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 had met at Strava, the subscription fitness platform, where Mather had led product and Hansmann had worked on the business side. 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 agreed to acquire The Athletic for $550 million in cash. The publication had 1.2 million paid subscribers as of December 2021 and covered more than 200 clubs and teams. The purchase remains one of the largest ever paid for a digital-native publication. 

One City at a Time

Most digital publishers of the 2010s built around topics and chased the largest possible audience for each one. The Athletic built around places. Neither founder had ties to Chicago. They chose it for the density of its teams, with the Bulls, Bears, Cubs, White Sox, and Blackhawks all in one market, which meant one newsroom could serve five separate fandoms.

Mather told The New York Times in 2017 that a city like Chicago contained roughly 100,000 die-hard fans, enough to support a valuable subscription business on its own. Local sports coverage had an advantage national media could not easily match. Fans followed the same teams every day, through good seasons and bad, often for decades. That loyalty turned coverage into a durable habit. Expanding city by city allowed The Athletic to add a series of distinct audiences, each with its own trusted teams, routines, and reasons to subscribe.

Toronto followed Chicago as the second market. The early city sites functioned as tests of a repeatable unit. Hire the best available beat writers in a market, put their work behind a paywall, price it as an annual commitment, and measure whether the diehards convert. They did.

The Land Grab

Once the unit worked, the company scaled it at a pace that alarmed the rest of the industry. Twenty months after the Chicago launch, The Athletic operated sites in 15 professional sports cities across the US and Canada, including The Athletic Canada, which covered all seven Canadian NHL cities. By October 2018, the company had journalists covering sports in 47 markets, up from 12 that January.

Venture capital funded the sprint. A $40 million Series C in October 2018 brought total funding to $70 million at a valuation of roughly $200 million. A $50 million Series D in January 2020 brought the total to $139.5 million and the valuation to approximately $500 million. Axios reported alongside the Series C that the company had over 100,000 subscribers and a 90% renewal rate, and Mather said most of the new markets were profitable while older markets grew roughly 10% year over year.

The Hiring Engine Ran on Local Trust

In each new market, The Athletic recruited the beat reporters local fans already trusted. Mather described the strategy in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, 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, and the company spent a long time repairing relations with the industry. The underlying insight was sound. A beat writer's byline carries a portable audience. When the Cubs reporter fans had read for a decade moved behind The Athletic's paywall, a measurable share of those fans followed with their credit cards.

By the time of the sale, the company employed about 600 people, including roughly 400 in the newsroom. The newsroom was, in effect, an aggregation of local franchises, each anchored by names that meant something in one specific place.

The UK Proved the Playbook 

In August 2019, the model crossed the Atlantic. The Athletic launched its British arm ahead of the Premier League season with a staff of 57 writers and editors, many recruited from national newspapers and regional dailies. Every one of the 20 Premier League clubs received a dedicated reporter, alongside coverage of five Championship clubs plus Celtic and Rangers. The hires included nationally known journalists such as David Ornstein from the BBC and reporters from the Liverpool Echo, the Yorkshire Evening Post, and the Newcastle Chronicle.

A Premier League club functioned like an American sports city. It held a passionate audience served by trusted beat reporters who could be hired. The company applied the identical sequence, signed the trusted names, launched behind the paywall, and sold to the diehards, this time club by club.

The Economics

The strategy was expensive by design. The Athletic generated $47 million in revenue in 2020 while burning through $41 million. In 2021, revenue reached about $65 million against operating losses of about $55 million, figures Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien shared with investors. The losses reflected the cost of employing hundreds of journalists across dozens of markets before subscription revenue reached sufficient scale.

The subscriber base kept compounding. The company reached 1 million subscribers by September 2020, months after a pandemic shut down live sports entirely. Retention through a season with no games was the strongest possible evidence that subscribers were paying for their relationship with the writers. At the time of the acquisition, a subscription cost $71.99 per year after a promotional first year at $3.99 per month.

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The Sale

The New York Times announced the acquisition of The Athletic on January 6, 2022, at $550 million in cash, with Mather and Hansmann staying on as co-presidents. The deal made strategic sense. The company had a public goal of 10 million subscribers, and The Athletic delivered 1.2 million paying subscribers plus a sports audience the Times had relatively little exposure to. What the Times was really buying was the output of six years of geographic accumulation, a subscriber base assembled market by market that no competitor could rebuild without repeating the entire land grab.

The Times folded it into its subscription bundle, and by the end of Q1 2024, 4.99 million Times subscribers had access to The Athletic. Advertising, which the founders had excluded on principle, arrived under new ownership. In Q3 2024, revenue grew 29.8% year over year to $44.7 million, with $9 million from advertising and new licensing revenue from a deal with Apple.

In Q3 2024, The Athletic posted a $2.6 million adjusted operating profit, its first profitable quarter under the Times, against a $7.9 million loss a year earlier. By May 2025, Axios reported the segment had been profitable for three straight quarters, and Q1 2025 delivered a $2.9 million adjusted operating profit. The Times shut down its own sports desk in 2023 and handed daily sports coverage to The Athletic.

Where The Athletic Stands Now

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.

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