Alex Mather and the price of caring too much

On August 18, 2011, Alex Mather put a complaint into a text file. Local newspapers were shedding experienced reporters. The sports writing he admired elsewhere concentrated on national stories. His own teams kept falling through the gap. He saved the file. A dissatisfied customer had begun making notes for a business.

There is something pleasingly modest about that beginning. No unveiling. No crowded stage. A Philadelphia sports fan, living away from Philadelphia, wanted someone to take his interests as seriously as he did. The eventual price attached to that irritation was $550 million, the amount The New York Times Company agreed to pay for The Athletic in January 2022.

Mather had spent his first 30 years in Philadelphia before moving to California. Distance gave him access to the technology business and a worse seat for the daily conversation about his teams. A score could travel across the country instantly. The texture around it was harder to replace.

“My team didn’t have LeBron James, so ESPN wouldn’t cover them.” His explanation had the compact grievance of a fan who has watched the national broadcast move on. The Athletic would turn that grievance into a service: follow particular teams closely, hire people who know them, and ask the people who care to pay.

A subscription education

Before he hired a newsroom, Mather worked on a product for people who took running and cycling seriously. At Strava, he led product management and product design. There he met Adam Hansmann, whose background was in finance and operations. Their future partnership joined the person shaping the product to the person thinking about how a business could support it.

Strava offered a useful lesson in concentration. A dedicated audience could support a paid service built around an activity already occupying a large part of its life. The Athletic’s founders wanted to apply that lesson to spectators. A reader who knew the roster might also want to know why the roster had been assembled that way.

Mather’s route was through technology rather than a newspaper apprenticeship. He attended Penn State from 1998 to 2003. By the time The Athletic took shape, he was bringing the habits of a product builder to an industry whose central asset remained the work of reporters. The combination would make him persuasive to investors and, occasionally, infuriating to newspaper people.

The partners launched The Athletic in Chicago in January 2016. The choice had a practical attraction: the Cubs looked capable of a championship. Founding editor Jon Greenberg had learned that ESPN would not renew his contract when the founders contacted him on LinkedIn. They were offering a new beginning at a moment when he needed one.

Chicago first. Then the habit spread.

That first market mattered because an idea about readers still had to encounter actual readers. Greenberg brought local experience and a following. The Cubs supplied a season with a remarkable ending. The startup had chosen a city where people had plenty to discuss, then paid journalists to stay with the discussion.

Toronto became the second city in October 2016, with James Mirtle leading its coverage. Cleveland and Detroit followed in 2017. By September that year, the network included Philadelphia and more Canadian markets. The expansion gave Mather’s personal complaint a broader test: would other fans recognize the same missing service?

The answer depended on the names on the page. Tim Kawakami joined to lead the Bay Area operation. Ken Rosenthal added national baseball authority. Seth Davis and Stewart Mandel brought college basketball and football coverage. Readers could arrive for a familiar writer and discover that their subscription bought more than one familiar voice.

The underlying arrangement was easy to understand. The original service charged readers and dispensed with advertising. Fewer interruptions gave the writing room to breathe. A fan could read about a team without first conducting delicate negotiations with an autoplay video. For a business selling attention to detail, the reading experience was part of the argument.

The sentence that followed him

In 2017, Mather gave the newspaper industry a reason to remember him that had little to do with product design. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment.” The comment, about recruiting from local papers, turned a business strategy into a public provocation.

He later apologized and said he was not rooting for newspapers to fail. The correction mattered. So did the original language. Editors and reporters had spent years watching colleagues leave depleted newsrooms. A venture-backed founder announcing his intentions in that register was unlikely to be received as a gracious new neighbor.

The episode leaves a useful wrinkle in his story. Mather was also a reader formed by newspapers. As a child, he would take the sports section of The Philadelphia Inquirer and leave the rest for his family. The product he wanted to rebuild owed a debt to the institutions he had described so carelessly.

His ambition and his affection occupied the same space, awkwardly. He wanted the experienced reporters, the daily habit and the authority of the sports page, housed in a different business. Newspaper people could reasonably welcome a new employer for journalists while disliking the prospect of their own institutions becoming its recruitment pool.

“Our long-term ambition is to have tens of millions of subscriptions.”

