The Athletic

Overview

The Athletic was founded in 2016 by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann as a direct challenge to the ad-funded local sports page. The founders met at Strava, then built a publication around paid subscriptions, full-time beat writers, and the premise that committed fans would fund reporting they considered indispensable.^[1]

The editorial and subscription product worked. The company expanded across North American and British sports, passed 100,000 paid subscribers in 2018, and reached roughly 1.2 million before The New York Times agreed to acquire it in 2022.^[2][3] But the standalone economics did not work at the same speed. Reported pre-deal figures paired about $65 million in revenue with a $55 million loss. The Times acquisition did not rescue a failed editorial idea. It placed a successful product inside a bundle whose distribution, pricing, advertising inventory, and cost structure could absorb losses that were difficult for an independent publisher.

Founding Story

Mather and Hansmann met at Strava, where they saw a consumer subscription business built around passionate recreational athletes. Their insight was that sports reporting had a similarly committed audience, while local newspapers were cutting coverage and optimizing pages for advertising volume. They started The Athletic in 2016 with a simple reversal: readers, not advertisers, would be the primary customer.^[1]

The model also changed the employment proposition. Rather than aggregate commodity scores and short news items, The Athletic hired experienced local reporters and asked them to produce deeper beat coverage without page-view quotas. By 2018 the company had about 300 employees and a stated mission to make sports journalism sustainable.^[1]

Mather explained the audience in bundling terms: “Most of our subscribers are ‘super bundlers’,” people willing to pay for several media products rather than choose only one.^[2] That observation proved strategically important. The Athletic first behaved like a standalone bundle of local sports desks, then became a component of the much larger Times bundle.

The available evidence does not provide a verified verbatim quotation from Hansmann. That second-founder quote gap should remain explicit rather than being filled with investor or company copy.

Timeline

• 2016: Mather and Hansmann founded The Athletic after working together at Strava.^[1]
• 2018: The company operated in 47 markets, had more than 100,000 paid subscribers, and reported 90 percent retention. It raised a $40 million Series C, bringing total funding to roughly $70 million.^[2][4]
• 2022: The New York Times acquired The Athletic. Pre-deal reporting put it at about 1.2 million paid subscribers, $65 million in annual revenue, and a $55 million loss.^[3]
• June 2022: The Times added The Athletic to its bundle.^[5]
• 2023: The Times closed its standalone sports desk and leaned on The Athletic, then producing roughly 150 stories daily.^[6]

What They Built

The Athletic built a paid digital sports newsroom organized around teams, leagues, cities, and individual writers. A subscriber could follow local beats and national verticals in one product, receive newsletters and notifications, listen to podcasts, and read analysis designed to remain valuable after the final score was known.

The expansion playbook began locally. The company entered a market, recruited recognizable beat reporters, and converted their credibility and audience into subscriptions. It then layered national league coverage onto that network. By October 2018 it covered 47 markets and charged about $60 per year.^[2] This was not merely a paywall around a conventional newspaper sports section. It was a vertically integrated network assembled around high-intent fandom.

Under the Times, that network became both content and acquisition infrastructure. The Athletic supplies sports reporting to a broader bundle, while the parent company contributes cross-promotion, subscriber relationships, games, cooking, news, and advertising sales. Partnerships now extend the brand into advertiser programs and other products, including Nike Olympics work, Google's support for expanded women's sports coverage, Paramount+ sponsorship of Connections: Sports Edition, and an EA Sports partnership for content in the EA Sports App and FC 26.^[7][8]