Culture, Media and Sport Committee
Oral evidence: Women's sport, HC 177
Tuesday 21 November 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 November 2023.
Members present: Dame Caroline Dinenage (Chair); Kevin Brennan; Clive Efford; Julie Elliott; Dr Rupa Huq; John Nicolson; Jane Stevenson; Giles Watling.
Questions 150-230
Witnesses
I: Jonathan Licht, Managing Director of Sky Sports; Barbara Slater, Director of Sport, BBC; and Niall Sloane, Director of Sport, ITV.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Jonathan Licht, Barbara Slater and Niall Sloane.
Q150 Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. We are continuing our work on women’s sport, with this session focused on broadcasting. Joining us are Barbara Slater, the director of sport at the BBC; Niall Sloane, who is the director of sport for ITV; and Jonathan Licht, who is Sky Sports’ managing director. You are all very welcome.
I remind Members to declare any interests when you ask your questions. I will kick us off. This question is to all of you, and you can fight it out amongst yourselves who goes first. To what extent do you agree that making women’s sport more visible is the key to growth naturally following?
Barbara Slater: It is essential. At the moment in the UK, we see a fantastic momentum behind women’s sport, and a lot of that is driven by visibility. But, from the outset, I want to say that that momentum is a result of many different stakeholders coming together and creating a collective environment, if you like, that has seen women’s sport really move centre stage.
Visibility is key, but a lot has to go on to make sure that, when that moment happens, it is really impactful and effective. I am sure that Jonathan and Niall have numerous examples, but we did some research for one of the Women’s World Cup football events that we covered. Twelve million people watched that event, and we canvassed the audience: 48% had never watched a women’s football match before. What is really essential in delivering that visibility, therefore, is the quality of that event as well, to make sure that those moments can deliver maximum impact.
Niall Sloane: I agree with Barbara. It is very important for sport in the UK and very important for the broadcasters to have that base. Given our commercial model, certain international football and international rugby events have been important for us in terms of how we allocate funds to slots in the ITV system.
Echoing what Barbara said, I was slightly surprised that in both the international rugby and in the football, the audience skewed 60:40. That was a slight surprise to me; I thought there would be more women coming to it. This is a long road. We have started from a base, probably in the last five years, and we are getting there slowly but surely. The story is a good one in the UK, through my two colleagues’ organisations, but there is still much more to be done.
Jonathan Licht: I do not have much more to add. Visibility is obviously important in and of itself for the showcase and to demonstrate our commitment to women’s sport, but visibility also has the wider benefit of bringing other commercial partners to the table—sponsors and advertisers—and that kind of thing. That whole cycle comes from the increased visibility from the broadcasters.
Q151 Chair: Jonathan, do you think that the clubs in the sports themselves are doing enough, or is there too much reliance on broadcasters to drive that growth?
Jonathan Licht: That is a good question. It is a good start. A key thing, because of where we are in the cycle and in the investment cycle, is partnership. That involves everyone: the rights holders, the broadcasters, the clubs and the players. There is still a uniqueness to the opportunity, and I think we look to the clubs and the leagues to step into that partnership, probably more than we would see in other sports that are further down the line. Whether they are doing enough is probably quite difficult to say. Could they do more? We would certainly make ourselves available for that. That partnership, and working with the clubs and players, is a really big part of our commitment, so we only encourage more of that.
Niall Sloane: Some federations get television, but they are in the minority. When you do a deal, you settle on the financial terms and the coverage, and then there is not a lot of dialogue for the next three or four years. That is the bit that is missing. Some sports are good and some are okay, but quite a few of them don’t really engage. It has astounded me, in all my time doing the job, that they don’t engage more with the power of broadcasters to get messages out there. So there is an improvement there that could help and, as Jonathan alluded to, sponsors could play a role in that as well; there is not a lot of engagement between the broadcasters and the sponsors.
Q152 Chair: Are there any particular sports that you would draw attention to? I do not want to put you on the spot, but that is my job.
Niall Sloane: I would not like to name them, but they are some of the bigger ones, shall we say.
Q153 Chair: Okay, that is very helpful.
Barbara, women’s sport is expected to be worth about £1 billion a year by 2030. That is phenomenal growth. What do you see as your role, as broadcasters, in helping to deliver on that?
Barbara Slater: We talked about visibility, and I think it is about providing those moments. Over recent years, we have seen the extraordinary impact that women’s sport can make. In a way, as you say, that drives commercial value in the longer run. What is really important to note, though, is that a degree of establishment is needed. If you look at the Women’s Euros, which is just such a fantastic example, it was an event that the nation got behind. It moved from being what you might call a specialist interest into the mainstream. That is where that commercial value rests, but it has got to get into the mainstream first, and that is why that exposure—that high profile—and the impact that that was able to make was fantastic. That is our mission; the BBC’s mission is to bring these events to the widest possible audience, and I think that that was just a brilliant case of that happening. If you had said at the start of the year that the most-watched moment of TV that year was going to be a women’s event, I think that people would have said, “That’s not possible.” Then, of course, we pretty much saw a replication of that—there were maybe not quite the same numbers, given the time difference—with the Women’s World Cup coming from Australia.
Similarly, I think that, somehow, there is a perception that women’s sport is maybe second best. When women’s sport is at its best, it is absolutely up there on a par. We can see that: 17 million people aren’t wrong, are they? That was the peak audience for the Women’s Euros. I think it is about capitalising on those moments. The Women’s Sport Trust have done some research, which says that 27 million people say that they are interested in sport; that is eight million more than in 2021, which is phenomenal growth. You would probably both agree with me that, looking across the spectrum of sport—men’s and women’s—and seeing something on that upward trajectory, when audiences are often in decline, is truly exceptional.
Niall Sloane: We have to be slightly careful, because, over the last 30 years, with the inception of the premier league, football has occupied a different universe. The figures for women’s football will be much higher than for any other sport, because it is the national game. I think that the real trick is not so much about working around football—it will always get big numbers—but how we get other sports up close to that level, for them to expand their reach.
Barbara Slater: Building on what you are saying, it is worth saying that the biggest gap that we have had between men’s and women’s sports has been in the traditional team sports. Actually, we have a whole Olympic family of sports, where, in fact, we have enjoyed much more gender equality. If you think of the Olympics, we didn’t cheer Mo Farah more than we cheered Jess Ennis in 2012, and we can probably go back in time like that.
It is interesting. We should not lose sight of the fact that we have had extraordinary audiences for women’s sport, but those have often been under the umbrella of Wimbledon, the Olympics etc. What has felt particularly out of kilter is the traditional team sports, where there has been a lag between the perception of women’s sports as compared with the men’s.
Jonathan Licht: Four women’s sports have had record audiences in the last 12 months. Just this weekend, we had a record audience for our WSL coverage for the Manchester derby. The Solheim Cup was a record for women’s golf in September. With the Ashes, we kept on getting records in all formats of the game, from the tests to the ODIs to the T20s—they all registered record audiences. Going back almost exactly a year, we had an all-female boxing fight night, which was a record, with well over 1 million. That is very strong for us—for pay TV—for boxing. We have seen across a number of sports record audiences and growth over the last 12 months.
Chair: A perfect segue into Kevin Brennan’s question.
Q154 Kevin Brennan: Thank you, Chair. Despite the increase in interest, women’s sport accounts for about one seventh of the total hours dedicated to sports coverage. What plans do you have to increase your coverage?
Barbara Slater: What was that figure?
Kevin Brennan: One seventh of the total hours dedicated to sports coverage goes on women’s sport, according to my briefing. If you maintain that that is wrong—
Barbara Slater: I might dispute that number.
Kevin Brennan: Please do, Barbara.
Barbara Slater: To be fair, it was a couple of years ago, but we really did a forensic look.
Kevin Brennan: What was the figure?
Barbara Slater: We were over 30%.
Kevin Brennan: On the BBC?
Barbara Slater: On the BBC.
Q155 Kevin Brennan: I think this is probably a universal, broader statistic.
Barbara Slater: Yes, maybe. I am pretty confident—although we did not do that detailed analysis of this summer—given the place of the Women’s World Cup and the dominance of that. I would also say that if you took our week in, week out sports news coverage over a period of time—we should not forget the importance of that—I would again genuinely dispute that number.
Q156 Kevin Brennan: What plans do you have to increase the coverage? Are there any plans to increase it?
Barbara Slater: It very much depends on the mix of events. What I would say is that we would now view those major women’s events, particularly women’s football, as being as critical as anything that we do. We will not ever be able to afford everything at the BBC, given our constraints on funding, but what I would say—
Q157 Kevin Brennan: Do you think there should be any sort of targets for the amount of women’s sport that is covered as a percentage of the total?
Barbara Slater: When something is developing and evolving, there can be arguments for targets until maybe a threshold is reached. What we have always tried to do is make these on-merit decisions. I would argue now that, if you were looking at a priority list of events, women’s sport would absolutely be up there and part and parcel of that.
Kevin Brennan: Niall and Jonathan, can I ask you both the same question briefly?
Jonathan Licht: I probably would not recognise that exact number, but I would not claim it was 50:50 at the moment. I think it would probably be somewhere between 20% and 25%. While we are sat in here over the next hour, we will broadcast 11 hours of sport on Sky Sports, so there is a volume to everything we do. For us, for the moment, most important is the impact of what we are doing and having the high level of quality coverage. That is where you are going to encourage most growth from interest in women’s sport.
