The Industry Case

BPSB (Building Professionals in Sports Broadcasting) is a workforce infrastructure organisation. We build the routes, standards and networks that move underserved talent into paid work across sports broadcasting, live production and branded content, and we hold the industry accountable for the pace of change.

We are rooted in the Black community, and we build for the full breadth of talent the industry overlooks. In the current climate, a narrow remit is not enough.

Who we build for

Underserved talent is not one group, and we do not treat it as one. We build for:

• Black and Global Majority talent
• Women
• Working-class talent
• Disabled talent
• LGBTQ+ talent
• People with caring responsibilities

These barriers intersect. A working-class Black woman with caring responsibilities does not meet them one at a time. Our work holds that reality, and builds routes wide enough to meet it.

The representation gap

The case is not abstract. On screen, Black talent is visible: around 43% of Premier League players are Black. Behind the camera, the picture inverts. In the Creative Diversity Network's latest Diamond report, Black professionals accounted for 2.7% of off-screen contributions in UK television, down from 4% in 2022 and below the 5.2% national workforce benchmark. The decline is the point: representation behind the camera is going backwards, not forwards. And Black professionals are not the only group under-served off screen. The same industry sidelines women, working-class, disabled and LGBTQ+ talent in different ways, and often in combination. Diamond, the industry's main diversity dataset, carries no dedicated category for sport, so the gap in our corner of the industry is not even measured. We build to close that gap, and we hold the industry accountable for the pace of change.

Rooted in the Black community

BPSB began in, and remains anchored in, the Black community. That grounding is not a limit on our remit; it is the expertise that shapes how we build routes for the wider range of talent the industry overlooks.

In the UK and across the global diaspora, we use "Black" to describe people of African and Caribbean heritage, including people of mixed heritage who identify with those roots. We also recognise "People of African Descent" as a widely used term in international policy and advocacy frameworks, and we acknowledge the United Nations' Second International Decade for People of African Descent (2025 to 2034).

Our Black-rooted approach makes us specific about the barriers people face, rather than treating inequality as a single, generic problem. It also strengthens our work with women, working-class talent, disabled talent, LGBTQ+ talent and people with caring responsibilities, particularly where those experiences intersect.

The areas we build in

BPSB builds routes into the parts of sports media where access, progression and decision-making power are often hardest to reach:

• Live production: including roles such as match directing, vision mixing, production management, technical operations and EVS.
• Branded content: including creative direction, strategy, campaign development, client services and commercial storytelling.
• Original storytelling: including documentaries, digital formats, development, producing and editorial work that expands whose stories are commissioned and seen.

These are areas of focus for the whole underserved workforce we serve, built on expertise rooted in the Black community.