The Athletic Burns Through $100 Million

Sports subscription website The Athletic has lost nearly $100 million combined over the last two years, according to a report from Front Office Sports.

The Athletic has recently attempted to find a buyer to help it turn a profit, to no avail. A second round of talks between The Athletic and New York Times centered on a Times takeover ended in June. Sources told OutKick at the time that there were no plans for a third round of negotiations.

Since then, The Athletic has hired investment banking firm LionTree to locate a buyer, reportedly at a valuation of more than $750 million.

It could be a hard sell, given that the website lost $41 million in 2020 and $54 million the year before that, according to Front Office Sports.

Last year, The Athletic discussed a potential merger with news website Axios, but those talks fell flat in February.

Co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann launched The Athletic in 2016 with the idea of generating all revenue from subscriptions and renewals. The site immediately brought on multiple highly regarded sportswriters and currently provides ad-free national and local coverage in 47 North American cities, as well as the United Kingdom.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Mather told the Times in 2017. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

While The Athletic has indeed been successful in landing many of the world’s most talented reporters, it’s become more evident the site will need a financial lifeline to maintain its current strategy.

Amazon and Fanatics have also been approached about a merger or takeover, but both of those companies took a quick pass, sources said.

But it may not all be bad news.

Per Front Office Sports, The Athletic is staying upbeat in projecting "$77 million in revenue with $35 million in net losses this year," adding that it also "projects revenue to increase 54.5% next year, followed by another 31% jump in 2023, bringing a $15 million profit that year."

So far, though, the San Francisco-based company has fallen well short of those lofty goals.

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