140 caps at international level, 7x Women’s Super League winner, 7x FA Cup winner and a UEFA Cup (now re-branded UEFA Champions League) match winner in a quadruple winning season.

All these accolades coupled with a degree in Sports Journalism & Broadcasting should qualify you for top jobs football punditry right?

Not if you’re Alex Scott according to some.

Last week rumours circled that Alex Scott MBE will be replacing Sue Barker at the end of the year on BBC’s “Question of Sport”. Although the public body have denied reports of it vehemently, in what would be her biggest role yet, along with her role as a Sky Sports pundit, the rumour mill truly went into full swing.

Abuse wherever she’s gone

Scott has been on the end of abuse from the day she first went into sports punditry on Sky Sports. Were they offended by the quality of her analysis? Were they offended by her hue? Were they offended by the fact that she was female?

Maybe all the above, but after showing her worth on Sky Sports Super Sunday weekends and great work on the BBC’s coverage of the World Cup, you’d think she had proved she was worthy of any role she gets, but clearly a lot of people are upset, offended or unwilling to accept that she’s changing the face of sports presenting one institution at a time.

Social media went into meltdown when the QoS rumours hit the net. Both optimists and trolls simultaneously flooded the timeline.

With tweets ranging from “woke agenda” insinuations to box-ticking assumptions, completely disregarding her professional football career, degree and prior experience.

More than “just an average sportswoman”

Her list of honours as a professional trounces that of most English professional footballers (to put it nicely, only a small handful of players have a comparable honours list). In addition to this, she is the ambassador of the UK’s first women’s football academy, aptly named the Alex Scott Academy in partnership with Puma.

In 2020, the fact that there is still distinguishing between pundits and female pundits implies that they are inferior, which could not be any further from the truth, as highlighted by Micah Richards below:

Change is apart of life. There was a time Sue Barker was not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, but over 25 years later, here we are with a sense of de ja vu.

Disapproval is inevitable, but like her profile, Alex Scott is still set to rise.