The Athletic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Athletic began in January 2016 as an independent, subscription-only sports website, launched with no advertising and no name recognition outside Chicago. Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann built it. Both were former coworkers at the fitness company Strava. They bet that fans would pay for sports writing instead of reading it for free.

  Six years later, in 2022, The New York Times Company paid $550 million to acquire that same website. By 2023, The Athletic had absorbed The New York Times' own sports department entirely. How did a startup nobody had heard of convince readers, and later a media giant, to pay for journalism the industry gave away free? What did the site actually cover to earn that kind of price tag? And how far did its reporting reach beyond the scoreboard?

• 2. The Subscription Wager

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  Y Combinator selected The Athletic for its summer 2016 batch, backing a plan to publish sports journalism without a single advertisement. The founders wanted proof that die-hard fans would pay directly for reporting other outlets gave away. Their stated mission was blunt: "smarter coverage for die-hard fans." At the time, a handful of newspapers were experimenting with paywalls. The dominant industry belief still held that information on the internet had to stay free. Mather and Hansmann bet the opposite, on strong reporting, a clean app, and no ads at all.

  Jon Greenberg served as founding editor when the site launched in Chicago that January. He was joined by Sahadev Sharma, covering the Cubs, and Scott Powers, covering the Blackhawks. Greenberg and Powers had both come from ESPN Chicago. Sharma left Baseball Prospectus's Cubs vertical to join the new venture.

  That original three-person newsroom covered exactly two teams in exactly one city. It would need reinforcements within months, as the company started looking well beyond Chicago.

• 3. Filling The Map

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  Toronto became the second market in October 2016, with new coverage aimed at the Maple Leafs, Raptors, and Blue Jays. James Mirtle took over as editor-in-chief there. He had spent more than a decade as a sportswriter at The Globe and Mail beforehand. Cleveland followed in March 2017 under editor-in-chief Jason Lloyd. Detroit joined in June 2017 when Craig Custance left ESPN to lead that market.

  By August 2017, the Bay Area had its own team. Longtime San Jose Mercury News writer Tim Kawakami became editor-in-chief, with Marcus Thompson as columnist. National coverage grew at the same time. Baseball writer Ken Rosenthal joined shortly after Fox Sports cut its entire writing staff. Stewart Mandel launched a national college football section called The All-American at the end of that August, and Seth Davis brought college basketball into the national lineup. September 2017 added Philadelphia, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and the rest of Canada, pushing local coverage to 15 US and Canadian markets. Most of that push was aimed at underserved hockey fans.

  February 2018 brought announcements for New York, Dallas, and Cincinnati, plus baseball-only coverage in Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Arizona, and Kansas City. National baseball writers Jayson Stark, Jim Bowden, and Eno Sarris joined under editor Emma Span. Denver and Boston got full local coverage that April. Denver's team came largely from The Denver Post, and Boston's from the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and MassLive. College football coverage grew too, with dedicated writers assigned to Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

  Soccer entered the mix in May 2018, covering both domestic and international leagues. Buffalo joined that June, staffed by reporters bought out from The Buffalo News, alongside expanded Los Angeles coverage. July 2018 added Atlanta, led by former Atlanta Journal-Constitution writers David O'Brien and Jeff Schultz, plus Baltimore, Wisconsin, and 19 new college football writers covering most major NCAA programs.

  Fantasy sports coverage launched in August 2018 alongside new markets in Washington, D.C., Carolina, Nashville, Indiana, Miami, and New Orleans. Shams Charania joined to expand NBA reporting, and Jay Glazer added NFL coverage. By September 2018, additions in Jacksonville, Houston, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Las Vegas completed local coverage of every NHL and NFL team. Memphis arrived as the 47th market that October, finishing coverage of every NBA team as well.

  That November, The Athletic signed three veteran television journalists, including 60 Minutes correspondent Armen Keteyian, to build video coverage alongside its writing. Motorsports followed in May 2019, with veteran journalist Jeff Gluck leading coverage centered on NASCAR but reaching toward events like the Indianapolis 500.

  By 2022, this city-by-city buildout had produced coverage across 47 North American markets, all 32 NFL teams, all 30 MLB teams, all 30 NBA teams, and 23 of the 32 NHL teams. One region still sat outside the map entirely.

• 4. Crossing The Atlantic

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  The United Kingdom became The Athletic's first market outside North America in August 2019, focused mainly on domestic and international football. Ed Malyon took charge as managing director, with Alex Kay-Jelski serving as editor-in-chief for the new operation.

