Inside the Rise of The Athletic UK: Interview with Founder Ed Malyon

Hi Ed, thank you for taking the time to speak to us today. Can you tell our readers us a bit about yourself and what you currently do?

Since I left The Athletic last year, I took some time off while we had our first kid. I am not sure I’ll ever get the chance to take 6 months off for something like that again, so wanted to make sure I took advantage and I think it’s something I’ll always be glad I did. Fitting around that, I’ve done some consulting with different media companies and ownership groups, which recently sprouted FootBiz, a newsletter-driven boutique media outlet focusing on the business of football. It’s such a big, important part of the sport now and we felt there weren’t many outlets devoted to it.

You worked for several large organisations in the industry such as Daily Mirror and The Independent. What inspired you to become a football journalist + editor, and how did you get started?

I was obsessed with football my whole life but never thought it was a career. I studied languages at university and still had no idea what I’d end up doing with it. I just knew I wanted to use my languages and travel, so was looking at airlines and hotel chains as potential avenues.

After spending some time working in Argentina and going to a lot of football there, I started blogging about South American football and eventually picked up some freelance opportunities. It kind of snowballed from there. I did a big piece on match-fixing which caught the attention of Gabriele Marcotti and as I finished my studies he was kind enough to take my phone call and give me some advice, which he never needed to do. He said I should give it a shot as a freelance journalist, and so I did.

I was very lucky that the summer I graduated was: 1) a time when digital was becoming a bigger priority for news organisations, and 2) 2012, with a European Championships and Olympics. If I’d graduated a year earlier or later then maybe I wouldn’t have found work, but the Mirror offered me some freelance shifts on the web desk (as it was then) to start and I ended up staying, helping build a team and being there for nearly five years.

You were instrumental in launching The Athletic in the UK. Could you share how that opportunity came about, and what were some of the key lessons you took from the experience?

At the Mirror and the Independent it was abundantly clear to me that the business model around journalism wasn’t working properly with print circulation falling. Newspaper companies were managing decline, investing in digital without a way to meaningfully fund it and it was all a bit grim. My entire newspaper career there were just waves of job cuts.

The Indy ditched printing and went digital-first, and they did a good job of making a profitable newsroom but it was a slog. I saw budgets being cut and good journalists being laid off across the industry but the appetite for the Premier League was greater than ever. It made no sense. In 2018 I had my first conversation with The Athletic, an outlet I subscribed to for their high quality coverage of US sports. They weren’t ready to go then but a year later they felt ready and got back in touch. It all happened very quickly. I flew to San Francisco that weekend, drew out the plan on a whiteboard and within 3 months we had actually launched the whole thing. It was a whirlwind, but some of the most fun I’ve had in my career.

How did you approach building and managing a team, and what qualities did you prioritise when assembling a top-tier staff?

It depends on your situation. At the Independent we had a lower budget and had to punch above our weight, so I was looking for ambitious, talented young people who had a point to prove and could use us as a stepping stone to something else. That is a really fun environment to be in, we had an unbelievable team spirit and worked hard for each other. I always ask people who report to me where they want to get and what they eventually want to do. Everyone in that team is now in a great job that they want to be in, doing what they want to do, so it feels like we achieved what we set out to do.

With The Athletic, there was budget so the emphasis for me was simply trying to create the best coverage of each club. For some, like Arsenal, that would mean hiring 2 or 3 or 4 people. For others, you’d just need the one person who was dominant on the beat like a Phil Hay up in Leeds. Alex Kay-Jelski agreeing to come as editor-in-chief was big for us and he prioritised getting good people in who would work hard and be a team. We didn’t want internal competition, we wanted a collaborative environment where everyone shared their information to produce the best possible journalistic output.

What were the key growth strategies for The Athletic UK and what advice would you give to others trying to build a sustainable media business?

Well, the launch made a big splash. It annoyed some people, which I can understand, but what we were doing was very difficult to do. Many people told us we wouldn’t be able to meaningfully insert ourselves into the landscape because of the dominance of the traditional media companies, which turned out to be incorrect, but it was a real fear going into it that kept me up at night.

