Why I left The Athletic

And what's coming next

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new soccer startup that I think you’re going to like. If you want to hear more about it, you can sign up here for the official announcement next week and follow us on:

• Substack

• Bluesky

• Discord

• LinkedIn

But first, here’s why I decided to do it.

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Five years ago, I got the best job in the world: writing about soccer for a living.

At first it wasn’t much of a job at all — more of an escape from one, really. During the strange pandemic summer of 2020, I walked away from a big law firm in New York City, still up to my eyeballs in law school debt, and for lack of any better ideas about what to do next I started a soccer blog called space space space.

Against the odds, some of you guys actually read it. Within a year, the mailing list filled up with fans, coaches and front office types from football clubs all over the world. FC Barcelona, the team I support, flew me out to the Camp Nou to speak at a conference and gave me a shirt with my name on it. I guess I probably should have framed it or something but I just wore it on the couch on the weekends while doing my new job. The office dress code was chill like that.

The secret to making it as a professional soccer writer, as far as I could tell, was having no idea what you’re doing. I never played at a high level. I didn’t really even start watching games until I moved to Latin America in my twenties. In the decade since, though, I had fallen in love with the sport and studied it with the zeal of a convert, watching and reading everything I could get my hands on, educating myself however I could. That was what space space space was about. I didn’t just want to write about soccer — I wanted to take it apart piece by piece and figure out what made it hum.

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that you guys were curious too. Soccer fandom has been changing for a while now. About 15 years ago, Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid and Michael Cox’s old blog Zonal Marking set off a new wave of fascination with how teams play. Around the same time, a community of analytics bloggers were diving into the rich new datasets that companies like Opta had begun collecting in hopes of measuring how soccer works. International broadcasts and digital video made it easier for coaches and fans to study the game in detail, and social media brought the world’s soccer conversation together, for better or worse. Thanks to the internet, a generation raised on Football Manager had everything they needed to overthink the hell out of a bunch of sweaty dudes chasing a bouncing ball.

This new breed of fans wasn’t meeting down at the pub. They were finding each other on message boards and Twitter, in comment sections and Discord servers and, as I soon learned, through newsletters like space space space. As Bill Simmons — whose ESPN spinoff Grantland helped push the nerds into the sportswriting mainstream — used to say: yup, these are my readers.

A lot of you were also early subscribers to The Athletic, a sports media startup that made data and tactics writing a big part of its subscription model. So when they reached out to me about coming on for Tom Worville, who was leaving to work for a club, I jumped at the chance. As I wrote to you guys at the time: “Tom’s gig as an analytics writer for a subscription-driven site that loves longform might be the only job on Earth that would give me a salary and benefits to do the soccer nerd stuff I love.”

As it turned out, I never really did Tom’s job. Mark Carey, one of the nicest and hardest-working colleagues I’ve ever had, became the analytics guy, leaving me in more of a free eight role. I still did a lot of data journalism on topics like why managers don’t matter, why penalties are dumb, and why teams should throw the ball into the box and launch more free kicks into the Dyche Zone. I covered cool research other people were doing on evaluating scouts, valuing off-ball runs, and using neural networks to measure counterattacks. In addition to writing articles, I wrote a ton of code for The Athletic’s data analysis package and created tools like pass networks, team playstyle wheels, territory maps, and match dashboards.

As far as I was concerned, though, data was always just one route to the goal of trying to figure out how soccer works. The most fun projects combined tactics and analytics to tackle big subjects like the Five Kingdoms of Football, how the World Cup has changed over the last 60 years, how Gregg Berhalter’s USMNT changed American soccer, the progress of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool or the many stages of Lionel Messi’s career. I really enjoyed doing a series on the mechanics of the game called How Football Works, and sometimes the tactics deep dives didn’t involve data at all, like the ones on Pep Guardiola’s coaching arc or how Messi moves off the ball.

My two favorite stories I ever wrote for The Athletic weren’t even on the data and tactics beat, just regular old reported longform on Christian Pulisic’s chess addiction and what Messi means to American soccer (yeah, there was a lot of Messi stuff, sorry). I was grateful to work for a publication that let me chase whatever seemed interesting, and to do it alongside a bunch of outstanding journalists whose work I’d admired for years.

But the The Athletic was changing, as startups tend to do. They got acquired by the New York Times, which was good news — at long last, my work would share space with Pulitzer winners and Wordle — but also a big change, because it meant the company would have to make money now. In the end, the dream of a subscription-driven sports site that prized big, nerdy projects didn’t survive shareholders, and I never quite figured out what my tactical role was supposed to be in the new manager’s game model.

The truth is there was always some tension between what I really wanted to do (understand soccer) and what paid the bills (posting). Soccer is hard. It takes a lot of work to learn interesting new stuff about it, and the more I learned, the harder the work got. One of my most-read articles at The Athletic was a thing on identifying 18 player roles with data. It was based on the work of a brilliant data scientist buddy of mine, Mike Imburgio, but even with his guidance it took a week or two of coding and fiddling around with features to build a halfway decent model and write it up. Worth it, I thought, because big analytics projects drove a bajillion subs back then and this would be a fun new tool we could use in lots of other Athletic articles. But a few days after the article dropped, some changes to the data broke my code and there was no time to go back and fix it. New articles to write, new deadlines to meet. So it goes.

Anyway, last year I got a text from Mike: he wanted to quit his day job and work on soccer data full time. Hold that thought, I told him. What if there was a way for us to work on cool shit like the player roles project together, all the time, and give it directly to fans? The data models he had been building for clubs were way better than anything the public had access to, and my whole sportswriting career was proof there’s a growing appetite for this stuff. We could start a company that let us think about how soccer works, free from article deadlines or the chaos of working for a club — all we needed was a business plan that could connect the dots.

And so, just like I did five years ago, I quit my job last summer without knowing exactly what the future would look like. I’d learned to trust that if I followed what I was really interested in, other people would be interested too.

For the last few months, Mike and I have been building a startup called futi that’s the most interesting soccer project I’ve done yet. Next week we’ll finally get to announce it, and I’m pretty damn stoked. If you’ve ever liked the stuff I write about, I’m pretty sure you will be too. We’ll tell you all about futi pretty soon, but the basic idea is to bring real, club-quality soccer analytics to everyone in a way we hope you’ll love.

Sign up right here to get that in your inbox:

You can also join our Discord to talk soccer nerd stuff with us, follow us on Bluesky, and connect with futi on LinkedIn if you have a passion for professional networking (or if you happen to be friends with investors). We’re doing this thing for fans and we want you to be part of it.

It was tough to step away from soccer writing, easily the best job I’ve ever had. I’m glad I’ll get to do some of it again for futi’s newsletter, where we’ll show off what we’ve been working on and try out new ideas to get your thoughts on them. The part I’m most looking forward to, though, is seeing all the things I hope you guys will do with the tools Mike and I have been building for you. As much as I love both soccer and writing, I’ve come to realize they’re just two paths to the same goal: starting a conversation with curious people around the world about something we all love. That’s the project I want to work on. That’s the game I really want to crack.