Subscription sports website The Athletic has imposed a 10% pay cut on staff earning more than £50k, while 46 employees in editorial and business departments in the United States have been laid off.
The job cuts, which amount to 8% of all staff, have applied only in the US, whereas the pay cuts affect staff on both sides of the Atlantic.
“In order to ensure we can be a viable business for many seasons to come, we have to make decisions that won’t jeopardise our future,” said Taylor Patterson, a spokeswoman for The Athletic.
The media company was founded in 2016 and its first local site was in Chicago. In August 2019, The Athletic launched a much-heralded UK service focusing on football and said it had “the biggest team of football journalists ever assembled.”
The roster included four-time sports journalist of the year Daniel Taylor, former Yorkshire Post chief football writer Phil Hay, and James Pearce, the Liverpool reporter for the Echo.
The Athletic makes the vast majority of its revenue through subscriptions, which usually cost $60 a year in the US but are frequently discounted, and has nearly a million subscribers, according to Patterson.
This growth has been fueled by nearly $140m in venture capital funding, including $50m raised earlier this year. This enabled The Athletic “to keep this layoff under 10% of the company,” Patterson said.
