The Athletic - any good?

[punky]

Missus bought me this month's copy of FourFourTwo as Sonny was on the cover. Stupidly priced at £6 but has been enjoyable reading about other clubs.

I know a lot of FFT journos jumped ship to The Athletic and they are doing an offer for £1 a month for 6 months then it goes up to £7.99/month I think.

Anyone subscribe and is it worth it?

 

[WannaDanceWithUdogie]

Missus bought me this month's copy of FourFourTwo as Sonny was on the cover. Stupidly priced at £6 but has been enjoyable reading about other clubs.

I know a lot of FFT journos jumped ship to The Athletic and they are doing an offer for £1 a month for 6 months then it goes up to £7.99/month I think.

Anyone subscribe and is it worth it?

I enjoy it, I have the £1 for a year offer on and it's defo worth it for me. I like their random long forms that you wouldn't get in other papers, they did one a few months ago about inside Soccer AM at it's peak and it was quite funny and interesting. Also read one the other day about Player liaison officers and their role in the modern game

 

[Wsussexspur]

I had it for a year. Started off ok but felt it went down hill around the start of the pandemic. Didn’t help that I thought the Spurs journalists were rather poor with there coverage and didn’t really feel they had decent sources etc at the club. Once my year was up I didn’t bother renewing the subscription.

 

[Everlasting Seconds]

What I feel about their guiding star for creating content is that they look at what’s out there in other media, and then they publish the opposite. So if 3-5 articles report on Levy considering hair transplant (fictive example) then they’ll publish an eloquent but fundamentally fluffy piece on the opposite. If you do that enough times, you’ll ultimately be the only publication that was correct on topic A, G and K. But whether that makes you reputable is a different story.

 

[MillerT]

Defo worth it imo, they regularly have deals going on to get a subscription at a discount. As others have said they've literally recruited the cream of the crop of UK football journos, so hard to see how it wouldn't be the best football magazine/media outlet in the country haha

 

[sherbornespurs]

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing, we will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.” Alex Mather, co-founder of The Athletic, in an interview in San Francisco.

I can’t speak about anyone else, but waiting for print competitors to bleed to death, then swooping in like vultures to steal the spoils sounds pretty repugnant to me. I rarely root for people to fail when taking a punt on a business venture, but I’m willing to make an exception in this particular case, the creation of the Uber of sports journalism.

Hopefully, the day will come when the world has had enough of this endless stream of reprehensibly self-important Trumpian 'hotshots’ looking to take over the world, egged on by venture capitalists who made their vast, and now-disposable, fortunes in the last generation of socially disruptive companies. The older I get, the more tiresome it becomes.

This has nothing to do with providing Sports fans with decent reportage, nor raising the standards of actual sports reporting - this is all about the money. If The Athletic becomes the Amazon of sports writing, which appears to be the goal, then we all lose out in the long run, and I have no desire to support people like this. I’ll never give these predators my money, no matter how good or how cheap their sports paper is.

 

[tobi]

It's worth it, excellent NBA and NFL coverage too.

 

[spursfan77]

I had it for a year. Started off ok but felt it went down hill around the start of the pandemic. Didn’t help that I thought the Spurs journalists were rather poor with there coverage and didn’t really feel they had decent sources etc at the club. Once my year was up I didn’t bother renewing the subscription.

I think it is because they come across as revelling in our disappointments more than a journalist covering us should do. But then I read articles on other teams and their reporters do too. It seems to be an editorial decision to have negative pieces on their clubs they write about.

I’ve actually kept the subscription for now not because there have been some other good articles and it’s not too expensive.

 

[Gassin's finest]

I enjoy it for the in depth reports about the games infrastructure, and stories on the games history. For example there's a great article on Lorimer today, interviewing Bob Wilson on facing his shots.

 

[McArchibald]

Had it for one year - chose not to renew. Too much chaff in between the few morsels of wheat.

 

[Seafordian Spurs]

Have a look at the mush on the guy that covers Liverpool. James Pearce?

The face that says 'even when we're shit we're still the bestest team in the world, la'

 

[King of Otters]

Haven't read it since we turned shit, but was enjoying it before that. It's great for analysis of individual players, particularly new or potential signings.

 

[Johnny J]

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing, we will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.” Alex Mather, co-founder of The Athletic, in an interview in San Francisco.

As a former journalist myself, the slow death of local journalism in the UK has been terrible and sad to witness. So Mather can get fucked.

 

[Marty]

I have it but I've stopped my automatic renewal as really I just listen to their podcasts (primarily Totally, Zonal Marking and Ornstein & Chapman) and only occasionally browse the site for articles these days.

Some of their club specific reporters are really good but as someone mentioned above James Pearce is the definition of special breed. I'm also very much not a fan of Jack Pitt-Brooke but I do like Charlie Eccleshare who also covers us.

 

[Westmorlandspur]

Well worth it if you are interested in general football as well as your own team. No match reports thankfully as I feel these are a waste of time in a lot of papers as you just get managerial quotes etc.
I pay 70p a week which is about the cost of the average daily paper.

 

[Spurrific]

I can't imagine anything I'd want less than to read long-winded, pretentious shite about football. Football, via Spurs, takes up way too much of our already short lives as it is. We should be reading books, not in-depth sports analysis delivered by some monocle-wearing, moustache-twiddling, penny-farthing-rider.

That and the guy that started it all sounds like a massive **** (as per sherborne's post above).

 

[Seafordian Spurs]

I have it but I've stopped my automatic renewal as really I just listen to their podcasts (primarily Totally, Zonal Marking and Ornstein & Chapman) and only occasionally browse the site for articles these days.

Some of their club specific reporters are really good but as someone mentioned above James Pearce is the definition of special breed. I'm also very much not a fan of Jack Pitt-Brooke but I do like Charlie Eccleshare who also covers us.

James Pearce ???

 

[carmeldevil]

McCourt (former American baseball LA Dodgers owner, another whole story there) and his ownership of Marseille . Can't believe he bought the team for only 45m Euros

mccourt - Pastebin.com

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

pastebin.com

 

['O Zio]

Defo worth it imo, they regularly have deals going on to get a subscription at a discount. As others have said they've literally recruited the cream of the crop of UK football journos, so hard to see how it wouldn't be the best football magazine/media outlet in the country haha

"Cream of the crop" is a massive exaggeration. They got enough reputable people to jump ship to give themselves some sense of legitimacy but I think you're overegging it just a tad.

Generally speaking I reckon the long form style stuff is an obvious gap in the market and I've enjoyed some of those kinds of pieces.

However, the dedicated club reporter stuff that they seem to place so much emphasis on to me just seem fundamentally flawed. I think I said it in a different thread recently but if you're a journo whose entire job relies on you having good access and inside info at one specific club, then there's a glaring conflict if interest there. If you're overly critical of the club or call out certain people, they're clearly going to be less inclined to give you access/info and therefore you become completely dispensible. Without all that you're no different to your average fan blogger type anyway. Not exactly the best environment for cutting edge journalism like they claim to be.

Plus it seems like the supposed insiders are a fairly mixed bag to begin with. Clearly some of them are great reporter's with a wealth of contacts and all that, plus enough credit in the bank to have a pop when necessary. Then there's Jack Pitt Brooke. If he's "cream of the crop" I'd hate to see what the degs are.

 

[aliyid]

Can anybody do a cheeky copy/paste of this article LINK

Intrigued by what they’ve got to say but don’t want to sign up (yeah yeah I know)