BCOMS

The BCOMS Media Academy is back, and so is The Football season ⚽ Meet Ifiok Awak-Essien, BCOMS Media Academy alumnus, at the Emirates for press day: mic in hand, pitch-side access, inside the media room to interview managers and players at Arsenal Football Club 🎙️ New season, same BCOMS mission: getting underrepresented talent into the rooms that shape sports media. Some stats to remind you of what our academy and members have been up to since joining BCOMS: ✨ 350+ alumni placed in sports media since 2018 ✨ 16 have worked at the FIFA World Cup 2026™ - Canada, Mexico and the United States this year ✨ 60+ alumni have worked at Wimbledon over the last three years If you have a passion for a career in sports media, start with the BCOMS Membership, it’s how it all begins… 🔗 Find out more using the link in our bio 🎥 A big thank you to Abdinasir Ali-Hassan and the Arsenal Football Club communications department for facilitating our press day and Xavier Taylor for capturing the moment https://lnkd.in/e5Pd9ms6

The Media Academy is back in full swing! ⚽️ This weekend six Academy members were out creating content across four Premier League fixtures, gaining invaluable experience and showcasing their talent in live sporting environments. A huge thank you to Everton, Nottingham Forest, Arsenal and Brentford for their continued support of the programme. We’re incredibly grateful to all the clubs that support our mission, helping talented young people gain the experience, opportunities and confidence they need to build careers in sports media.😍 Having worked on the Media Academy for the past five years it’s been incredible to see the standard of talent coming through the programme continue to rise year after year. The future of sports media is in very good hands. 🔥 If you’re looking for emerging talent, have opportunities available or would like to connect with the next generation of sports media professionals I’d love to hear from you.

A huge congratulations to the successful applicants of BCOMS’ 2026 Media Academy cohort! 🎓 Out of a huge number of applications, we’ve selected this year’s Media Academy programme students. That’s a lot of people who took the leap and put themselves forward for twelve months of masterclasses, mentorship, and direct access to people working in sports media right now. We don’t take that lightly, and neither should you. 🌟To everyone joining us this year: the work starts now. You’ve got a room full of like minded individuals who share your ambition and a network built over fifteen years of doing exactly this: use it. To everyone who applied and didn’t get a place this time, we want to take a moment to thank you for considering BCOMS to nurture your sports media ambitions. The standard this year made the decisions genuinely difficult, and our BCOMS Membership remains open if you want to stay close to the community while you wait for the next round. It gives you access to our online masterclasses, Discord community, and our jobs board, open to all and self-paced. The Media Academy exists because the pipeline into this industry has never been open enough, this cohort is another step in fixing that. 👉🏽 Find out more about BCOMS at bcoms.co. #sportsmedia #sportsjournalism #diversityandinclusion

When we talk about diversity in sports media, why do we so often focus on just one dimension of it? Race is an important part of the conversation. But it isn’t the only factor that determines who gets through the door, who progresses and who feels they belong. Who can afford to spend months gaining unpaid experience? Who has access to industry networks before they’ve even submitted an application? Who feels able to be openly LGBTQ+ in a newsroom, a press box or around elite sport without worrying about the consequences? And who decides which of these barriers matter most? The reality is that opportunity in our industry is shaped by far more than ethnicity alone. Socioeconomic background, class, disability, sexuality, gender identity and a host of other factors influence who gets seen, heard, hired and retained. Yet many diversity conversations still treat underrepresentation as though it has a single cause. If we’re serious about building a more inclusive sports media industry, we need to ask harder questions. Not just who is missing but why they’re missing. Not just who gets a seat at the table but who never had a chance to enter the room. That’s why BCOMS has always taken a broader view of diversity and inclusion. Fifteen years on, I still think this is one of the least understood aspects of our work. But perhaps it’s also one of the most important. Because if our definition of diversity excludes people who face barriers that don’t fit neatly into a single category, are we really addressing exclusion at all?

Last night, Spain lifted the World Cup in front of a global audience. This morning, everyone's got a version of that story: the winning goal, the celebrations, the heartbreak in Buenos Aires. A lot of sport organisations talk about storytelling, fewer build it with the people the stories are actually about. Our Stories of Sport programme is built the other way round: communities who are underrepresented in grassroots sport: women, ethnically diverse groups, disabled people, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, help shape the content from the start, not review it at the end. The result is work that holds up because the people in it trust it 🫂 It's a model we think more of the industry should be using, and one we're actively building partnerships around. If your organisation is trying to move from talking about representation to actually resourcing it, get in touch: we'd like to show you how this works in practice 🤝

Impact Isn’t an Event. It’s What Happens Every Day, Every Month, Every Year.

Most diversity partnerships in sports media start and end with a logo on a slide: quite frankly, we’re not interested in that, and increasingly, neither are the brands and broadcasters we work with. Here's what a real partnership with BCOMS looks like: your people in the room delivering our academy masterclasses. Your organisation showing up at our events, not just funding them from a distance. In return, you get direct access to a talent pipeline that's been built over 15 years: alumni now working across the BBC, ITV, The Premier League clubs and major broadcasters worldwide, including 15 of our alumni at the FIFA World Cup this summer ⚽ 🎙️ This isn't a CSR line item. It's how you build a genuinely diverse production and editorial pipeline, with people who are ready before they arrive. If that's the kind of partnership you're looking for, let's talk 🤝