I am not sure it is sustainable at the moment, given the volume of hours we are covering, that we could be at that equity level. We are absolutely on a growth trajectory, so I imagine that any time we get called back into this room, we will only see those numbers tracking up. That is just part of our plans to increase the coverage.
Kevin Brennan: Niall, are you broadly assenting to those answers from the other two, or do you have anything different to add?
Niall Sloane: At ITV, every slot at the moment, with the economic headwinds, has to be looked at. It would be very difficult for us to find a level of percentages. It is something that we want to do. With the advent of ITVX, which launched a year ago, we have an easier platform, rather than a pure linear delivery from the main channel and ITV4. ITVX can be a playground and an opportunity, and that is something we are looking to develop next year.
Q158 Kevin Brennan: I understand that the recent England versus Canada women’s rugby international was offered to both the BBC and ITV at no cost and ended up not being able to find a broadcaster. We are talking about economic headwinds and so on. Why did that not work out?
Niall Sloane: Which competition was that? Was it a friendly?
Kevin Brennan: It was not a World Cup game, I don’t think.
Barbara Slater: I think it was a friendly, Niall.
Kevin Brennan: It was a one-off match. Do you have any knowledge of that?
Niall Sloane: I would need to check back.
Barbara Slater: I am aware. Often, there are many different decisions, and even if something is offered at no cost, there actually is a cost. There is often quite a lot of infrastructure that you require. You take a raw feed maybe at no cost, but it has to be added to. There can be scheduling issues. We are generally reluctant to have events competing against each other, because they cannibalise. While I don’t know the specifics, there are a number of reasons why we would choose to do something and not do something else.
Q159 Kevin Brennan: If you could write to us later, the Committee would be interested in the mechanics of why that was not possible.
Barbara Slater: Yes—on the exact why. I would say, though, that we do have a big commitment to women’s rugby and the Six Nations, and we have been really encouraged by the way the numbers for the Six Nations have grown. It is an interesting example of an event that initially was running alongside the men’s and was maybe not shining as brightly. Crowds would not stay, and as a TV spectacle it maybe was not strong enough. Now we are seeing it in its own window.
Q160 Kevin Brennan: How important is it that competitions are competitive for them to continue to grow? The English premiership rugby—the women’s is now being covered—introduced a rule recently that means the vast majority of the players have to be England qualified to play in the league, which means you have a couple of players you can choose who are non-England qualified. In that league, which is probably the best professional women’s rugby league in the world, they will be picking international players, so Wales, Scotland and Ireland are not going to get a look in, and the Six Nations will therefore be less competitive than they could be if those players were in the world’s top women’s professional league. Do you agree with that?
Barbara Slater: The Women’s Six Nations is an interesting example. You are absolutely right. We have had some very extreme scorelines because we have had amateurs and professionals, so you have got domination, probably by England and France, in the Six Nations tournament—disproportionately so. But what has been really interesting is this fundamental outlook that, just because it is women, women’s rugby has to be second class. We have actually seen a significant increase in audiences coming to the Women’s Six Nations, even though we might not have the jeopardy that you would want in the matches. It is a good example of how there is a sort of snowball around women’s sport, and there are some changing perceptions out there that—
Q161 Kevin Brennan: I agree, Barbara, and it is great—I went along to some of the games myself—but the point I am making is that, if the sport does not help itself, and introduces rules that mean that the jeopardy will not grow and the other nations cannot develop, they are shooting themselves in the foot if they want to get TV coverage.
Niall Sloane: Did they have that conversation with any of the broadcasters before?
Kevin Brennan: I doubt it very much.
Niall Sloane: That’s a little problem. We do not want to run sports. We would like a little bit of consultation sometimes.
Q162 Kevin Brennan: It was all covered as an issue on BBC Wales’s “Scrum V” at the weekend.
I have a final couple of brief questions. This is slightly off-piste, but I should ask. I have heard that there are real concerns—genuine fears—about the men’s Six Nations and the men’s Rugby World Cup being lost from free-to-air in the future because they are not sufficiently protected. How genuine are those fears? Secondly, in the case of the Rugby World Cup, could ITV and BBC team up as they did on the Six Nations and keep the rights to free-to-air in future?
Barbara Slater: To be clear, we need a well-funded BBC if we are to be able to continue to afford sports rights. It is worth sharing a couple of statistics with you. Sports rights in the UK have more than doubled in the past decade. The BBC’s income in real terms has gone down by 30%. It is incredibly difficult for the BBC to maintain across a range of sports the expectations of those governing bodies. We feel really proud of the events and sports that we have acquired. We have done partnership models—we have had to do partnership models to be able to retain the portfolio that we have. We have some very successful partnership models with ITV and similarly with Sky. If we look at what we are doing with cricket around the Hundred, there are some showcase moments on the BBC, but the bulk of the matches are on Sky. We are not afraid of creative and innovative partnership models to make sure that we are striking a balance. There is free-to-air exposure of key events in the UK.
Q163 Kevin Brennan: To go back to my question, Niall, are there genuine fears that free-to-air could lose both the Six Nations and the Rugby World Cup?
Niall Sloane: I do not think we have ever done a deal where there was not speculation, probably well founded speculation, that it could in part or in whole go to a pay operator—less so with the Rugby World Cup because we have done only two deals in my time at ITV. I think they recognise that if you are going to grow the game, something like the Rugby World Cup should be on free-to-air, but there is no guarantee of that whatsoever.
Jonathan Licht: I think the Rugby World Cup final is listed.
Q164 Kevin Brennan: Is Sky after the Rugby World Cup and the Six Nations?
Niall Sloane: The Six Nations is not listed.
Jonathan Licht: I am not going to talk about commercial strategies, but the evidence is there. The Rugby World Cup has only ever been on free-to-air TV. The Six Nations—I think there was a period, probably going back 20 years, when Sky had England and possibly France home matches, but for the last 20-plus years it has been on free-to-air. But as Niall says, I am sure that every time the rights come to market that story is written, partly to keep everyone excited.
Q165 Kevin Brennan: I have a last very brief one to you, Barbara; I am conscious that I am taking time. You are retiring in the near future, I think.
Barbara Slater: I am.
Kevin Brennan: Congratulations and thank you for the incredible public service that you have given; you are a legend in the broadcasting industry. I am going to ask you a cheeky question. You did get a bit of flack over the whole Gary Lineker thing. Do you think the BBC will keep him beyond his current contract?
Barbara Slater: I am not sure it is fair to ask me to speculate on an individual contract, but I do think that there is a new set of guidelines. Gary knows those guidelines—he understands them and is supportive of them. The relationships between Gary and the BBC are really good and I think he has said that publicly too. In a way, we love Gary and Gary loves the BBC.
Kevin Brennan: I will leave it there, Chair.
Barbara Slater: And I am quoting him, by the way.
Q166 Julie Elliott: Welcome, everybody. You have talked about the success of the Women’s Football World Cup this year—it was hugely successful. But as we know, there were issues around broadcasting rights right up to the last minute, with the FIFA president threatening a broadcast blackout. Why did it take so long? What was so complicated in reaching this deal?
Barbara Slater: Well, Niall, how shall we do this? You go first.
Niall Sloane: We struck a number with FIFA in late October, I think. There had been some comments from FIFA about misogynistic European broadcasters. The BBC and ITV both felt that they had given a very fair offer for those rights. We were a little bit annoyed at the accusation of misogyny, so we talked it out with FIFA and were told a couple of weeks later that we had a deal. That was late October.
The lawyers from both sides of the fence worked for five months to nail the contract down. We were very close to the end of that process when we were told again, “We want more money from the European broadcasters.” We said that we had made a very fair offer and that it was wrong to be accused of misogyny; we were well ahead of the European broadcasters—Spain, Germany, France and Italy. In the end, we got the deal at the same level agreed in October and the four other European broadcasters came up. But it should not have taken that long. It damaged ITV commercially and was handled poorly.
Barbara Slater: One thing we did, in terms of why we determined what we put on the table as our offer, was a metric of cost per viewer hour: we look at what we think the potential audience will be for an event and calculate the audience. We did an exercise based on England getting to a semi final, so what we did was very reasonable.
The percentages put out there were some sort of amalgamation of a number of European broadcasters. Those bore no relationship to that cost per viewer hour percentage. Comparisons were made between the Women’s World Cup and Men’s World Cup and some figures of a tiny percentage were given. I absolutely assure this Committee that those percentages bore no relation to the cost per viewer hour comparison between those two events.
Q167 Julie Elliott: Is unbundling men and women’s sport at these things the right way forward for negotiations?
Barbara Slater: I think it can work both ways. We have had occasions whereby—if you like—a governing body has used the leverage of, maybe men’s rights, to put pressure on the broadcaster as to how it would cover the women’s events. We have got a whole mixture of different examples. There are some occasions when bundling has been successful, and others where stand-alone has been the right approach. Many times, that is down to the individual sport.
I would argue that separating the major football—both men’s and women’s—has been a great success. We are now in a scenario where we have a major football tournament every single summer, which is fantastic. Then you look at tennis, with its history of the grand slams being effectively mixed-gender events. I would argue that has been extremely advantageous to those events, but it has also seen the women’s events shine amongst it.
