By George Marsden
Three seconds.
That is, approximately, how long squash now has to make its case.
There is no time to explain the scoring, introduce the players or describe the peculiar geometry of the court; no room for the history of the British Open, Egypt’s dominance or the long campaign that has finally carried the sport towards its Olympic debut.
But just enough time to stop a thumb from moving.
For a sport built on long rallies, accumulated pressure and patterns that reveal themselves slowly, that presents an obvious contradiction. Squash is increasingly being sold in fragments: a dive, a confrontation, an outrageous winner, a disputed call, each edited into the few seconds required to survive the attention economy.
For Simon Dent, social media executive at the PSA, this is now central to the job.
“We can post some content and think, ‘This isn’t going to do amazingly, but it’ll do okay,’” he says. “Then you wake up the next day and it’s got over a million views.
“That’s the world of short-form content. It’s so volatile and unpredictable. Anything can just catch fire.”
The opportunity is considerable. In the past, building an audience required people to seek squash out; social platforms can now place the sport in front of millions who have never watched a match.
Dent likens the algorithm to an e-bike: you still have to pedal, but something else is helping propel you forward.
The difficulty is deciding which version of squash gets pushed.
Experienced fans may appreciate the construction of a long rally, the subtlety of movement or the tactical importance of a straight length, but none of those necessarily offers the immediate hook demanded by TikTok or Instagram Reels.
Emotion, surprise and conflict often do.
Dent has seen some of SquashTV’s largest engagement arrive through precisely those moments. At the New Zealand Open, a clip of Aifa Azman saying that Marie Stephan had slapped her began with the accusation itself. The viewer immediately wanted to know what had happened.
It worked because controversy carries its own narrative.
That does not mean the PSA wants to build its audience around confrontation. Dent is conscious that continually promoting disputed calls, arguments and flashpoints risks presenting a distorted version of a sport that still values respect and sportsmanship. A clip may attract a huge audience while doing so for reasons squash would rather not celebrate.
There are other routes. Spectacular skill can travel just as far. A Diego Elias no-look shot generated significant engagement because it was instantly understandable: you did not need to know the players, the score or the tournament to recognise something unusual.
That is the bargain the sport is learning to make. The traditional question - is this good squash? - is no longer enough. Increasingly, the question is whether somebody who knows nothing about squash will care within three seconds.
Attention, though, is only the beginning. A million views mean little if nobody wants to see what happens next.
Will Salter is approaching that problem from the opposite end of the sport. An English professional climbing the rankings, he has spent the past few years documenting his life through YouTube videos, Instagram reels and behind-the-scenes footage from the lower reaches of the professional tour.
The idea grew from something he had wanted himself.
“I didn’t know how to structure training or what it actually took,” he says.
Professional squash can appear strangely opaque from outside. The leading players are visible under bright lights at major tournaments, but much less is seen of everything required to reach them: budget flights, hostels, training blocks, minor events and the hours between matches when very little glamorous happens.
Salter began filming that world.
His videos show the practical life of an aspiring professional rather than merely the finished product: travelling cheaply, preparing for tournaments, meeting players afterwards and trying to improve while moving from one event to another.
For younger players, that intimacy matters.
“People message me and leave comments saying they appreciate seeing what it takes,” he says. “Almost every squash club I visit now, a kid comes up and tells me they’ve seen one of my videos.
“That’s quite mind-blowing.”
Salter’s experience suggests that short and long-form content do different jobs. The reel catches somebody; the vlog gives them somewhere to go once curiosity has been created.
“Someone who’s never watched squash probably isn’t going to sit through a 10- or 20-minute vlog,” he says.
“But if someone is scrolling through Instagram and suddenly sees Mostafa Asal diving for a nick in a 20-second reel, they might stop and think, ‘What’s this?’
“The reels attract completely new audiences. My longer videos then keep those interested once they’ve discovered squash.”
He has learned, though, that he is subject to the same forces Dent is navigating.
“I uploaded one video titled ‘Conduct Match’, even though it wasn’t actually a conduct match - it was just something somebody had mentioned,” Salter says. “That video got around four times the views I normally receive.”
Conflict travels.
Yet Salter’s channel also illustrates the value of building an audience around something more durable than a single viral moment. Followers begin to know the player rather than simply the clip. They see the losses, cheap flights and unremarkable days as well as the victories, creating a relationship that conventional tournament coverage rarely allows.
That visibility can have tangible value. Salter believes his social media presence helped secure his sponsorship with Unsquashable at a point when his ranking alone would probably not have justified the deal.
“That was huge,” he says. “I would never have got signed at the ranking I was at when they signed me unless I had the social media.”
There is work involved. Videos have to be shot, organised and edited, often while Salter is travelling home from tournaments and trying to recover for whatever comes next.
For a player attempting to climb the professional rankings, content creation becomes another demand on limited time, although he insists it remains something he enjoys rather than resents.
His approach and Dent’s ultimately meet at the same point.
Short-form video cannot explain squash in its entirety, and perhaps it should not try. Its purpose is to create curiosity: an extraordinary retrieval, an improbable winner, a flash of personality that interrupts somebody’s scrolling for long enough to make them wonder what they are watching.
The danger comes if the sport begins confusing what attracts attention with what deserves attention.
Squash has spent decades trying to persuade people to watch more of it. Now, paradoxically, its route to a larger audience may begin by asking them to watch less.
Three seconds will never tell the whole story.
But it may be enough to make somebody want the next three.
