Abstract
My teenage years would have been a great deal easier had I not been a Leeds United supporter some 180 miles away from Elland Road. In a large, Hertfordshire comprehensive among a sea of fickle Arsenal fans and glory-guzzling Manchester United supporters, I occasionally got hold of The Square Ball, the long-running Leeds fanzine, but otherwise resigned myself to scraps of Leeds news from whatever national newspaper my dad had picked up.
We didn’t have The Athletic in those days. The US subscription-based sports website, founded in 2016 with the mission to create “smarter coverage for die-hard fans”, set up shop in London last year and in doing so, sent British sports journalism into a spin. Its aim? To take the model of in-depth commentary and insight that it used with ice hockey, baseball, American football and basketball to gain more than 500,000 subscribers and replicate it with “soccer” in the land where association football was founded. An ambitious target of one million subscribers globally by the end of 2020 was mooted.
To get there, The Athletic went on a summer spending spree worthy of Real Madrid in the early 2000s. Oliver Kay (chief football correspondent, The Times), Daniel Taylor (chief football writer, The Guardian) and David Ornstein (sports correspondent, BBC) joined their ranks under the watch of editor Alex Kay-Jelski (The Times sports editor) and managing editor Ed Malyon (The Independent sports editor). It poached staff from FourFourTwo, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror – reportedly offering journalists 20-30 per cent more than their current employers – and secured the services of digital playmakers Michael Cox (@zonal_marking) and Adam Hurrey (@footballcliches), who, like the rest of the recruits, brought their significant social media followings across with them.
On top of that, it hired a raft of local sports writers in cities with big teams but under-resourced sports desks. The Brighton Argus, the Chronicle in Newcastle and the Birmingham Mail lost some of their leading football writers, as did the Yorkshire Evening Post, as chief football writer Phil Hay, who had covered Leeds at the paper since 2006 and amassed an army of more than 140,000 Twitter followers, also joined the team. Not only did The Athletic gain well-connected talented writers, but it also got an instant audience.
Phil holds a special place in many Leeds fans’ hearts, including mine, and so it didn’t take long for me to take up the offer of a half-price introductory subscription for £30 for a year. (In the early stages of The Athletic, writers were controversially compensated for the number of subscriptions they sold, but the UK operation has never done this). In return, I’ve got access to articles that go deep into the fabric of my team – detailed pieces on the backroom staff and the club’s Argentinian coach, nostalgia-laden articles about the days when Leeds graced the Premier League, and even an interview conducted during a game with the parents of a young starlet, as well as creatively commissioned pieces on teams and personalities I didn’t realise I cared about.
There are no blow-by-blow accounts of matches that most fans have already seen, no meaningless player rating pieces and no made-up transfer gossip (commonplace for other digital-only sports sites). The tone is insidery and inviting and the regular writer Q&As and countless podcasts (including recent additions on German football and fantasy football) make subscribers feel part of a club. It’s exactly what sports journalism should be on the web – niche, deep and of value – and why a reported 100,000 subscribers have signed up in the UK in just six months.
As with all subscription businesses, The Athletic’s challenge will come when the half-price subscriptions end and fans are asked to pay full whack. Not that anyone seems to be too worried: retention rates are over 80 per cent (almost unheard-of in subscription businesses) and the founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann recently announced a further $50million of funding – adding to the $90million of venture capital they had already raised – valuing the company somewhere in the region of $500milion (to put it in perspective, that’s roughly the same as it would take to buy Leicester City or Everton).
If the chances of Leeds United crashing and burning this season are high, I expect The Athletic to fare much better. Its club-led, pay-to-access model will work for as long as sport continues to hold fans’ attention and those fans, like me, continue to have a glimmer of hope.