Jonathan Licht: I agree that there is not a one-size where you would have good examples. The WSL, for instance, used to be sold as part of the FA Cup package. There were rights we were very interested in through partnering with the WSL, but, for a period, we had not been particularly interested in partnering on the men’s FA Cup, and men’s England international football. The unbundling there gave us an opportunity to get involved in those rights, and to make a significant commitment to them.
To take the ECB as an example, we have been partnering with them on women’s cricket for almost 30 years. Because of the way the calendar works, with the Men’s and Women’s Ashes happening at the same time, and the Men’s and Women’s Hundred happening at the same time—the parity of the events—it would have been quite incongruous for them to not be with the same partner. Because you get that benefit from the marketing, the promotion, and having the audiences flow through. Again, a lot of it comes back down to the rights holder really understanding what the broadcaster is looking for, and what is going to give them the best returns.
Niall Sloane: By and large, unbundling is a better way forward, but it is not one size fits all. Individual sports need to be treated differently. Where we sit, we sometimes do not want all of this being offered. Partnerships with other broadcasters—we could have x, they can have y—is probably a better way forward for us.
Q168 Julie Elliott: Do you think, overall, there is enough money behind bidding for the rights to women’s sport now?
Barbara Slater: One thing we can safely say is that those rights have risen exponentially, given the clear audience appeal. If you look at those major women’s football events, those rights fees are in multiples of what they used to be. But I am not saying that has translated to all sports. I would go back to those metrics, where you are looking at an event on a cost per viewer hour. There is an audience return for that. Certainly, from a BBC point of view, we want to be showing things that are going to appeal to as many licence fee players as we can. You do have to balance those assessments.
We are in a very different world now with the resources that are available. Yes, there is network peak time, but there is a whole raft that sits underneath that—including digital content—where we can start to grow events and see if there is an audience. If we spin back the clock a little bit with women’s football, we invested a lot in the streaming of women’s football. As those numbers grew, it was right to start putting that in the mainstream in our network.
It is complicated, but exposure and access remain absolutely key. Maybe we are at a point in time where we should not rush to revenue too much. Reach, at this moment, in some sports, is really critical. I think the governing bodies of sports recognise that.
Q169 Julie Elliott: Does anyone else want to comment?
Jonathan Licht: We are not many TV cycles away from being in 2030, which is where you started talking about women’s sport being a billion-pound industry. There are going to have to be some significant step-ups for that to be realised. To date, I think I am right in saying that the WSL is about a five-year professional league. We would say that we invested ahead of where the sport was from a cycle, because we invested in the view of growth and it was a partner that we wanted to be with.
In the cycle now, we are saying that investment is catching up from a value perspective, but to take a next jump—from a Sky perspective and how we value rights—we will have to see that it is delivering subscriber growth for us. That will be the next thing. Again, we will want to balance that; we are not rushing to move beyond making a lot of these sports more accessible, but for a lot of the women’s sports we offer on Sky Sports, we currently take them to a broader audience than we do with some of our men’s sport. We use more widely available Sky channels and put a lot of content on YouTube; I think most of our netball is broadcast on YouTube. We will specifically try to find the audiences where they are, rather than just saying, “You all have to come over here”.
Barbara Slater: There is something quite important about the stage of development. There are some very interesting contrasts between a men’s major football event and a women’s major football event. If we take the example of the Women’s World Cup in Australia—actually, it was the Women’s Euros—60% of the entire number of audience hours that watched that tournament watched England. Sixty per cent. In a men’s major football tournament, the percentage who watch hours devoted to England is 15%.
We believe that the Women’s Euros was an unbelievable success, but a majority of matches were what we describe as slot negative. That means that we could have put alternative programming on the air and got a higher audience. But in a way, that is part of the investment we make—that is part of why we want to grow it. We did not want to treat that event as an England story; we wanted to treat it as a major football tournament. We put quarter finals and so on on at peak time on BBC One whether there was domestic interest or not, but it is important to understand that in terms of how our audiences engage with those events, they are not yet the same. Hopefully that will change, and we will see those tournaments embraced as tournaments as much as a men’s tournament is embraced in the future. It is important to understand that we are still at a stage of development. A lot of consolidation and work still needs to be done.
Niall Sloane: I would like to make the point that ITV decided to invest in the England women’s football team before their success at the Euros, so it was deliberately plotted. We thought that there was going to be a commercial return, and there has been. It has been very successful for us. That obviously kicked on again with the success of the Euros. We looked at that set of rights and thought, “That will work for us”, and it has.
Q170 Julie Elliott: If we move on and look to the listed events regime, what is your view on more women’s sports being included in the listed events regime?
Barbara Slater: Surely everyone must feel that the decision to list the Women’s World Cup and the Women’s Euros was a fantastic decision, given the audiences that those events reached. A listed event is around pinnacle moments. It is around ensuring that those moments that drive the national conversation are there and available for everybody, and that is absolutely the case with those two events.
Again, I would say that it is a development stage. As events develop, start to deliver and move into the mainstream, that is when they should join the list. I hope that that will happen over time. I think it was right to start with those two stand-out events, and that has been proven in the audiences who have come to those events, but we will hopefully see more women’s events listed over time.
Niall Sloane: Listed events are very important for free-to-air broadcasters. Jonathan may understandably have a different perspective. It is a very broad issue. I think that listed events should be looked at quite carefully every so often. I understand your point very easily, but we have to be careful about what gets listed. I don’t think you can have sport after sport after sport added every year. You have to be very careful as to why you are listing it and what benefits it will have.
Jonathan Licht: The Sky view, and my view, is that the rights holders are best placed to plot the path. We understand and respect listed events. I agree with what Niall said, though: there needs to be some caution that you don’t go too far and wide, because there will be lots of examples of sports that have plotted their own path, managed to balance reach with revenue and returns for their sport, and been able to best plot that themselves.
Q171 Julie Elliott: The Government has not yet included digital rights in the Media Bill. What impact will that have on women’s sport reaching audiences?
Barbara Slater: This was a piece of legislation that was introduced in the 1990s. It is interesting: at that moment in time, 4% of the population had an internet connection; now, 4% do not. We have seen, during a period of time, an extraordinary transformation in the media landscape and in broadcasting. I just think it is right that that regime is modernised for the world in which we now live. If we take the example of the Men’s World Cup, there were 60 million clip views. There is a younger audience that is not necessarily engaging with linear TV in the way that it used to, so the provision and inclusion of some proportionate and sensible digital rights within the regime is incredibly important. We don’t want a digital divide and a generation coming through for whom the very purpose of listed events, which is getting the widest possible reach, is undermined.
We are also going to have a scenario where there are events that will happen in time zones that do not work for the UK, and the listed event regime protects live, rather than on demand. Again, some provision of on demand, to make sure that those pinnacle moments—that is the principle of listed events—can be made accessible at times that work for the majority of the audience, is really important. We think it is fantastic that the Media Bill is addressing some of the issues around listed events in terms of distribution and qualification, but that modernisation extending to digital and on demand is absolutely essential.
Niall Sloane: ITV is very grateful for all aspects of the Media Bill, and we thank everybody for all the hard work that has gone in there, but I agree with Barbara that there needs to be an added aspect to digital rights, given the time zones and opportunities for people to watch.
Jonathan Licht: We probably come at it from a slightly different perspective, but digital rights are a really important part of what we do. We have an enormous footprint socially and digitally. We are certainly the No. 1 commercial provider in some spaces. We probably have more eyeballs than anyone, so it is really important for us that the digital rights come with the linear rights, because it is all part of the story. It is all part of how you go to market and whether it is attracting different audiences—younger audiences—or whether you have the ability to promote and market. For us, they should be kept with the rights overall. I think you are missing an opportunity, or there is an inconsistency, if you have them in different places. But that is a more general comment than specifically about a listed event. I don’t know whether it plays through the same.
Barbara Slater: I think it is inevitable. When something was conceived in the 1990s, a level of modernisation should just be part and parcel of it. We should recognise the world in which we live, and that should be reflected in the listed event regime.
Q172 Julie Elliott: Finally, to what extent will the new clause on multi-sport events in the Media Bill impact the BBC and other PSBs?
Barbara Slater: We are quite confused, because there is the word “adequate”. Who is to define the word “adequate”, and what does it mean? This is something that has worked incredibly well for a long period of time. It is a piece of legislation that has existed since the 1990s, and it seems a very odd inclusion so late in the day. There could be many, many different interpretations of “adequate”. At the moment, there are some examples of partnerships that work incredibly well, so we would genuinely question the amendment. It seems that there could potentially be quite a few problems that flow from that.
Niall Sloane: I think “adequate” is a slightly vague term; it needs more granular work.
Julie Elliott: May I wish you a happy retirement, Barbara? Personally speaking, you have done more to get women’s sport on TV and up the agenda than anyone else I can think of, so have a long and happy retirement.
Chair: I think that is shared by all of us, Barbara. Thank you very much for everything. You have done incredible work.
Q173 Giles Watling: To follow that thought, I think you will be a massive loss to the industry, judging by the evidence you are giving—
Barbara Slater: I will be shouting from the sidelines, make no mistake.
Giles Watling: Something tells me you certainly will be doing that. You talked earlier about this exponential growth in women’s football and cricket, but you did not know how that linked to other sports—hockey and netball spring to mind. Do you have any evidence for that?
