Streamer, YouTuber and all-round web celebrity IShowSpeed has recently been helping one among the largest TV stations in Europe, Sky Sports, with its broadcasts of English Premier League matches. That was, reportedly, until the executives on the channel discovered a couple of video that went viral back in April.
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IShowSpeed—more commonly often known as simply ‘Speed’—had been within the stands earlier this month to observe his team Manchester United play Fulham within the league (after which my beloved Aston Villa for the League Cup), and while there helped present segments for the channel and appeared on their social media feeds. Here’s one (surviving) example:
And here’s one other (uploaded independently by someone who had saved the footage), showing him failing to recognise either Jamie Redknapp or Louis Saha:
Speed, who got famous streaming games like Fortnite, NBA 2K and FIFA, was presumably brought in by Sky to leverage his web following and supposed appeal to younger football fans, which at time of posting stands at 13 million YouTube subscribers and 5.4 million Instagram followers (he’s permanently banned from Twitch).
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As of today, though, nearly all of Speed’s promotional material on Sky’s social media has been deleted (excluding that single Tweet above), with The Athletic reporting that Sky made the choice after they were made aware of a video that did the rounds in April—one which became so notorious we reported on it—wherein Speed made incredibly hostile and misogynistic comments to his teammates:
While Speed later apologised for those comments, they were so bad that Riot Games banned him from not only Valorant, but League of Legends as well (his Twitch ban, meanwhile, was also for misogyny, only a different video). It’s weird—provided that it was so widely reported, that Tweet has 180,000 likes and 11.7 million views and it was only 7 months ago—that no person at Sky thought to even Google his name before putting him within the highlight like this!
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