In the world of sports commentary and punditry, football is arguably the most male-dominated of the lot. You don’t need to spend time online when a female commentator, presenter or pundit is working before you will see all manner of abuse being sent their way from men who feel as though they have no place working within a men’s game. Obviously, such views are extremely outdated, which is why broadcasters often ignore them and employ the best people for their job regardless of their gender. Here is a look at those that have made a name for themselves.
If you read the other pages on this site, then you might well notice some crossover, given the fact that there are some excellent women working in football broadcasting.
Hayley McQueen
Of all of the various presenters, pundits and commentators on this list, there is a strong argument that Hayley McQueen might well be the best-known. Born in Manchester on the ninth of December 1979, McQueen was essentially born into footballing royalty, even if you ignore the pun on her name. Her father is Gordon McQueen, the former footballer, so it’s little surprise that she grew up supporting Manchester United even when she lived in Scotland and Bangkok. Her broadcasting career began when she worked as a runner for Richard and Judy.
She joined Boro TV, the television channel of Middlesbrough, working as a reporter and producer and was eventually headhunted by Sky Sports in order to become one of the main presenters on Sky Sports News. Having also worked for Premier League TV, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio X, no one could ever argue that she doesn’t have the necessary experience to be considered one of the best female presenters working in football. Having briefly left Sky to work for Manchester United, she returned to Sky Sports News when the channel was launched in HD in 2010.
Fara Williams
Fara Tanya Franki Merrett was born on the 25th of January 1984 and is known professionally as Fara Williams. She joined Chelsea as a youth player, playing in midfield and regularly scoring goals as well as taking set-pieces during a career that saw her play for both Everton and Liverpool, in addition to Arsenal and other clubs. She earned 177 caps for the Lionesses during her career, which included four European Championships, three World Cups and a Summer Olympics for Team GB. She retired in 2021, at which point she began to make the move into broadcasting.
Williams has an incredible story to tell, having been homeless for six years whilst still playing for Chelsea and England. When the Women’s Euros came about in 2022, Williams was part of the BBC team covering the matches and continued to work for the broadcaster after that. She worked with fellow former player and female presenter Alex Scott when Scott took over the presenting role of Football Focus, with the pair joking at the time that her presence on the show might be able to help it win back some viewers that had departed when a woman took over from Dan Walker.
Izzy Christiansen
If you want to look for experience in a pundit, then you’ll struggle to find much more than that offered by Izzy Christiansen. Born Isobel Mary Christiansen on the 20th of September 1991 in Macclesfield, Christiansen joined the Manchester United youth system before moving to Everton. It was at Birmingham City that she got her breakthrough, playing 34 games for them before moving to Manchester City in 2014. Four years later and she was on the move again, this time gaining some experience of life abroad thanks to a season with French side Lyon, seeing out her career at Everton.
Although she didn’t retire as a player until the end of the 2022-2023 campaign, Christiansen began working as a pundit in 2019 and has worked steadily ever since. The combination of her experience as a player and her work as a coach has made her an excellent addition to the Sky Sports studio, as well as working regularly for the BBC. In 2023, Christiansen covered the FIFA Women’s World Cup for the Seven Network in Australia, proving that it isn’t just UK broadcasters that are keen to hear what the former player has got to say about footballing issues.
Laura Woods
When it comes to women working in men’s football, they have to work twice as hard as most people in order to do so. That is a fact proven by the career of Laura Woods, who began her broadcasting career by working as a runner for Sky Sports. In spite of the fact that there are countless men who attack her on social media all the time, Woods takes it with good grace and regularly uses clever put-downs to ensure that they know their place. In spite of her association with football nowadays, Woods actually got her on-screen break covering darts for Sky Sports’ YouTube channel.
Eventually, Sky realised that she had star quality and she became a regular on Super Sunday before she chose to leave in order to work for ITV. She was front and centre for the broadcaster’s coverage of the Women’s World Cup in 2023, which caught the eye of the producers of TNT Sports, formerly BT Sports. She became their lead reporter for boxing but, more importantly as far as we’re concerned, the Champions League coverage. In the months that followed, Woods was also used for Premier League and other matches, which has remained the case ever since.
Rachel Brown-Finnis
Rachel Laura Brown was born on the second of July 1980 in Burnley, Lancashire. She joined Accrington Ladies as a youth player, then in 1995, aged just 15, she moved to play for Liverpool Ladies. In spite of her age, she was thrown in at the deep end and started against an all-conquering Arsenal side in a match that was played at Anfield, which the Gunners won 6-0. By the end of the season, however, she was playing in the FA Women’s Cup final. In 1998 she left Merseyside for America, playing for the Alabama Crimson Tide and then the Pittsburgh Panthers.
After playing for Everton and Arsenal as well as ÍBV, an Icelandic side, she retired in the January of 2015. Having also played for England, Brown-Finnis, which is what she became after marrying professional golf caddy Ian Finnis in 2013, was a much sought-after voice for punditry by many of the big platforms. Consequently, she took on work for the likes of BBC Sport and BT Sport, which is what it was before it rebranded as TNT Sports. She worked as a pundit for the Women’s World Cup in 2023, covering matches for the ‘Beeb’ and giving her professional opinion on the goings-on in Australia.
Kelly Cates
There are few people working in football that seem as destined to do so as Kelly Cates. The daughter of legendary Liverpool player and manager Kenny Dalglish, Cates was one of the first presenters ever to work on the newly launched Sky Sports News in 1998. She remained with the channel in one form or another for the years that followed, eventually becoming one of the main presenters of Sky Sports’ football coverage after having enjoyed a brief stint with rival broadcasters Setanta Sports and Virgin Media, rejoining Sky in the August of 2016.