Alex Mather, on The Athletic’s ambition in 2017

When the journalists became the transfers

By 2019, the hiring campaign had crossed the Atlantic. During several days in May, British sports writers came to London’s Park Lane Marriott to hear The Athletic’s pitch. The meetings produced the sort of corridor choreography usually reserved for a transfer window: people passing colleagues while attempting to appear entirely unsurprised.

That summer’s British expansion enlarged the experiment. Following a club meant caring about a particular place, but the people doing the caring might live almost anywhere. The Athletic could connect those dispersed loyalties through one subscription. Mather’s experience of following Philadelphia from California had acquired an international counterpart.

The scale was changing quickly. In July 2019, The Athletic reported more than 500,000 subscribers. It was adding podcasts and investing in WNBA coverage as well as preparing its English football offering. The publication was becoming a bundle of recurring interests, giving a subscriber more reasons to open it between the major events.

The bundle also brought a difficulty. Every new beat meant people to recruit, edit and pay. Every new subscriber brought the promise of recurring revenue and the possibility of leaving. Growth offered evidence that the appetite existed. Keeping the operation financed was a separate obligation, and one that the enthusiasm of fans could not settle by itself.

The bill for all that attention

In January 2020, The Athletic raised another $50 million. The round was led by Bedrock Capital, with participation from Emerson Collective, Powerhouse Capital and existing investors. Mather was talking about finding more subscribers abroad after the British launch. The plan still pointed outward.

Later that year, the company cut 46 jobs, nearly eight percent of its staff, and introduced pay reductions. Most employees were asked to take a ten percent reduction for the rest of the year. The founders had expected to reach profitability that year. They were instead making decisions with immediate consequences for people who had joined their experiment.

The publication nevertheless reached one million subscribers in September 2020. That milestone and the job cuts belong in the same account. A company can attract paying readers and still face difficult economics. Calling either fact the whole story would make Mather’s business much easier to describe and much harder to understand.

By December 2021, The Athletic had 1.2 million subscribers. Its 2021 revenue was about $65 million, while its losses were about $55 million. Those figures explain why a buyer with a subscription business, an existing audience and resources to absorb further investment could see possibilities that the standalone operation would struggle to fund.

A newspaper buys the sports page

The New York Times Company announced its $550 million agreement on January 6, 2022. The acquisition completed the following month. Mather, the founding chief executive, initially became general manager and co-president; Hansmann became chief operating officer and co-president. Both would report to David Perpich, the new publisher.

The transaction gave Mather’s history an irony that required little embellishment. A founder whose recruiting language had so irritated newspapers was selling to a newspaper company. The Times wanted more people to subscribe to its products. The Athletic brought an audience with a habit, a set of loyalties and reasons to return.

The buyer expected more investment before the operation contributed to profit. It also saw an advertising opportunity alongside subscriptions. The original ad-free proposition was entering a larger commercial system. The deal preserved a publication and financed another chapter; it did not freeze every promise made at the beginning.

Mather’s story continued beyond that sale. He subsequently founded Eternal, which publicly launched in 2025 and announced its wind-down in July 2026. The Athletic remains the venture that made his argument visible at scale. Its acquisition price records what a buyer paid for the company, rather than a measure of his personal wealth.

The detail worth keeping

For all the figures, one of Mather’s explanations of fandom comes down to a rubber band. His grandfather wore one around his wrist at baseball games. After keeping score, he could roll up the scorecard and secure it. Attention had produced something worth taking home.

Mather grew up in Philadelphia as the oldest of three children, watching his mother support the family. He has credited her work ethic and optimism with shaping him. Those details give his persistence a personal history without making the company’s outcome feel preordained. Plenty of determined people start companies. The readers still have to arrive.

The founders described learning to stay level through unpredictable growth, and wrote a company value accordingly: “Never settle. Never take shortcuts.” Their advice to younger founders was to trust data and persist. It was a more useful instruction than assuming that a good day had permanently solved the business.

The scorecard offers a quieter way into what Mather built. Someone had cared enough to record the game carefully, and someone else remembered the care. The Athletic asked whether that kind of attention could earn a subscription. Mather and Hansmann spent six years putting a company around the question. Eventually, a newspaper bought the answer.