  Two acquisitions followed quickly. In April 2020, The Athletic bought the UK football YouTube channel Tifo Football, which kept much of its original identity and now operates as Tifo Football by The Athletic. Two months later, in June 2020, the company acquired podcast production house Muddy Knees Media.

  Laura Williamson became editor-in-chief for the UK and Europe in April 2024. By then the UK roster included writers Michael Cox, Oliver Kay, David Ornstein, and Daniel Taylor. Financing all of this growth, at home and abroad, meant convincing investors long before any of it turned a profit.

• 5. Chasing Capital

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  Investors put a total of $139.5 million into The Athletic across five funding rounds. Courtside Ventures led the first, a $2.3 million seed round in January 2017, and returned that July to lead a $5.4 million Series A.

  March 2018 brought a $20 million round led by Evolution Media. Cofounder Alex Mather said the money would fund new cities and grow the writing staff beyond its then-total of 120. A further $40 million arrived in October 2018 through a Series C round co-led by Founders Fund and Bedrock Capital, earmarked for teams covering audience, data, editorial, subscriptions, podcasts, and video.

  That capital bought loyalty as much as growth. The Athletic reported 600,000 paying subscribers with an 80% year-over-year retention rate, and 60% of them followed teams in two or more cities. By September 2020, the company announced it had reached one million subscribers worldwide, alongside a push into new breaking-news formats. None of that loyalty solved the deeper problem: the company still could not turn a profit without outside help.

• 6. A Buyer Emerges

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  By 2021, unprofitability had caught up with The Athletic, driven by high costs and a business built on venture funding rather than steady operating revenue. At that point the company had 1.2 million subscribers and $80 million in revenue, on top of $55 million already raised from investors.

  Axios opened talks in March 2021 but walked away without making an offer. By May, The New York Times had emerged as the clear frontrunner, though Vox Media was also circling. Those Times talks collapsed that June. Then, on the 2nd of November 2021, reports surfaced that sports-betting companies DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment were also bidding for the company.

  Talks with the Times revived. In January 2022, the New York Times Company announced it would buy The Athletic, with the deal expected to close in the first quarter of that year. The Times promised the newsroom would keep operating independently, and Mather and Hansmann would remain on staff under new publisher David Perpich.

  That independence proved temporary. In June 2023, the company cut 4% of its staff, reassigned 20 journalists, and stopped using team-specific beat reporters. The New York Times Guild condemned what happened the following month, accusing management of "outsourcing union jobs on our sports desk to a non-union Times subsidiary under the preposterous argument that The Times can 'subcontract' its sports coverage to itself."

  The site itself changed address in May 2024, moving from theathletic.com to nytimes.com/athletic. That same year, in the third quarter, The Athletic posted a profit for the first time in its history. By the end of 2024, 5.83 million subscribers had access to it, directly or through a bundle, the last time that figure was made public. The second quarter of 2025 brought $54.0 million in revenue and $5.8 million in profit, a fourth straight profitable quarter. Starting in the third quarter of 2025, The New York Times Company stopped breaking out The Athletic's finances in its own reports, closing off the one public window into how the operation was performing.

• 7. Reporting On Power

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  Tim Cato's 2018 investigation into the Dallas Mavericks exposed how high-ranking staff there ignored, and sometimes tacitly approved of, financial misconduct and mental abuse inside the organization.

  In March 2021, reporter Brody Miller documented sexual misconduct spanning every level of Louisiana State University's athletic program. His reporting, backed by interviews with former players, supported a parallel investigation carried out by the law firm Husch Blackwell.

  September 2021 brought The Athletic's most consequential sports investigation. It detailed soccer coach Paul Riley's sexual abuse of players including Sinead Farrelly and Meleana Shim, along with an unnamed additional player, during his time coaching Portland Thorns FC. The allegations had first reached the club back in 2016, and the report tied them to Portland's decision not to renew Riley's contract at the time. Riley simply took another NWSL coaching job afterward. Both the league and his new team offered no comment when the story broke, and Riley denied every allegation. He was fired shortly after publication, and the NWSL, FIFA, and the United States Soccer Federation all opened their own investigations.

  Investigative reporting like this ran alongside a very different kind of programming the company was building at the same time: audio.

• 8. Beyond The Page

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  Eighty-plus exclusive podcasts now sit inside The Athletic's lineup, a mix of daily, weekly, and league-specific shows covering every major sport.

  In August 2025, the company signed Acast as its exclusive podcast sales partner. That same month, The Sports Gossip Show joined The Athletic's podcast network. With Acast now handling ad sales across the lineup, that show becomes one more program competing for a slice of eighty-plus shows' worth of listener attention.