How Two Strava Operators Built a National Sports Publication One City at a Time

In January 2016, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann launched The Athletic in Chicago. The two met at Strava, the subscription fitness platform. They believed a deeply committed audience would pay for coverage built around its specific interests. Their audience was the die-hard sports fan, and the product was ad-free, subscription-only reporting focused on the teams those fans followed.

Six years later, The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic for $550 million in cash. The publication had 1.2 million paid subscribers as of December 2021. The purchase remains one of the largest ever paid for a digital-native publication. 

Most digital publishers of the 2010s built around topics and chased the largest possible audience. The Athletic built around places. Neither founder had ties to Chicago. They chose it for team density, with the Bulls, Bears, Cubs, White Sox, and Blackhawks all in one market. Mather told The New York Times in 2017 that a city like Chicago held roughly 100,000 die-hard fans, and he described that group as a lucrative subscription business on its own.

A local sports subscription has a rare property. Fans of a specific team check on that team daily, through winning seasons and losing ones, for decades. Toronto followed as the second market, and the city sites became tests of a repeatable unit. Hire the best beat writers in a market, put their work behind a paywall, price it annually, and measure whether the diehards convert. They did.

Twenty months after launch, The Athletic ran sites in 15 professional sports cities in the US and Canada, including all seven Canadian NHL cities. By October 2018, it covered 47 markets, up from 12 that January. Venture capital funded the sprint. A $40 million Series C in October 2018 valued the company around $200 million, and a $50 million Series D in January 2020 brought total funding to $139.5 million at a valuation of roughly $500 million. Axios reported a 90% renewal rate alongside the Series C, and Mather said most new markets were profitable.

In each market, The Athletic recruited the beat reporters local fans already trusted. Mather described the approach in a 2017 New York Times interview, saying the company would “wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed” while hiring their best people. The remark drew years of criticism. The insight underneath it was sound. A beat writer's byline carries a portable audience, and when a trusted reporter moved behind the paywall, a measurable share of readers followed with their credit cards. By the sale, the company employed about 600 people, including roughly 400 in the newsroom.

In August 2019, The Athletic launched its British arm with 57 writers and editors, many recruited from national newspapers and regional dailies, including David Ornstein from the BBC. Every Premier League club received a dedicated reporter. A club functioned like an American sports city, with a passionate audience served by trusted reporters. The identical sequence ran again, club by club.

The strategy was expensive. The Athletic generated $47 million in revenue in 2020 while burning through $41 million, and 2021 brought about $65 million in revenue against operating losses of about $55 million, per figures shared with Times investors. The subscriber base kept compounding. The company passed 1 million subscribers by September 2020, months after the pandemic shut down live sports. Retention through a season without games showed subscribers were paying for their relationship with the writers.

The Times announced the $550 million all-cash acquisition on January 6, 2022, with both founders staying on as co-presidents. The Times folded The Athletic into its bundle, and by the end of Q1 2024, 4.99 million Times subscribers had access to it. Advertising and Apple licensing revenue arrived under new ownership. In Q3 2024, The Athletic posted a $2.6 million adjusted operating profit, its first profitable quarter under the Times, and by May 2025 it had been profitable for three straight quarters. The Times shut its own sports desk in 2023 and handed daily sports coverage to The Athletic.

The Athletic now serves as the sports report of one of the world’s largest subscription news companies, covering more than 47 North American markets and the United Kingdom. Its growth validated the founders’ original thesis: fandom is local, readers will follow trusted beat writers to a new publication, and a national publication can be assembled one devoted market at a time. Subscribers arrived city by city, and six years after launch, The New York Times paid $550 million for the network they had built.

The Athletic built a national sports publication city by city. The founders launched in Chicago in 2016, hired the beat writers local fans already trusted, and sold ad-free coverage on an annual subscription. The same template ran in Toronto, then across 47 North American markets, then club by club in the United Kingdom.

A vertical audience that looks national is often a collection of local audiences, each with its own trusted voices and its own reasons to pay. A builder who wins those geographies one at a time, with a repeatable template, assembles an asset that competitors can only match with years of hiring, audience building, and local trust. What began as one newsroom in one city became the sports report of the world's largest subscription news company. See you next week.

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