Sky Sports has quickly and quietly terminated its recent collaboration with YouTuber IShowSpeed. The channel has scrubbed its social media of nearly every clip featuring the one-time Valorant steamer after clips re-emerged online of a misogynistic rant he made on his Twitch channel back in April, The Athletic reports.
IShowSpeed—usually just called 'Speed'—has millions of followers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and was enlisted by Sky Sports to help gin-up some enthusiasm for the channel's coverage of the Premier League. Speed appeared in clips on Sky Sports' social media and even in broadcast segments on the channel itself, reading team news alongside veteran sports reporter Geoff Shreeves. A recording of that appearance still survives on YouTube, below.
But that appearance, along with almost every single other one, has now been obliterated from Sky Sports' social media entirely. It seems that, at some point, Sky execs were made aware of a video of the streamer verbally abusing a female player in Valorant back in April this year.
That event was widely reported-on when it happened, and ended up getting Speed banned from every single Riot game out there. He's also banned from Twitch for a different misogynistic rant, so it's a mystery as to how it took this long for Sky to cotton-on to the streamer's well-documented past behaviour.
PCG has reached out to IShowSpeed for comment and will update if we hear back.
Only a solitary clip featuring Speed survives on the Sky Sports Twitter account at this point. The rest have been quietly removed from the channel's platforms, and The Athletic reports that Sky has opted to sever ties with Speed completely going forward. The streamer—a teenage American—was apparently only in the UK to see Cristiano Ronaldo play, and was devastated to learn the legendary footballer wasn't playing in either of the matches he'd attended. Some might call that karma.