Barbara Slater: Probably nothing tangible. I think, though, that we have seen a fundamental shift in attitudes to women’s sport, and that there is a collective momentum. I would love to see that carry on and be powerful. It will not happen by accident; it will take a lot of effort from many different stakeholders. You touched on it, Niall, when you said that football has had an advantage, because it is the national game and therefore has many advantages. If we can see that success in women’s football, however, there is no reason why we cannot see that success flowing through in other sports as well.
Q174 Giles Watling: It occurs to me that there must be some sort of trickle-down effect—
Barbara Slater: There is.
Giles Watling: But no one has taken any evidence on it.
Barbara Slater: No, I don’t think anything tangible, but it is interesting, isn’t it? When we have success, and we did in Rio, with the women’s hockey team and how much that captured the public imagination, and maybe in comparison with the men’s hockey team, that was not really a gender issue. It was more around hockey itself. In the UK, different sports will occupy different levels of interest with our audience. In some areas, gender is less an issue; it is where that sport might sit overall in a hierarchy.
Q175 Giles Watling: Which is an ideal to be pursued, do you believe?
Barbara Slater: Yes, I think so. If we can have equality in sport, to me that means that we have equality more widely. While we still have some of the discrimination against women’s sport, we all have to fight against that.
Jonathan Licht: Netball has a very positive story to tell from a participation perspective. I know that you could talk to the Commonwealth Games and the cut-through that was had there. We have shared the last couple of World Cups.
Barbara Slater: Yes we have.
Jonathan Licht: With the Super League—we mentioned this earlier—we focused our strategy from a distribution perspective: taking netball wider, going to a YouTube audience, because it is harder to expect a Sky Sports audience to be particularly faithful or loyal to netball coverage. If we go to find the audience, we find on the YouTube channel that 70% to 80% of the audience is female, which is not replicated on other channels, so we could really target more effectively there. We have been partnering with netball for 17-odd years and we are delighted with the growth of the sport—we take it very seriously and we cover it—
Q176 Giles Watling: It is ever evolving, is it not? There must be trends that you can identify.
Jonathan Licht: You can say that in all sports. If we talk particularly about netball and go back a couple of years, in terms of audiences, what we were seeing on Sky Sports—I can talk more confidently about that—was that the audience for women’s sport tended to skew towards, to be, our traditional audience, so it was quite heavily male and a little bit older. The women’s cricket audience did not look dissimilar to a men’s cricket audience, likewise women’s golf and men’s golf. Where we have seen the growth in the past few years, that is coming from a younger audience and particularly a younger female audience, so we see that as how we want to lean into those audiences, but that might mean that we need to operate in different places, whether that is YouTube or everything we are doing in all the various places such as TikTok or Instagram, because we know that we can find a dedicated community there, and those audiences, in a more effective way.
Q177 Giles Watling: Niche as well. So we are having this exponential growth in women’s sport.
Moving on slightly, can it be said that it is now beginning to hit a glass ceiling—that it has grown and grown, and there is some resistance? I come on to the 3 pm blackout, which has been going since the 1960s; it has been suggested that perhaps that 3 pm blackout could be used specifically for women’s sport in some way or another. If that blackout were removed, would that be a removal of some sort of glass ceiling? I put that to you, Barbara.
Barbara Slater: I would say that one really important thing is scheduling and giving women’s sport some space. At the moment, it is a very congested football schedule, which makes it difficult. It is about whether football can come together to find a solution to that: effectively to give a window—an appointment to view—for women’s football, where it can be there regularly. It works extremely effectively when we have international weekends, when there is space and women’s football is not competing against men’s football. I am sure you will recognise the numbers. If we have a women’s WSL match against a men’s premier league match, there is a significant impact on the audience. I would say that, if football can come together to create some dedicated windows—an appointment to view—for women’s football, that will make a difference.
Q178 Giles Watling: Fundamentally, creating a habit in the audience.
Barbara Slater: Yes, absolutely—so the audience knows where to find it.
Niall Sloane: The 3 o’clock blackout perhaps made a lot of sense in the ’60s and ’70s, when it was first introduced. In the ’60s, television coverage was frowned upon, but as the game develops and you get to the premier league era, when television becomes very widespread and much more is available, you still have a problem, as Barbara suggests: where do we put these women’s games so they can be viewed? The 3 o’clock space is one that should be utilised, because where else can women fit into a weekend?
It is quite hard to find those slots. If that was preserved for women’s football—WSL or whatever—I do not think it would impact the premier league, the English Football League, or leagues one and two. I do not think it is going to impact the non-league pyramid, which I think has its own audience. They will not stop going to individual non-league grounds, because that is about community, whereas if you put women’s football on that nationwide platform, it will have a unique platform.
Q179 Giles Watling: My concern is that it will do exactly that, because the original reason for the 3 pm blackout back in the ’60s was to protect local clubs.
Niall Sloane: I don’t think they need that protection any more.
Q180 Giles Watling: Right. Why not?
Niall Sloane: Because it is about community. If you are a non-league fan and your team is kicking off at 3 o’clock, you do not particularly want to watch Manchester United or Liverpool, as was mooted originally, and you may not want to watch women’s football. You have the opportunity, but most will prefer still to go to watch a live game. Watching a live game of football is completely different from a static experience of watching television in your front room.
Q181 Giles Watling: Is it something that you suggest we should perhaps trial and see what the effects are?
Niall Sloane: I think so, yes.
Jonathan Licht: There are a couple of things to think about as well as scheduling. Logistics and facilities are a challenge for a lot of the WSL teams. They do not own their own grounds—they are ground sharing—and that has to be considered. I understand and can see the perspective on 3 o’clock; as it stands, it is the only time when no other football is being broadcast, so I can see why you would naturally come to a conclusion that that would be attractive.
It may not be so clear cut, though, because it is the time when more people are attending football, because more games happen at 3 o’clock than at any other time. A number of people are attending, so you again have that challenge of the facilities—it is the time when most grounds are in use—and of whether you will be able to drive people to watch. I am not saying it is not going to work, but let’s not necessarily put all our eggs in that basket and say that that is going to be a great unlock.
To Barbara’s point, the weekend just gone was a men’s international break. That gave us an ability to showcase the Manchester derby at 4.30 pm on a Sunday, which is a traditional premier league slot for us. That is why we drove a really strong audience. We have tried working with the FA to look at lots of slots.
Barbara Slater: It is no accident that, for us, our audience on Saturday with Chelsea-Liverpool was a record-breaking WSL audience, so I would say that it is about finding an appointment to view that is a regular commitment and in football we are coming together to find an appointment to view—
Q182 Giles Watling: Going back to that habit.
Barbara Slater: Going back to a habit and finding that slot. Now, there is a lot of logic about it being that Saturday afternoon slot. It doesn’t have to be that, but I think it would be wonderful to see football come together—
Jonathan Licht: To the point earlier, we have spent a lot of time talking to the WSL clubs about availability of kick-offs, including when they can happen, as I am sure that you do, Barbara.
Barbara Slater: Yes.
Jonathan Licht: It is not clearcut. Even when you have a slot that you think is available and would suit an audience, sometimes you cannot get the game that you want there as well. It is contended.
Barbara Slater: And it’s a very congested schedule.
Q183 Giles Watling: It is congested; I get that. Thank you very much.
I would just like to move on to something else very quickly, because it is linked. The research from the Women’s Sport Trust has shown that positive outcomes can be achieved by brands sponsoring sport—this is really more for the gentlemen here. Can you tell me about the types of brands that are choosing to advertise during women’s sport? Is there a trend here?
Niall Sloane: When we have shown rugby—men’s and women’s rugby—it is an ABC1 brand area. Football is not so much ABC1 brand. However, given the profile of football and rugby, it is a very open marketplace and it is one that, particularly for broadcast sponsorship, we will constantly look at.
Giles Watling: Anything to add?
Jonathan Licht: I just think that there has never been a better time for brands to get involved in women’s sport. It is growing from an audience perspective; the demographics are increasingly attractive. There are lots of different ways. I think that sports fans and women’s sports fans notice brands that are supporting women’s sports, so I think there is a lot of opportunity there.
Q184 Giles Watling: So you feel that there is definite benefit? You have an ability to generate revenue from women’s sport and expand upon it.
Niall Sloane: That goes back to the problem that we had with the Women’s World Cup. Doing the deal so late with FIFA meant that we had very little time commercially to get the brands in and that was a real problem. We got the deals done, but it could have been more valuable to us if everybody had been sensible.
Giles Watling: Right. Point well made. Thank you.
Q185 Clive Efford: I was interested in the answer that Barbara gave earlier to Kevin’s question that only one seventh of sports coverage covers women’s sport. Barbara, you said it was 30% for the BBC. According to the figures that we have, the BBC accounts for 2% to 3% of all sports coverage.
Barbara Slater: Yes.
Clive Efford: And the figure of one seventh comes from the Women’s Sport Trust, and that was published back in June.
Barbara Slater: When you say 1% to 2%, that figure—
Clive Efford: 2% to 3% of all hours of sport broadcast each year on TV.
Barbara Slater: Correct. We are 2% to 3%. And by the way, that delivers between 30% and 40% of all viewership of sport in the UK.
Clive Efford: You’re making my point for me.
Barbara Slater: Sorry. [Laughter.] I’ll be quiet.
