Nick Green
Commercial Partnerships Director, UK
What is your role at The Athletic?
I joined The Athletic as UK Commercial Partnerships Director in December 2020. Before joining The Athletic, I spent over ten years working at The Telegraph in the sport partnerships team.
So, what is The Athletic?
The Athletic is one of the world’s biggest subscription publishers, with over a million paid subscribers globally. The company was founded in 2016 in the USA to provide sports audiences with insightful, premium content about the teams, clubs, leagues and competitions they most care about.
The Athletic arrived in the UK in 2019 and focused on football, acquiring some of the very best writers to offer fans content that can’t be found anywhere else. Whether it is James Pearce for Liverpool, Amy Lawrence for Arsenal or one of our other 50 UK-based writers, there is something for every football fan. We are the only sports publisher with a dedicated writer in place for every one of the 20 Premier League clubs.
As well as the unrivalled insight and in-depth analysis in our articles, we run the UK’s biggest football podcast network with 25 podcasts every week and over 4 million monthly downloads. We also have our fantastic Tifo YouTube channel, where over a million subscribers enjoy videos that offer thoughtful, intelligent content with a touch of humour.
In the two-plus years since we launched in the UK, we have seen a significant number of subscriber sign-ups, high retention levels and massive growth in overall audience numbers. Our football content has also helped drive growth for The Athletic in other key global markets in Europe, Australasia, Asia and Africa.
What is your approach to partnerships?
The Athletic has a highly engaged audience of football fans with a real passion for the game. We want to work with brands that share this passion for football and over the course of 2021, we have been successful in developing brilliant relationships with more than 25 brands.
This includes our women’s football partnership with Sky streaming brand, NOW, our official show for the Football Manager game with LiveScore and our long-standing podcast relationships with Paddy Power and bet365.
As we move into 2022, we are keen to continue to work with brands in a collaborative way across the various touchpoints that we have with football fans. That could include integration into one of our popular podcasts, sponsored content on our app, a live-streamed event from The Athletic on Twitter or using our expertise to create content for use on our partners’ own channels.
We have a flexible approach to what we can offer and how we can partner with brands. We will work together to understand objectives, shared goals and then identify how we can best team up in a way that really engages our audience and delivers results.
Can you tell us more about one of the partnerships that The Athletic has delivered this year?
One of the projects we are most proud of is our work with Nike during summer 2021, when we collaborated around their Land of New Football campaign.
Land of New Football is all about showcasing an inclusive, joyful and forward thinking vision for the global game.
We talked with Nike around how we might get involved and hit upon the idea of giving a group of young and diverse writers the opportunity for a paid internship in The Athletic’s London newsroom. These six writers had six weeks of the very best tuition from our world class editors, writers and producers.
They were then commissioned to write a series of articles that tackled some of the important issues that Land of New Football touches on – mental health, community and diversity. These impactful and engaging Nike-sponsored articles were published on The Athletic and Nike channels throughout the summer.
The campaign was successful at highlighting important topics that Nike wanted to align themselves with and it engaged a significant audience across our channels. The participating writers really enjoyed the experience and one of them, Elias Burke, is now in place as The Athletic’s Derby County reporter!
What are the current areas of focus at The Athletic and what are you looking forward to in 2022?
There is a packed football calendar next year and we are busy making plans for how we approach a series of mouthwatering events.
The summer will see England play host to Women’s Euro 2022. Interest in the women’s game has been growing for some time and there is little doubt that this tournament will see record levels of interest, particularly in the UK. Women’s football is an important part of our offering at The Athletic and this will only become more prominent as we get closer to the Euros kick-off in July.
Later in the year, we have the first-ever winter World Cup, and we are very ambitious about bringing this tournament to life for our global football audience.
At The Athletic, we will have an unrivalled offering for both the Euros and the World Cup, with insightful, passionate coverage across audio, app, social, video and events.
Beyond the two big international events, the domestic and European calendar in both the men’s and women’s game offers plenty of excitement and an engaging narrative to continue to enthrall subscribers and broader audiences of The Athletic throughout the year.
