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Recently, New York City’s Grand Central Terminal hosted the Tournament of Champions, one of the most prestigious events on the professional squash calendar—similar to a tennis Grand Slam. Squash, which will debut as an Olympic sport at the 2028 Summer Games, in Los Angeles, remains niche; at Grand Central, there were no reporters running around, no designated press area, no press conferences. Broadcasts of the matches, pre- and postgame talk shows, and news reports came from a single source: SquashTV, the sport’s sole broadcaster, owned and operated by the Professional Squash Association (PSA), the governing body. “Fifty percent of the audience throughout LA28 will have never seen the sport before,” Lee Beachill, the chief operating officer of the PSA, told me. “It’s a huge opportunity for us.”
I met Beachill—a former top squash player, now forty-eight—in SquashTV’s makeshift control room. He greeted me with a firm handshake as we sat down by a folding table, surrounded by cardboard boxes full of wires and merchandise. “The pyramids in Egypt or Grand Central, these are the venues that set us apart from other sports,” he said. “But it’s a real pain in the ass to work from these environments. Here, connectivity is difficult. There, you’re dealing with sand, which the equipment doesn’t like.” Beachill has been the head of SquashTV since its formation, in 2009, when streaming was still a novelty. “We didn’t have the money to do fully fledged TV,” he told me. “And we’re still doing everything on a very limited budget.” SquashTV, which now travels across the globe to cover forty-five tournaments in a season, generates a profit thanks to its sponsors and twenty-five thousand subscribers, though Beachill said that it struggles to reach beyond the squash community.
Squash has, in the past, attracted wide interest, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it was once a mainstay of newspaper sports columns. Today, aside from a few Substacks, podcasts, and a freshly revamped coffee-table magazine called Squash Player, the sport is virtually nonexistent in the press. SquashTV has a monopoly on footage rights: it offers live and on-demand matches, expert analysis, interviews, and documentaries at $13.99 a month or $119.99 a year; highlights and behind-the-scenes footage appear on its social media.
Last year, however, squash received broad exposure from an unexpected source: In April, an anonymous YouTuber going by the name Quash Bad Squash posted a twelve-minute video analyzing the game of Mostafa Asal, a twenty-four-year-old from Egypt who is the sport’s top-ranking male player. The video labeled Asal’s on-court behavior “unsportsmanlike” and called him “a cheater” for the way he hindered the movement of his opponents and got away with it. The video quickly reached hundreds of thousands, which prompted Quash Bad Squash to probe further into players’ behavior and critique the PSA’s refereeing. Soon came a New York Times profile of Asal, focusing on his controversies. Squash fans flocked to the comments sections of SquashTV, urging the channel to acknowledge that a scandal was brewing.
“I respect the SquashTV punditry a lot. I think that they do as well as they can with the resources available to them,” said Quash Bad Squash, who agreed to engage with me on the condition that we only exchange emails; the quasher insisted on anonymity. “The main criticism I have is that it is obvious that the relationship between pundits and active players causes them to be very neutral about controversial situations. Every time they would discuss Asal, it was always about defending him. When they interviewed Asal’s coach”—James Willstrop, a former world No. 1—“they painted a picture of my videos being a hate campaign and focused their attention on my identity instead of the analysis.”
I asked Beachill what he made of the insurgent analyst. “Whoever produced these has got talent. And they highlight issues that are very relevant,” he said. The videos have helped the PSA reflect on its work, he added. But in a small world where commentators are former pros, and the whole traveling circus, players and media alike, stay in the same hotels, keeping distance and holding players to account can prove difficult.
Joey Barrington, a former pro and SquashTV’s lead commentator since its inception, told me that players are “sensitive” to criticism, even though “90 percent of the time there’s lovely stuff that’s said about them.” Pundits, he argued, have gradually gotten better at scrutinizing on-court behavior. But they share a goal: “We’re all in it to make the sport better and to reach viewers outside of the squash world.”
SquashTV is now trying to seize the opportunity to build up its capacity and prepare for the Olympics. Recently, Michael Absalom, a former BBC and Sky Sports commentator, was hired as lead presenter to host pre- and post-match shows, in an effort to make a more TV-ready product. “Having those segments, those thirty minutes to cover the main talking points, just like football or rugby would, is crucial,” he told me. “We want people to feel like they’re with the players, in that cauldron of pressure. Ultimately, in LA, we want to make a spectacle.”
“It’s going to be a fantastic broadcast—we’ve already gotten attention before we’ve even hit a squash ball,” Barrington said. Games will be played on the set of Universal Studios. “We’re going to nail the Olympics, just like we do every tournament month in, month out.” He is more concerned about what will happen down the road. “It’s not guaranteed that we’re going to Brisbane afterwards,” he said, referring to the site of the 2032 Summer Games. “We could really just be a one-hit wonder.”
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