Q186 Clive Efford: You’re doing very well; probably a better job than me. However, the point that I want to allude to is this. Doesn’t that suggest that the BBC is doing the heavy lifting and that when we get into commercial TV the figures drop dramatically, because to be at only one seventh of coverage when the BBC is doing such a fine job of 30%, but the BBC is only 2% to 3% of overall coverage—where is the women’s coverage on commercial TV?
Jonathan Licht: We would like to think that we are playing our part in the coverage of women’s sport.
Q187 Clive Efford: These figures suggest not, don’t they?
Jonathan Licht: Well, I don’t know whether you’re banding us in the whole of the 98% for the rest of the sport. I could reel off the list of the sports that we are covering, if you would like. Within football, we are covering the WSL and the SWPL. We have had 27 years with cricket and 25-plus years of golf. We show every ladies golf major. We are showing the ladies European tour. We are showing the American tour. We are showing boxing, darts, netball—I will keep going on the list—Women’s Super League rugby. There has never been a stronger commitment, or level of investment, in women’s sport than has been demonstrated by Sky over the last couple of years. And I would like to think that that is recognised; it is certainly recognised within the industry and is hopefully recognised more widely.
Clive Efford: When we look at netball, for instance, you have a deal with netball. But they are complaining that they can only get so much coverage and interest, because they are not getting the exposure on terrestrial TV that they need. It seems to suggest that sports, in order to be successful and generate interest, need to be on terrestrial TV, and only then does commercial TV show an interest. Is that correct?
Niall Sloane: We had a conversation with Sky Sports about five years ago about netball. They wanted to know if we wanted to share some of the inventory, but we looked at it and we couldn’t make it work commercially. At that point we had only the main channel and ITV4, so we ran the numbers and unfortunately we couldn’t make it work. At ITV, we have plenty of women’s sport. I don’t know how it affects the percentages, but we have done women’s rugby, women’s football in a very high-profile way and women’s cycling. We have the fantastic sport of horse-racing where women jockeys are absolutely on an equal level to the men. Ditto in some forms of motor sport that we have shown, such as Extreme E and Formula E. So there are different ways of doing it.
Q188 Clive Efford: Should we be concerned about the need for women’s sport, which is emerging, to drive interest in terms of its commercial capacity? Should we be concerned about the impact of its need to drive advertising interest and sustain it if it is going to be successful going forward? Is it becoming commercially viable for commercial broadcasters to show the sort of interest that we are all eager to see?
Niall Sloane: It depends again on the individual model. At the time we couldn’t run the numbers, but ITVX might be a platform going forward because there is an element of plug in and play. If they are producing a world feed, you can plug in because it is not a linear schedule within ITVX, so there are possibilities there for us. ITV4 and the main channel obviously work on a linear basis, and you have to fit into a tight schedule, so not everything will work. It is a mixed economy at ITV, but we will definitely expand within ITVX.
Q189 Clive Efford: Can I ask about the digital platforms that younger audiences use? Are they seen as competition with your platforms—if I can call them that, or your broadcasting—or are they seen as opportunities to promote what you are doing and signpost people towards your products?
Jonathan Licht: We think that they are very complementary. We all have our owned and operated platforms, so at Sky Sports we have our app, but we have a presence on YouTube, X and Instagram—all the main social platforms—and that gives us an opportunity to talk to a different audience directly in an authentic way, and cultivate their interests, wherever they are, and then think about where else we can take them around our estate. So we think that they are complementary. They are not necessarily themselves directly investing in the sports, but they are benefiting the visibility of the sports.
Q190 Clive Efford: So you make clips readily available to them to fulfil that purpose, and there is no restriction on that.
Jonathan Licht: There can be restrictions, but they tend to come from the rights holders. They are about what they want to keep themselves or what they want to share with their commercial partners. But generally, we use clips quite widely for most of our partnerships.
Q191 Clive Efford: Barbara, there seems to be a big relationship between exposure through the media and the development of women’s sport. We have seen that massively with football, the Olympics and other things. Is there a future for women’s sport without massive exposure on terrestrial TV?
Barbara Slater: Again, I would say that a mixed ecology is really important. Some governing bodies recognise that in the way they bundle their rights. They would see a partnership model—so a potential combination of paid and free-to-air. The simple fact is that a free-to-air partner, such as the BBC, is going to deliver more reach, and there is so much evidence that that is the case. What we try to do is use our multiple platforms—our sport website, 5 Live and so on—to amplify events. We have lots of evidence of where we can grow events and create interest that becomes beneficial.
I think there is a good case in The Hundred. The ECB very much embraced the women’s tournament as embedded with the men’s, with double-headers and so on. There is a match a week live on the BBC, plus the final stages, and a combination with Sky. As you look back at that, I believe that you would acknowledge a role that the BBC played in establishing that as a start-from-scratch event. I am not saying that it is achieving all the numbers that everybody would like, but I truly believe it is achieving better numbers because of BBC involvement.
Given the commercial reality that many governing bodies face, they have to balance reach against revenue. We see cases where that is being done successfully, and that is the reality going forward. That is why the BBC is in so many different partnership models—because we bring a value, but so do other broadcasters. If you were a wise rights holder and governing body, you would want to exploit the best that all of your broadcasters can offer. I think the BBC has a lot above and beyond pure revenue.
Niall Sloane: It is constantly evolving. In the past, we have had contractual relationships with Sky. We currently work with TNT Sports around rugby. Different platforms spring up and different alliances and allegiances are forged. But the idea of free-to-air and pay, as Barbara says, is well established as an ecology, and it is one we should work to.
Barbara Slater: I think it is why we have such support for the listed event regime. That legislation has lasted so long because there is a recognition that it is not always going to be possible for your free-to-airs to compete. Therefore, there is some protection for the audience to be able to reach those events that matter most and that are an incredible shop window.
If you look back at the success of British sport, you can go back to Beijing. I remember the Olympics—if we go back to previous games—where if we won one medal, it was quite something special. To see the success of some of our athletes, through Beijing and then into 2012, uplifted the whole nation, and that needed to be seen. In particular, think of the investment that UK Sport has put into those athletes—of course, this needed to be available for the widest possible audience.
Clive Efford: Thank you for your service over many years, Barbara. I’m sure you will have a lot to say in future.
Q192 Chair: You are very popular, Barbara; we like you.
Jonathan Licht: We’ve noticed.
Barbara Slater: Well, you know what you’ve got to do: lots more women’s sport.
Q193 Jane Stevenson: Thank you for your evidence so far. I would like to dig a little deeper into who is watching women’s sport, and how much data and research you have done on changing audiences. I went to a Euros warm-up match at Molineux, and the crowd was significantly different from a normal Saturday there. There were lots of families going together and lots of children. How much evidence is there on that, Barbara?
Barbara Slater: What you say is really interesting. Really understanding that may be a help to finding some of the solutions. We find, for example, that women’s football, rugby and golf are all watched predominantly by men. That varies—it can be 70% men or 60%—but that is broadly the case. It is fans of the sport saying, “I love rugby or football, and the women’s is wonderful, too. I am going to watch it and engage.”
The audience that we really have to get to is more women watching women’s sport. I am not suggesting that is easy. It is interesting; if you went into WHSmith on your way home and looked at the sea of women’s magazines and saw how much sport is there, I think you would be bitterly disappointed.
It is about how we bring women’s sport into the mainstream. We have some brilliant examples of where that is done. Where the really big audiences come is when you have an audience that is, effectively, equally men and women. For the Olympics, for example, we probably have an audience that is 50:50. Wimbledon is probably skewed slightly more female, but with the traditional team sports, we see a predominantly male audience.
That is in contrast to the experience when you go to the grounds. I don’t know how many of you were fortunate enough, as I was, to go to the finals of both the men’s Euros and the women’s Euros, but the contrast was extraordinary. As you say, to see the family dynamic attending women’s football is incredibly important. What is interesting for football is how they can use that as an asset, because it is different. Actually, if you are trying to grow the appeal of your sport—both men’s and women’s—exploit everything that is there. I think that some of the fantastic atmosphere that we see at women’s football—which, as I say, is more family-orientated—is a real asset to the sport and for bringing in the next generation of fan. I see that the women’s game has a big role to play in that. That is a personal view.
Niall Sloane: It is a key question: how do we build from here? At ITV, our channels skew towards female viewership. The only channel that really exists to attract male money is ITV4, which was set up 20 years ago—recognising the female dominance of ITV viewership. When we have gone into the morning services at some of the big tournaments, we get pushback from the audiences: “Where’s ‘Lorraine’? Where’s ‘This Morning’? Where’s ‘Good Morning Britain’?” It is a balance that we have to strike. I keep going back to it, but ITVX should hopefully solve some of those problems going forward.
Q194 Jane Stevenson: Thank you. Jonathan, is it easier for you to get data?
Jonathan Licht: We do have a lot of data. I recognise what you say about attending a women’s Euros match compared with a men’s, but we have also seen that success, or that change in audience, replicated. If you go to The Hundred cricket, it has much more of a family feel. I think that I have seen a statistic to say that 40% of ticket purchases are female, and just the sounds in the ground are different when you go to one of those games.
We talked about this a bit earlier, and we have also have seen that traditional male skew in some of our sports, but the growth is coming from different audiences. We have worked hard to go to different places, and to put our content in different places, specifically to target female sports fans—whether that is using broader Sky channels, going to YouTube or creating communities for WSL on Instagram.
