When The Athletic launched in the UK last summer it lobbed a hand grenade into Fleet Street’s sports desks, and left traditional print media to clean up the mess.
The ambitious upstarts snapped up some of the top talent from Britain’s national newspapers.
The Athletic, first launched in the United States in 2016, has been described as “the Netflix of sport.” The subscription-based platform operates online and through an app. The businessmen behind the idea set their sights on the Premier League, realising its incredible worldwide interest.
One of their first major signings was Alex Kay-Jelski, then sports editor of The Times. “I only heard about them a week before I got the call.” he admits.
“The opportunity to build something from scratch was the most exciting thing I will ever do- I absolutely loved it.”
With each Premier League team having supporters around the globe, they decided to become the first platform to have a correspondent at each club. They believed that this would guarantee subscribers. It was estimated in 2012 that Manchester United had a support base of 692 million – tapping into this market could be a goldmine.
The Athletic costs £9.99 a month or £60 for a whole year and alongside the Premier League coverage there is space devoted to five Championship clubs, Scottish football, the German Bundesliga, Spanish football and the women’s game.
Among the star names they recruited were David Ornstein, who was BBC sports correspondent, Daniel Taylor, multi-award-winning chief football writer at The Guardian, and Oliver Kay, football correspondent at The Times.
As well as recruiting some of the biggest names in the industry, they also cherry-picked reporters from local papers. Gregg Evans, who covers Aston Villa for The Athletic, worked for the Birmingham Mail. “When the idea was first pitched to me, I thought it was too good to be true,” he says.
Kay-Jelski walked away from an incredibly prestigious role to join The Athletic. “I can’t rely on newspapers for the rest of my career,” he says.
But it seems that his step into the unknown is paying off. “Luckily it appears that the numbers of subscribers are stacking up to our expectations.”
Both Kay-Jelski and Evans admit that there are significant differences between newspapers and their new venture. “The lack of a daily deadline completely changes your thinking, at a newspaper no matter, what you have to fill the back page,” says Kay-Jelski. Evans tells me: “It took quite a lot of adjusting to, if I’m honest.”
In contrast to a newspaper where you will usually find a match report of a game, The Athletic offers its subscribers something different. They don’t always try to be the first to break a story, they prefer to take a step back, assess the situation, and then delve into their writing with more of an analytical approach.
Stories that have caught the eye over the recent weeks have included ‘Understanding Dele’, a deep look into Dele Alli’s career so far. ‘The art of a dressing room team-talk’, ‘Unwritten: When Villa signed a string of present-day stars – and finished bottom’ and ‘England’s no-cap wonders.’ All these features demonstrate The Athletics main aims – in-depth, lengthy articles, often featuring multiple voices with writers given time and license to be creative.
It has been change for Evans. “I get to actually watch the game, that’s one big difference,” he laughs. “For the past seven, eight years I had my head buried in the laptop.” He admits: “I have come out of my comfort zone and the level of the content I am being asked to produce has increased.”
At the end of each piece the subscriber can rate it from ‘meh’ to ‘awesome’ and leave a comment. Evans says: “I really enjoy engaging with subscribers, they give really constructive feedback. We also have to remember that its these guys that are paying for me to be here.”
The following that these local reporters bring with them is absolutely vital to the success of The Athletic. “If you are a Liverpool fan, you have to listen to what James Pearce is saying,” Kay-Jelski tells me. Thanks to social media, reporters have become celebrities in their own right. Pearce has 569,000 Twitter followers at the time of writing, that’s nearly double the number of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.
Although The Athletic is a new concept, it still has to have the infrastructure of a traditional sports desk. 15 journalists, many recruited from national newspapers, work in their central London offices.
It would be easy to think that The Athletic is going to sweep all before it and take over from newspapers. But without papers and their writers producing traditional match reports the more in-depth analysis found on The Athletic would lack a base. Kay-Jelski acknowledges this: “Everyone has a role and importance in the eco-system.” He goes on to say that: “I like the fact it is different.”
But Henry Winter, chief football writer at The Times, said: “The game is about the 90 minutes and everything else stems from that.”
The future surely has a place for the bold new ideas of The Athletic, alongside the old-school football coverage of the mainstream media.
By Alex Brinton