The launch made a lot of noise and after that really we were judged on the quality of the work. If the work being produced wasn’t good enough, The Athletic wouldn’t have accrued the subscribers that it did. There are a load of things you can do in terms of performance marketing, and the spend there was quite heavy, but it cost less to acquire those subscribers than they were paying to subscribe, so it’s a model you’d happily repeat all day long. Just keep feeding the meter.

I don’t know how repeatable it is, what we did at The Athletic. It was a certain period of time when people didn’t have subscription fatigue, rates were low and investors were throwing money at projects. I think post-Covid start-ups have much more of a focus on getting profitable (or at least close to it) first before aggressively growing but in the second half of the 2010s it was all about how fast you could grow and build a moat between you and the competition.

You’re the founder of FootBiz. Can you tell our readers all about it and why you launched this newsletter?

To be honest I thought I was done with media but just from consulting with and spending time with executives in the football space, I kept hearing that there wasn’t enough coverage of the things they were interested in. And in an era when litigation and profitability and sustainability rules are some of the biggest stories in the sport, I thought that made no sense and it could be a good little business. The internet has bred an era of specialisation where if you can cover something really well then people will pay you for it. All the tools are there for anyone to use, it’s a question of whether you can execute on the vision, which is what we are trying to do now.

A couple of things lined up nicely and it actually came together very quickly this summer. Because of the failings of the traditional business model in publishing, there are some excellent, well-connected sports writers that are unjustly out of work so I looked to partner with them immediately, and then approached a number of subject matter experts to bolster our coverage in legal, financial, sponsorships and beyond. We haven’t even been going a month but it’s been a very healthy start and feedback has been great.

Could you share a memorable experience, project or an individual piece of work from your career to date that stands out to you?

Best experience for me will always be the 2014 World Cup. Because I kind of fell into journalism and did so by writing about South American football, the first two years of my career were simply trying to get sent to the World Cup. Most people want to cover England but I didn’t care, I was just over the moon to be there and covered most of the South American teams as well as France and Spain. I think I did about 12 games in 8 cities over 4 weeks. Just an absolute dream.

When I went to Russia four years later I had a terrible time and spent most of it depressed and sleep-deprived in the apartment we had rented, so it really underlined quite how amazing Brazil was.

Knowing what you now know, what advice would you give to your younger self if you were starting your career today?

I asked my first boss at the Mirror for some advice on a career in journalism and he said “don’t do it”. I never planned on being in journalism and don’t really consider myself to be anymore so I’m not really one for advice.

I guess I wish someone had taught me earlier to be more confident calling people you don’t know for stories. It took me a long time to get comfortable with that and it is crucial.

With constant changes in technology and consumption habits, where do you see the future of sports media heading?

Honestly, I am 35 and I feel like a relic already.

When I first started, we were the skilled young whippersnappers who could use photoshop and social media and that was considered a professional edge. Now, you see the content creators on TikTok and YouTube and the huge businesses they’ve created for themselves and it’s just a different world.

Will they ever be allowed into press boxes at Premier League games? Probably not. But the gatekeeping over that will probably reduce a little. A few years ago it would have been unimaginable that you could get Premier League accreditation for your Substack but it’s happening now.

The minimal access afforded in English football has always been closely guarded, so I’m interested in where that line is drawn over time. The league also should be mandating media access to sporting directors, other coaches and players a bit more. The American major leagues do this so much better, and there are hugely influential decision-makers and players that we never hear from outside heavily controlled events.

I think the assumption for so long was that the best coverage of the sport entailed being on the ground, at the press conferences etc and I would agree it does but does the audience? Loads of people watch tactical breakdowns on YouTube from creators who weren’t there. Far more than would ever read a match report from the same game.

A mistake that big, slow, old businesses make is to produce what they want to produce rather than what their clientele wants them to produce.

I think in media, if you don’t produce the content your audience actually wants (in the format they want it) then over time you will pay the price and we have seen that play out in a number of places.

Thankfully it seems SEO traffic is cooked now, so maybe we will see a return to creating what humans want to read rather than black box algorithms in Silicon Valley.

And finally Ed, what do you do to switch off outside of work?

Watch other sports, mainly. I love cricket and NFL but will watch virtually anything. I took up golf during the pandemic and play as much as I can.

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