In the past three months, we have been creating this series called “Editions”, where we have been working with some leading female sports talent. We have been getting them to editorialise a photo cover shoot. Again, that is so out of the ordinary for Sky Sports or what we would have been associated with going back five or 10 years. We know that we can find these different audiences, but we just need to go to slightly different places.
Barbara Slater: We should be really encouraged. When we do our demographic research, we find that women’s football and women’s sport can skew younger, so I think that there is a generation coming through that genuinely has a different attitude, and we are seeing that reflected in the audiences. That is important to recognise as well.
Jonathan Licht: I think it was the BBC that published something about how the fans of women’s football are more associated with the players than the clubs—they have less club affinity. Again, we see that, and we have to think about that in how we tell our stories through our coverage. Maybe we look much more at the narrative around it, rather than being so focused on stats. I do not want to generalise, but those are things that our production teams are very conscious of in how we tell those stories.
The personalities involved in women’s sports at the moment make themselves much more accessible. They have great personalities and they deliver on those personalities on all of their social channels. That is a real unlock for female fans, particularly the younger fans, and we can only encourage that. Actually, there is probably a lot that the clubs and the sports can learn from that.
Q195 Jane Stevenson: Do you think that there is enough content? This did happen in the women’s Euros and World Cup a little bit—we got to know players better and we got that background content, which drew more people in. However, while that happens in very major women’s sporting events, do you think that that is lacking day to day?
I will ask another thing before you come in: as you understand that your audience is shifting to maybe a younger and possibly more female audience, are you looking at scheduling around what their viewing habits would be, or the availability of streaming services and content, to match that new audience, rather than the existing or past one?
Barbara Slater: In a way, yes. Something that we have tried to do over quite a long period of time is what I would describe as normalising women’s sport. For example, we will lead a sports bulletin with a women’s sport story. It is just part and parcel of what we do. Obviously, you are guided by the broader sport diary and stories that ebb and flow, but if you were to look over the past decade, you would see a transformation in the number of women’s sport stories that are covered. At times, there is a very conscious effort to do that.
What has been interesting is to see how much that has enriched the offering that we make. In the early days, there might have been some questions about whether that was the right thing. Certainly, there was a period where we got more complaints about doing too much women’s sport than about not doing enough. In fact, that has not happened as much recently. It is about the normalising of women’s sport, embedding it in what we do. As some of our athletes and players become better known, more stories flow from that. I completely agree that normalisation is absolutely crucial. What has happened is that the services we provide feel better, richer and more diverse in the stories they are telling. That has been an absolute benefit.
Niall Sloane: An important part of the picture is on-screen representation. If we go back to the Indian Premier League of 2010, three of the main presenters were Shonali Nagrani, Mandira Bedi and Isa Guha. In 2016—I am pretty certain this had not been done before—we put Maggie Alphonsi into our Six Nations coverage on the main channel. Later that year, Eni Aluko took her place and she has been with us for seven years as a pundit on the main football tournaments. It is about getting that balance right—it is something that will attract a lot of adverse criticism on social media, but a lot of those attitudes are a cesspit, anyway. You have to do these things and disregard the welter of public abuse about it. It is not always popular, but it is the right thing to do.
Q196 Jane Stevenson: Thank you. Jonathan, do you have anything to add?
Jonathan Licht: I agree. We talked earlier about how you schedule and about the challenges with the slots, particularly for women’s football—the WSL. One of the things we tried with the WSL, going back a year, was to look at kicking off at 6.45 on a Sunday, which was to allow for an inheritance from our Premier League audience—so it is a good way to carry an audience. It is a good time for people to watch football, but it is clearly not a good time for people to attend football—or, at least, it is a harder time, particularly if they have to travel. Again, that is just the balance that we have to work out. We are not going to be overly precious about that. If it really isn’t working on the ground, we will have to be flexible with that. But if you move that kick-off to Sunday lunchtime, that may not be a good time for people to be watching but it might be a good time for people attending, so there are lots of things in the mix.
Q197 Jane Stevenson: It is difficult. I have been a Wolves fan my whole life and I am not going to stop watching men’s football because I enjoy women’s football as well. So it is about that additional time, when we are all busy. There are significant challenges.
We had evidence that lots of people do not feel they can find women’s sport on catch-up services. Have you considered at Sky a dedicated women’s channel? Do you think there is an argument for having dedicated screening channels?
Jonathan Licht: We talk about that a lot—whether it is the right thing to do, to make it clearer from a signpost perspective, or whether you think that it should be part of Sky Sports cricket, golf or football and should be mainstreamed. With the volume that we are doing, we take the view that mainstreaming is the right thing for us to be doing, making sure that women’s sport can be seen by as many people as possible. In other places, we will probably then go deeper and narrower—probably more on some of our social channels, where we think we can create a community. We are trying to play that twin track but don’t necessarily see that from a linear, channel perspective. We think that the opportunity is to have women’s sport rightly seen by as many people as possible.
Q198 Jane Stevenson: We heard evidence that 47% of fans of female sport find it difficult to find women’s sport content online. Do you think that all your platforms have enough prominence, if you go to the sport catch-up home page?
Barbara Slater: I think it is there, though I am not saying that you don’t have to click through to find it. Our ambition is to normalise and bring it into the mainstream, and where it’s right, put women’s sport up front and on centre stage. That is better than creating a niche space.
Q199 Jane Stevenson: Is that not slightly contradictory? So you have to click through 10 times, but—
Barbara Slater: It depends, but I think the big stories are there, just as the men’s big stories are there. There is only so much space on the front page, and I would argue that, if you are a fan of a men’s sport—say, men’s cycling—you would probably also say, “Well, I can’t find everything that I want on men’s cycling.” You would have to click through quite a few pages, but it is there.
Q200 Jane Stevenson: It is that sort of nudge effect. We all sit, late at night or whenever, thinking, “Oh, I’ll find something to watch.” If I click on football, will I get an option of women’s or men’s football on that page?
Jonathan Licht: For us, it would be editorialised. The men’s and women’s football would be in the same space. Effectively, what would be leading would be the key story at that time. If that was a WSL story, that is what you would see; if it was a Premier League, an England or a Scotland story, that is what you would see.
Dr Huq: Can I add my congratulations on your long service? Is a gold watch coming?
It is #AskHerToStand Day today, when we are all meant to encourage more women to get into politics, so I wanted to ask all three of you about misogyny and sexism. We know that punditry is often seen as the blokes, the ex-players and that kind of thing. That is what the public see. Is there still misogyny and sexism in sports media organisations? We know that large companies often cover up things like locker room talk and all that jazz. Shall we start with our hopefully not token but esteemed female colleague?
Barbara Slater: Unfortunately, I think there is misogyny at large. I am not sure that it is confined to sports broadcasting or anywhere else; it is at large.
Q201 Dr Huq: Is it even worse in “the beautiful game”, because it is seen as such a blokey game?
Barbara Slater: There is definitely an undercurrent that we do not see in our coverage of the men’s game. There is clearly a small number of people who resent the progress that women’s sport or women’s football are making, and they will be very derogatory. It is a great shame. All three broadcasters have run campaigns—ours was a joint one with Sky Sports, “Hate Won’t Win”—because we see it. If you had female athletes and female players in this room, they would tell you that they get a disproportionate amount of abuse online. If a woman speaks out on an issue—I am sure you all find it in your sphere of work—misogyny is there, at large. I suspect it might be heightened slightly in sport because many men will have traditional attitudes and would possibly see sport as a more male domain. It is an issue, but one that I think everybody should be fighting and addressing, not just your broadcast community.
Q202 Dr Huq: I will ask everyone the same question. The British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, and England Netball recommended that there should be 50% of women on air presenting sports. Would you agree with that, or do you not like quotas?
Barbara Slater: I will be honest with you: if you look at some of our coverage, we are not far from that. If you look at the Olympics and across the whole spectrum of what we do, we have Gabby Logan—absolutely brilliant; Clare Balding—fantastic; Isa Guha; Jeanette Kwakye; Hazel Irvine. We have standout women presenters and pundits.
Q203 Dr Huq: Is there a need for targets?
Barbara Slater: I wonder whether we haven’t made that move forward. Targets are really helpful where you have a significant discrepancy, but I think we have a fantastic range of women who are effectively front of house. That is true of other broadcasters as well.
Q204 Dr Huq: Just a last little section on something that occurred to me: the decision-making pyramid. What about in the board room? Are there sufficient numbers of women at the very top table of the BBC?
Barbara Slater: Some of the decisions about what airtime to devote to some of the women’s football that we have done were made before there was the success. Decisions were being made about putting content on BBC 1 at peak time way before anybody thought there might have been the success that there was. My boss is a woman—Charlotte Moore—and she has been wholly supportive. Maybe it is a privilege of working for the BBC that we have been able to make decisions that are driven not purely by what we think an audience return would be, but by the opportunity to make a genuine difference. It has been an absolute privilege to be in a position to do that and then for it to be successful, but those calls were made very much in advance, and there was a willingness to acknowledge that this was important.
