The Athletic is negotiating a content-supply agreement with NFL Media that would place its reporting on NFL.com and inside the NFL+ streaming app, according to people briefed on the discussions. The talks involve editorial workflows, branding guardrails, and how subscriber conversion tracking would function when a reader arrives from NFL.com to a paywalled Athletic piece.
The structure under discussion resembles AP-style wire licensing more than joint venture. The Athletic would produce NFL coverage—team beat reporting, analysis, long-form features—and NFL Media would surface select stories on its owned properties, likely with co-branding or attribution modules. NFL+ launched in 2022 at $4.99 monthly and has roughly 1.8 million subscribers, per industry estimates. NFL.com registers 180 million monthly uniques during the season. The Athletic sits at 3.8 million paying subscribers as of the New York Times' most recent earnings call, up 12% year-over-year but still short of the 10 million target the Times laid out when it closed the $550 million acquisition in January 2022.
The timing reflects two pressures. First, the Times has been methodically pulling The Athletic's editorial apparatus into its cost structure: shared CMS, centralized video production, layoffs in March 2024 that cut 28 Athletic staffers. A content deal with NFL Media creates a new revenue line—licensing fees, traffic-share arrangements, or subscription attribution credits—that helps justify the newsroom spend. Second, NFL Media has a distribution problem. NFL+ was supposed to be the league's DTC beachhead, but it remains a narrow product: mobile-only live local and primetime games, condensed replays, NFL Network. It lacks the editorial ecosystem that keeps users opening the app between Sundays. The Athletic has 180 credentialed beat writers and columnists covering all 32 teams, plus a track record of driving 6.2 million app opens per month during football season.
The partnership also gives the NFL optionality on a bigger question: whether to build or rent its media operation. The league already operates NFL Network, NFL Films, and NFL Media's sales arm. It could staff up its own digital newsroom, but hiring and retaining talent at scale is expensive and slow. Licensing from The Athletic lets the NFL test whether high-end reporting moves the needle on NFL+ retention and NFL.com engagement without committing to headcount. If the answer is yes, the league can renegotiate terms or pursue an acquisition. If no, it walks. The Athletic, meanwhile, gets access to the largest single-sport audience in North America and a promotional vehicle that could drive subscriptions among the 71% of NFL fans who do not currently pay for sports writing.
Watch for announcement timing around the May 8-10 league meetings in Minneapolis, or possibly delayed until the July 24 NFL+ marketing push ahead of training camps. Separately, monitor whether ESPN or Fox Sports make a counter-offer to license Athletic content for their own digital properties, especially as ESPN+ subscriber growth flattens at 26.5 million. The Athletic declined to comment. NFL Media did not respond to a request for comment.
The deal, if it closes, marks the first time the Times has licensed Athletic IP outside its own walls since the acquisition, setting a template for potential partnerships with other leagues, teams, or platforms that need editorial depth without hiring it themselves.
The takeaway
The Athletic testing content licensing to NFL Media as subscriber growth slows and the Times hunts non-subscription revenue.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.