For years, whenever new female employees walked through the doors of Sky Sports, they were given an important briefing by their more seasoned colleagues: Watch out for Richard Keys.
His reputation for misogyny and inappropriate language was an open secret.
And long before he left the broadcaster in disgrace in 2011 – after sexist comments he and co-host Andy Gray made about a female referee when they thought their microphones were off – the sisterhood at Sky Sports made sure to look after their own.
Even during the Nineties and early Noughties, when misogyny in the media was still rife and Keys was riding high presenting the channel’s flagship Super Sunday show and fronting its Champions League coverage, a source recalls how Keys ‘took it to the extreme’ in terms of his sexist behaviour.
But the problem for female staff was that he was also very powerful. ‘He ruled the roost,’ they said. ‘He ran the show and got away with whatever he wanted.’
One presenter, who I have agreed not to name, goes further. ‘Richard Keys is the most awful and vile man I have ever worked with, and I’ve been around a long time,’ they said. ‘There didn’t appear to be a desire to rein him in, despite the words he would use as he and Andy Gray performed to one another, trying to make one another laugh.
‘He was a dinosaur back then and we are talking the early Noughties. Today you can’t bump into a Sky Sports employee from then and not have a conversation about Richard. Some don’t want to give him the oxygen, others are still cross at how awful he was.’
Andy Gray and Richard Keys during their TalkSport days. Today, the pair are holed up in Qatar where they present on BeIN Sports, writes Katie Hind
Gabby Logan pitch-side ahead of a UEFA Champions League match
And last week, those women were no doubt reminded of the horror of working for Keys, 68, when he posted a thoughtless comment online about former Sky Sports host Gabby Logan – hours after the world had learned of the death of her beloved father, Welsh football legend Terry Yorath.
‘Sad to hear the news of Terry Yorath’s passing,’ wrote Keys on X, in a post viewed more than nine million times. ‘He was a warrior & won fans over wherever he played. He was great for us at Coventry & the reason I got Gabby a job at Sky. I had no idea who she was when we met but I knew her dad. RIP Terry. Your daughter did you proud.’
The post prompted outrage. TNT Sports presenter Laura Woods led the charge against Keys, branding him a ‘t**t’. Dan Walker, a close friend of Match Of The Day host Gabby from his time at the BBC, wrote: ‘Richard, just imagine what it would be like for Gabby, or a member of her family, to read this. I’m hoping you have just worded this badly and it isn’t a dig at a really difficult time. There is still time to change it.’
I’ve been inundated with calls and texts from people with stories about Keys. Some are so eye-watering they are impossible to print. As one woman who knows quite a lot about the sports host put it: ‘You won’t have to look far to find people to s*** over Keysie.’ Indeed, one story I would love to share about Keys – but can’t for legal reasons – involves the time he had the hair on the back of his hands lasered off. The reason for the treatment had his colleagues rolling around with laughter, and it would certainly make you wince.
Keys got his comeuppance after 21 years at Sky Sports. He and Gray, presenting a Wolverhampton Wanderers v Liverpool match in 2011, made a jibe about female officials failing to understand the offside rule, as well as a cruel slur about the assistant referee’s appearance.
It opened the floodgates for further clips of them behaving in a sexist manner, including comments directed towards West Ham chairman Karren Brady, to be leaked. The pair apologised and left their jobs. In 2013 they joined TalkSport where – sources tell me – they were unable to get into any sexism scandals ‘because there were no women working there’.
Today, the pair are holed up in Qatar where they present on BeIN Sports. And the irony of them ending up in a country where women’s rights and freedoms are strictly curtailed is not lost on one former female colleague. ‘Typical, isn’t it,’ she says. ‘The only place they can get a job now is a country where women are ruled by men.’
But the latest comment by Keys has put him back in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.
Gabby, 52, a sportswoman in her own right who represented Wales and Great Britain at rhythmic gymnastics in her youth, is yet to comment on his public outburst.
But friends tell me she ‘absolutely despises him’. ‘Gabby is a total pro, she is lovely and she is extremely supportive of women,’ says one of her pals. ‘She and Richard Keys were never going to get on. She can’t stand him.’
Gabby Logan with her father Terry Yorath in 1998, launching a heart disease screening drive
TNT Sports presenter Laura Woods led the charge against Richard Keys after his post on X, branding him a ‘t**t’
That was clear from her 2022 autobiography, The First Half, where she tells an anecdote about a flight she took with ‘especially cruel’ Keys and Gray when she was seven months pregnant with her twins, now 20.
She wrote: ‘In full earshot of me – and anyone who might be listening in our business-class cabin – Richard said, “So, Andy, what do you think of pregnant women?”
‘“I’m afraid I don’t find them very attractive, Richard. In fact, I never slept with my wife when she was pregnant with our kids.”
‘“So you didn’t have sex, Andy?” Keys asked. “No, I didn’t say that, Richard.” Then they laughed their heads off at their little “comedy” routine. I was embarrassed, of course, and thought their comments were especially cruel, bearing in mind they both had children and wives of their own.’
It was perhaps no surprise when, in 2016, Keys left his wife Julia after 34 years, while she was in remission from thyroid cancer, to have a relationship with his daughter Jemma’s friend Lucie-Rose, who is 30 years his junior and is now his wife.
As one associate of Keys says: ‘You’d have thought he would have learned his lesson by now. But after his comment about Gabby, it would seem not.’
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