We ran two campaigns: Change the Game and Know Your Place. Often trails and campaigns on TV are pure appointment-to-view trails, but these were not; these were value-driven trails. They challenged the core perception that somehow women’s sport was less valuable, and they had a tremendous impact. They were embraced not just by sport, but more widely across the BBC in an editorial. That, in partnership with the success of the athletes and the brilliant role models that they were, has really contributed to some of that shift. Those 28 million people who claim they are now interested in women’s sport, and that growth of 8 million since 2021, is a consequence of the brilliance of what we have seen on the field of play, and a spotlight has been put on that.
Q205 Dr Huq: What about sexism in the organisation and the boardroom, and quotas?
Niall Sloane: My immediate boss, Rosemary Newell, is a woman, and Dame Carolyn McCall is the chief executive of ITV. As we know, there are not too many women CEOs in the FTSE, which is a nonsense, and it is a very female-led company in many different ways. In the various genres, there are probably more female commissioners than there are men, and in most of the meetings I attend at ITV, which are cross-genre meetings, there are more females in the room than men.
On the abuse issue, what happens is absolutely disgraceful. Whether it is women appearing in men’s football tournaments as pundits, analysts or commentators, or whether it is women leading the coverage of women’s football, it is frightening what they have to put up with, and it is an utter disgrace. During the Rugby World Cup, we ran a campaign called Would You Say It?, working with an online charity. The campaign was, “If you wouldn’t say it, don’t send it.” Nobody is learning the lesson. You don’t get any help from the tech giants or the platforms, but it is pretty appalling and something has to be done. We are not helpless, but there is very little we can do. It is a great worry.
Going back to the split within ITV Sport, I did a little countback of the significant positions over the last couple of years, and there were easily more women presenters and reporters than men on the ITV talent front. Also, three weeks ago, Laura Woods won broadcast sports presenter of the year for her coverage of the Women’s World Cup, the Men’s World Cup and the FA Cup, so we are happy with the mix.
Barbara Slater: I would argue that it is important behind the camera as well. Again, that is a space where we have seen some really dramatic change. When I joined, which was a very long time ago, there were just one or two women in the sports department. We now have 40% women working in the sports department. That is really telling about the progress that has been made, but I would agree with Niall: I think some of the abuse that is received is completely unacceptable. It was interesting that at the time I announced that I was retiring, there were a couple of highly critical pieces. They did not even mention women’s sport. If you had to look back at the contribution that women’s sport made over the past few years, in summarising the success and the impact of the department, you have to mention it. They did not.
Q206 Dr Huq: Is your replacement a woman or a man?
Barbara Slater: I don’t know yet. My only takeaway from that experience is that women’s sport is not important to them. Sadly, those attitudes still exist, and we just have to work hard to make sure that we change that.
Q207 Dr Huq: Do you think there is probably no need for quotas to reach 50%?
Barbara Slater: With on-screen presenting teams, I am not sure that targets would be right. We also have to bear in mind that it is not always that we get a choice. Quite often, the pundits you want have to be expert at the game. Sometimes you have women gold medallists and sometimes you have male gold medallists. You are always looking to find the best pundit that you can. I am not sure about working on a gender quota. In some spaces targets are right, but I am not sure about in presenting and talent. A lot of it flows from the sport itself. In some sports, because there have been many successful women participants you might naturally be led to a more female-dominant team. I think it gets challenging when targets drill down into individual sport decisions.
Q208 Dr Huq: Would you also not be a fan of targets, Mr Sloane?
Niall Sloane: We took a decision 10 years ago to improve it, and we are getting there. As Barbara suggests, we are probably at about 40% as well. It might even be slightly more.
Jonathan Licht: Do you want me to answer broadly or on targets?
Q209 Dr Huq: On the three things, and is there sexism in the industry or your organisation?
Jonathan Licht: Clearly, as we all do, we have a very strong view that sport is for everyone, speaking on a societal basis. Commercially, it will be more valuable if more people who are interested in playing feel that they are represented and included in sport. We have partnered with the industry, including BBC and ITV and Kick It Out. We have also partnered with Women in Football and the Women’s Sport Collective. Those are internal industry partnerships and then external, where we are looking at discrimination, representation and sexism. It is something we take very seriously.
To the off-screen point, there has been a huge push behind that. Off-screen is where we have our volume of people. Within Sky, there has been a big push around leadership as well. We do target leadership and having parity of around 50:50. On-screen, I hope people would recognise the great strides and the changes that have happened over the last years across the sport. It is as Barbara says. For a sport like Formula 1, which we are very deep in, it has been very male dominated. When you look at our Formula 1 on-screen line up, probably 50% of the people we are putting on screen are female. There are strategists like Bernie Collins, reporters like Rachel Brookes, presenters like Natalie Pinkham and expert pundits like Danica Patrick and Naomi Schiff. We have worked hard to put very credible and strong people on screen to have a better representation in our coverage of sport. That is not necessarily being replicated within the sport yet. It is something that all our teams are very conscious of and are working very hard on.
Barbara Slater: One of the things we have always tried to do is lead our audience and be ahead of our audience, but not so far ahead that it smacks of tokenism. I believe it is quite a fine balance to strike, making that progress and being ahead but taking your audience and the big consensus and the mainstream with you. I honestly think that we have been able to do that, and among very changed attitudes to how women are welcomed on screen in a way that they would not have been in the past. If we had tried to have a female pundit on World Cup football back in 2010, I am not sure that the audience would have been ready for that, but they are now.
Q210 Dr Huq: I have seen the news cuttings when Angela Rippon was first on the news. Actually, it was Anna Ford—Angela Rippon was a dancer who moved over. Anyway, people said that nobody would be able to concentrate on the news if a woman was reading it, and that everybody would be too distracted. You cannot imagine that attitude now. Niall, you touched on the abuse point. Alex Scott in particular has said that it has had awful effects on her mental health and that her family kept her going. She has opened up about this. She is BAME, and there is an intersection there—I am in all these marginalised categories myself. There are statistics. The 2020 survey across men’s and women’s sports found that 83% of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds experience discrimination in some form in the sector, and only 8% felt that it was being dealt with. There are Venn diagrams of different levels of disadvantage. We have seen the Azeem Rafiq report, also work of this Committee, which made shockwaves across the country. There are layers of being BAME and a woman, and I wanted to ask you about that. What are you doing in your organisations to make the issue of racism in women’s sport uppermost? Are some of the reports—there was a big one on equity in cricket—getting the adequate coverage they need?
Niall Sloane: I would go back to 2016, when Maggie Alphonsi came into the Six Nations. There was some adverse reaction, but the rugby audience was probably more accepting or did not have the level of vitriol. Once Eni Aluko turned up at the Euros, it just went ballistic. Luckily, Eni is quite a strong woman, but anybody receiving any level of abuse deserves help. We work hard around that and there is plenty of advice and plenty of mechanisms—but not enough, probably, because it is so widespread to this day.
Q211 Dr Huq: We have football, cricket and rugby. I think all those have had reports that say there is sexism, classism, racism: the whole lot. Does it just require whistleblowers for us to even know these things are going on?
Niall Sloane: With Ugo Monye, it was not necessarily a broadcast issue but it was just the fact that he was a black pundit down in Exeter and he got absolutely disgraceful and vile abuse. It was not the broadcast or the platform in that instance. That happened this weekend. Luckily, I believe there is some footage and now they have identified the moron who did it, but that is not good. Why shouldn’t Ugo Monye, a storied rugby player, be welcome in a part of the country just to turn up to work? Why should that be allowed to happen?
Barbara Slater: These are issues beyond broadcasters. That does not mean that we are not 100% behind our talent and we do not want to be supportive and do what we can. For example, part of the Hate Won’t Win campaign was about moderation, so removing offensive posts and everything. However, when you have an individual and a social media following, how you control some of the abuse that occurs in that space is very difficult. That seems to me to be a much wider issue that, surely, has to be addressed at some point.
Q212 Dr Huq: Do those people get support from you?
Barbara Slater: We would want to do that—of course we would—but it is very hard because those individual accounts often attract abuse. Sometimes people come off social media because it gets too much. I think it is a societal problem and I am not sure that it is related to broadcasting as such.
Niall Sloane: As per Ugo.
Barbara Slater: Yes, that is right.
Jonathan Licht: We could cut this question in lots of ways if we are talking about how we support our on-screen talent. I think you are right that it probably is football where it has shown up the most. We spend a lot of time making sure that our on-screen people understand the support they have and the duty of care that we have, whether that is the production leads or how we communicate with them. What are we doing for our own people? Obviously, there are lots of processes in place and a code of conduct that is wrapped around everything that we do.
Externally, we play our role, whether through Sky Sports News or through the sports we cover, in making sure that sports are held to account where that needs to be the case. We would have followed the cricket story in the same way; we would have run with that and there would be lots of other examples. We do not shy away from shining a light and trying to be part of the response: who we partner with, how we use our voice, how we make sure we are represented and how we make sure all our people feel included. There are lots of aspects to that question and we undoubtedly spend more time than ever making sure we try and get that right for our people and in how we show up and how we present ourselves.
Q213 John Nicolson: Good morning, everybody. We are talking about prejudice. It is worth pointing out that there is only one openly gay male footballer in England’s top four men’s divisions because of the amount of abuse they get. We had the chief executive of the English FA before this Committee at one point. He got a bit of abuse—I thought quite unfairly—because I asked him whether he felt that it would be safe for gay footballers to come out. He said he would not advise them to come out. People misinterpreted what he was saying. I think he was just saying that there was a duty of care and he did not feel that they would be safe—if it were his son, he would not advocate that he came out. In terms of prejudice, that is a dark stain. I think we talked about this before.