Such is Cates’ ability to control the room when leading presenting duties with the likes of Roy Keane, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher that she is widely accepted as being one of the best in the business, even by the sexists. She has also worked for the BBC for numerous years, presenting 606 with Ian Wright and doing other work on Radio 5 Live. Such is her association with the broadcaster that when Gary Lineker announced he would be leaving as host of Match of the Day, Cates’ name was one of the first to be linked with the role.
Emma Hayes
Emma Hayes will be better known to most as the former Chelsea manager who won everything there was to win in the game, apart from the Women’s Champions League. Born in Camden, London, in 1976, she was briefly attached to the youth team of Arsenal Ladies before her career was drawn to a premature close thanks to an ankle injury suffered on a school skiing trip. She studied European Studies, Spanish and Sociology at Liverpool Hope University College, later reading for a Master’s in Intelligence and International Affairs alongside coaching women’s football.
Having worked in the United States managing the Long Island Lady Riders and the Chicago Red Stars, she was given the role of being the United States women’s national team manager in 2024. As a result, it is maybe a little unfair to have her on a list of female presenters and pundits, given that most of the time she works as a professional coach, but the insights that she offers when she does work as a guest with one of the major networks mean that she’s more than worthy of a place on the list. Some will think she’s a bit dry and monotone, but there are few better to tell you about the game than Hayes.
Kate Abdo
One of the things that is so often forgotten when it comes to football is that it is supposed to be fun. If you want to get a sense of that, then it is worth tuning into the CBS Sports coverage of the Champions League, for which Abdo has been the anchor since the August of 2020. Usually, she is tasked with working with Jamie Carragher, Micah Richards and Thierry Henry, doing brilliantly to keep them all in line when they are often acting like naughty schoolchildren. Not that she doesn’t have fun of her own; Abdo is just as likely to have a laugh as the others in the studio.
We are referring to her as Kate Abdo as that is the name that most people will know her by, but she was born Kate Giles on the eighth of September 1981, changing her name when she married German-Iranian businessman Ramtin Abdo in 2010. They divorced in 2016, but she initially kept the name, then in the September of 2024, she married American retired boxer Malik Scott, taking his name. She has been in broadcasting since 2005, being used to cover the Bundesliga thanks to the fact that she can speak German, having also worked for CNN, Sky Sports and Fox over the years.
Reshmin Chowdhury
Born in London and brought up in what she describes as ‘an extremely open-minded, progressive Bengali Muslim family’, Reshmin Chowdhury went to work at Reuters TV News as a TV News Helpdesk Operator. She gained a wealth of experience working in numerous countries around the world, including Madagascar, Greece, the Maldives, Dubai and Nigeria at one point or another. She then worked with the likes of ITN, BBC and Bloomberg Television before becoming a presenter for Real Madrid TV. In that role, she became the first person to interview Cristiano Ronaldo following his move to the Spanish giants.
Well, that was fun! Thanks for all the lovely messages #UCLDraw #UCL @ChampionsLeague @UEFA pic.twitter.com/dWSzcsv7HE
— Reshmin Chowdhury (@ReshminTV) August 24, 2017
Those that like to do down the role of female pundits, largely because they can’t stand the idea that women might have something interesting to say about men’s football, would struggle to put up a coherent argument against Chowdhury being more than capable. There is barely a sports broadcaster that hasn’t used her services at one point or another, covering everything from the Premier League to the Champions League via presenting the World Cup draw and the Best FIFA Football Awards. She can work in multiple languages and cover numerous different sports.
Jacqui Oatley
Jacqueline Anne Oatley was born in Wolverhampton on the 28th of December 1974 and brought up in Codsall, South Staffordshire. The daughter of a Managing Director of a large gas appliance company and a retired nurse, Oatley attended all-girls junior school St Dominic’s in the Staffordshire town of Brewood. She loved to watch and play football, passing her A-Levels before studying German at the University of Leeds. She travelled the world before heading to London in order to work in intellectual property, studying print journalism and radio production at night school.
She eventually gave up her intellectual property job in order to gain journalism experience, eventually joining BBC Radio 5 Live and becoming the first woman to commentate on a football match on a British network. She made further history when she became the first female commentator on Match of the Day, later being used for both men’s and women’s football matches. As well as working for the BBC, Oatley has also been a presenter for most of the main sports broadcasters in the United Kingdom and the US, being appointed as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2016.
Working in a Man’s World
Anyone who has ever listened to some of the complete and utter drivel spoken by the likes of Rio Ferdinand and Joe Cole will know that a man doesn’t have to be able to talk sensibly in order to gain work on broadcasters such as Sky Sports and TNT Sports. In fact, most of the male pundits that work for such companies have very little ability and yet are given work season after season. For women, the task is significantly harder. If they want to be able to work regularly, then they need to work hard to ensure that they’re well-versed on what they’re talking about, or else they’ll be roundly mocked and attacked online.
In fact, most female presenters, pundits and commentators will be mocked and attacked online regardless of how good they are at their job. A case in point is that of Eni Aluko, who has regularly been the subject of attacks from former footballer Joey Barton. It got to the point that Aluko took Barton to the High Court after he tweeted 45 times about her, which resulted in her receiving threats from some of Barton’s followers. Even now, many people attack Aluko and say that it isn’t because she’s a woman or she’s black but simply because she ‘isn’t very good’.
In the April of 2025, Aluko hit the headlines after suggesting that male broadcasters and presenters like Ian Wright risk blocking a pathway for female pundits. This was because Wright often works in women’s football, covering the Lionesses amongst other women’s games, taking up one of what Aluko believes is one of a ‘finite amount of opportunities for women’. It caused ITV, the broadcaster that has hired both Aluko and Wright in the past, to come out in support of the former Arsenal striker, but is a good example of what women are up against when trying to work in the male-dominated world of football.