Appointment to View – Sky Sports’ Gary Hughes

Going inside ‘the full Sky Sports treatment’| Innovation in sports broadcasting | The commercialisation of the Women’s Super League

Appointment to View is a series from the Leaders Sport Business Podcast that features conversations with rights owners, broadcasters, creators and innovators at the epicentre of the shifting sports media landscape.

The series examines how sport is packaged, produced, consumed, distributed, and monetised.

The third episode in the series features Gary Hughes, Sky Sports’ Head of Football who oversees football production across all Sky Sports platforms. He joined the broadcasting giant in 1995 as a producer on Sky News, before moving across to Sky Sports News, where he led a production team for ten years. He ran Sky’s Champions League coverage for 5 years before taking the Head of Football role in 2014.

This conversation was held a few days after the opening weekend of the new WSL season, the first match week of a new rights cycle that has seen Sky and the BBC sign a landmark deal to broadcast the league that has been reported as the richest in domestic women’s football. Gary covers the tone and texture of the coverage, and the importance of the marketing push behind it.

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