Jonathan Licht: We did some work probably a year ago with a young footballer in the Championship at Blackpool who wanted to come out. We told that story and it was a story that we had to work over, with the duty of care to the individual, his family and the club. It was a very involved piece of work for one person, effectively.
John Nicolson: Of course. What does that say, if you are a gay kid in a housing scheme somewhere in the UK and you are struggling with bullying? You think: wealthy footballers, with all the protection and wealth they have and the ability to insulate themselves, and they do not feel they can come out. What does that say to them? I know I have made this point, and this is not really what I am going to focus on in my questioning but, when we have soccer tournaments in really repressive regimes—as we are about to have again—I think it is very important that our national broadcasters focus on that to a degree and do not normalise and sportswash these evil regimes, just because they have managed to buy their way into hosting tournaments.
Niall Sloane: I think we both did that in Qatar, didn’t we?
Barbara Slater: We have a lot of evidence that, actually, those stories and that challenge that you are talking about were made. That was interesting and, indeed, it probably divided some opinion, with some people saying, “Hang on a minute, I want to watch a football tournament. I’m not sure that some of what you’re covering is right”. What I absolutely stand by—I did so last time—is that, across the BBC, those stories are being told across our many different outlets.
Q214 John Nicolson: I did not dispute that. If you remember, I said that I thought that, if you are turning on to watch sports, you should not think that this is a normal country in which the tournament is being hosted. If you are not watching any news at all and are just watching sports, I think that you should be made aware. That is especially the case if Saudi Arabia, of all countries, is going to begin hosting tournaments, given that their stand-in monarch authorises the murder of political opponents—journalists. I think we really have to keep that in the forefront of our minds.
Barbara Slater: I think the example of Qatar is evidence that we did that.
Q215 John Nicolson: I will turn to Scottish women’s rugby; lots of people have contacted me about that. The Scottish women’s rugby team won their inaugural competition, which was in South Africa. It is my understanding that no broadcaster covered those games—I think that it was covered on an obscure streaming service—which meant that Scottish women’s rugby fans missed their side winning three games in a row and lifting the trophy.
Perhaps I could turn to you, Mr Sloane. Why was there no coverage of the Scottish women’s rugby team in that competition? You covered Wales and England, and rightly so; it was great that you covered them, but Scottish women’s rugby fans were frustrated.
Niall Sloane: That went to ITVX, and ITVX has a very limited pool of resource; it is extremely low, and we could only afford to do two. Barbara referred to the broadcast infrastructure cost. Because England and Wales were more likely to have a commercial return, we chose to show those two, but we did go back to the organisers and point that out to them; it was up to them. I don’t know where they sold it or whether they sold it in the end, but that was the decision we came to.
Q216 John Nicolson: You covered the two teams that lost and did not cover the team that won.
Niall Sloane: Correct. It was very bad.
Q217 John Nicolson: That wasn’t a great call, was it?
Niall Sloane: No.
Q218 John Nicolson: Are you going to do better next year?
Niall Sloane: We will endeavour to, yes.
Q219 John Nicolson: Is that a promise?
Niall Sloane: It is a suggestion that we will endeavour to do better on our calls.
Q220 John Nicolson: That is a bit vague. Could we have a promise? You are saying that it was a mistake, so we have to assume that you will be covering Scottish women’s rugby next year.
Niall Sloane: We will certainly have a look at it, yes.
John Nicolson: Have you ever thought of going into politics?
Niall Sloane: On the evidence of today, yes.
Q221 John Nicolson: Just because we are such a sunny, happy crowd, you want to be a member of this team, don’t you?
Let’s have a look at the BBC. A lot of people have told me that they are very pleased by the BBC’s new Monday night package, plus BBC Alba coverage.
Barbara Slater: It is Alba; BBC Alba, yes.
John Nicolson: Yes. In Gaelic, it is pronounced “Allapa”.
Barbara Slater: We are talking about Scotland and Scottish sport.
Q222 John Nicolson: Yes, indeed. I have been asked to ask you this. How about having a regular Saturday 3 pm broadcast on the BBC Scotland channel to help grow women’s sport?
Barbara Slater: I would come back to the previous answers; it is a question of football coming together and trying to find a window. There is no question but that having some space for women’s sport to shine is really important. Whether that is the right slot, I am not sure, but it is probably for the football authorities to work together to provide that space.
I agree: a window for women’s football in Scotland would be valuable. It would help grow the women’s game, give it space and allow the spotlight to fall on one slot on the women’s game. The danger is that it moves around and it is difficult for people to know when it is. A space that is consistent is important.
Q223 John Nicolson: A lot of people think that the BBC Scotland channel is exactly the right place because that channel was put in place to cover various musical and sports events that would not necessarily qualify in terms of reach for the main BBC1 channel. I promised to float that idea with you; I have now done so.
Barbara Slater: I have half agreed. We need a slot, but it is for the football authorities to work together on where that time and space should be.
Q224 John Nicolson: What can you do to persuade the football authorities? How can you seduce them, encourage them, persuade them?
Barbara Slater: Interestingly, a number of colleagues were in a similar situation, contributing to one of their committees looking at women’s sport. I have not seen all the detail, but I know that they were making similar cases. That was a representation on BBC Scotland and BBC Alba to a similar committee looking at women’s sport, and it obviously fed a lot of views and opinions into that. All that information is readily available. This is a very common theme about finding a space for women’s sport to shine.
Q225 John Nicolson: To be clear, on the question of free-to-air rugby, can I ask about the Six Nations and the World Cup specifically? Is there a difference in terms of the guarantee that you feel has been given? The World Cup Final—
Barbara Slater: It’s listed.
Q226 John Nicolson: Exactly. But there has been a suggestion that the RWC, for example, might not be there in the future both for women and men. I have been reading a number of newspaper articles about it—in the Telegraph and The Guardian and elsewhere. Here is one quote: “The Six Nations is not certain to remain entirely free-to-air on the BBC and ITV following the creation of a new world league that could see rugby’s television rights sold as a bundle”. Mr Soane, what reassurance can you give fans about that?
Niall Sloane: We would like to bid for that property; it just depends on whether they want to sell it to pay television. We discussed this earlier. It was mooted several months ago. It is always mooted when there are negotiations on the horizon. We have not spoken in earnest, but we will in the new year to both entities—Six Nations and Rugby World Cup. They have been great competitions for us in the past, and we would hope so going forward.
Q227 John Nicolson: So that is your objective.
Niall Sloane: Yes.
Q228 John Nicolson: For both of them.
Niall Sloane: For both of them, yes.
Barbara Slater: We have traditionally done the Six Nations, both the men’s and the women’s. I would go back to the point that we need a well-funded BBC. I gave you the figures. Sports rights have doubled and our income in real terms has gone down by 30%. When we bang on the door for rights, which we want, we have to bring a package that is about amplification and using all our platforms.
The truth is that we are probably not going to be the highest bidder. It will come down to individual governing bodies as to how they balance that reach and revenue. That is why we have been in so many partnerships. Indeed, we are in a partnership with the Six Nations. ITV has the lion’s share. We have been covering Wales and Scotland because of the importance of the nations to the BBC. For the Six Nations, like anything else, we will have to assess the affordability at the time because it is very difficult for the BBC, on that trajectory of income, to continue to afford everything we have, but that is not a decision that is being made at this moment in time.
Niall Sloane: The question for certain rights holders is: are you about getting more and more money coming in, or are you about stewardship of the game? That is the question that needs to be asked of certain rights holders.
John Nicolson: Thank you.
Q229 Chair: Finally, very quickly—a one-word answer will probably suffice—Barbara and Jonathan, you mentioned earlier that your deal with the Women’s Super League is ending this season, and we are hearing that TNT are set to bid for the live rights. Will you be preparing to tender a bid to continue your deal, Jonathan?
Jonathan Licht: Yes, we certainly have an intention to remain a partner with the WSL, but it sounds like it will be a competitive process. We have really enjoyed the partnership, and we are really pleased with how we have been helping audiences and attendances to grow, but we will have to see how it goes commercially.
Barbara Slater: It will be a bidding process. Yes, we will be there, selling everything the BBC can bring to the event as strongly as we can, but ultimately those decisions will rest with the rights holder.
Q230 Chair: Thank you very much. Before we conclude, is there anything else that any of our witnesses would like to say?
Jonathan Licht: I think we would probably all say that, as broadcasters, we want sports to grow. We want to be part of that, and we make ourselves available to work with partners. We do not want to be viewed just transactionally. Look at the platform, look at what we can do and look at how we can grow. Work closely with us and communicate with us. That is the big message that we always want to talk to our partners about.
Barbara Slater: As we look to the long-term future and the affordability of rights, I would like to express my thanks to this Committee for the position it has taken on list events. We are in a world of fragmentation with many competing subscription services, and the principle of preserving the very pinnacle of men’s and women’s sport is absolutely critical.
Niall Sloane: There are three very different models in the UK represented here today, but it is a reasonably successful picture. Could it be better? Yes, but the three of us are determined—for our individual reasons with our individual companies—to make it better and bring sport to a more prominent position than it currently occupies.
Chair: Thank you to our panel for your time today. If you think of anything else that we need to take into consideration for our report, please do get in touch with us afterwards.