coming, it provoked imitators with too much time on their hands, who produced fake Halo clips.

One had Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc talking about his engagement to his fiancee. Another entitled ‘Explaining 2008 Crashgate in girl terms’ was a reference to the F1 scandal when Renault’s Nelson Piquet Jr deliberately crashed at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help his team-mate Fernando Alonso win the race.

In subsequent reporting, Sky carried the can for these memes, too. By Saturday night, it was clear that the entire exercise had been a disaster and it was pulled.

The project was one of ‘good intention and execution’ a Sky source said on Monday. ‘We hold our hands up. We didn’t get it right. The importance we put on women’s sport is unrivalled and our search for a new audience of people at the start of their sport journey is consistent with that.’

It is not thought that executive heads will roll for what the Halo social media team - presumably delivering what they thought their superiors wanted - will have found a bruising experience.

But the Sky journalists and producers who have spent years fighting for the credibility of women’s sport must steel themselves for mockery. ‘It will take some living down,’ says one we have spoken to.

Gill’s introductory LinkedIn post for Halo is still visible, along with more than more 30 well-reasoned and disbelieving responses to it.

‘Cannot believe there weren’t any focus groups or user testing before this got launched into the wild,’ one tells him. ‘It shouldn't have got past a Post-It note, as an idea.’