From Print to Digital: Lessons from Two European Football Writers on Growing Paid Newsletters

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The new football season — soccer, to us Americans — has begun in Europe, and you can read plenty of newsletters to follow what’s happening abroad. Big outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian have newsletters that cover international football, as do football-specific publications like Goal.

But football in Europe isn’t like a sports league in America: no Major League Soccer covers all of Europe. Instead, each country has its own top-tier league, like the Premier League in the United Kingdom or La Liga in Spain. If you care about just one league, you’ll want to find a newsletter that covers the teams you care about.

We checked in with two European writers who cover the sport in their countries. (Since this series is called The International Inbox, we’re going to use the terminology these writers use in their home countries — i.e., “football” instead of “soccer.”) Based in Lisbon, Portugal, António Tadeia has covered Portuguese football since 1992, with a focus on Portugal’s top league, Primeira Liga. He launched his eponymous newsletter in 2021 to supplement his work by providing commentary on television broadcasts and on YouTube. His newsletter goes out to over 6,000 free subscribers, providing commentary and analysis on Portuguese games, trades, and ownership, along with a dash of sports history and data crunching. He also has more than 250 paying subscribers, most of whom pay about 50 euros per year (the equivalent of about $50 U.S), which gives them access to all articles, the ability to comment on posts on his website, and access to a Telegram channel where they can get audio versions of the newsletter.

Over in Hamburg, Germany, Pit Gottschalk helms his newsletter, Fever Pit’ch — a play on his own name and Nick Hornsby’s soccer autobiography, “Fever Pitch.” Gottschalk, with the assistance of some staff columnists, a podcast producer, and a news agency, delivers comprehensive current coverage and analysis of Germany’s top league, ​​the Bundesliga, all with a veteran journalist’s authority. (Both Tadeia and Gottschalk started in traditional print media in the 1990s.) When we spoke in May, Gottschalk had over 35,000 subscribers and 173 paying members. Gottschalk offers three tiers for support, ranging from 48 euros to about 86 euros per year. (In U.S. dollars, that’s about $52 to $94.) If you pay for a year’s membership upfront, he’ll also send you a Fever Pit’ch coffee mug and a copy of his 2019 book, “Kabinengeflüster,” where he tells stories from the locker room. Occasionally, he’s even offered members of his community free tickets to sit next to him at games.

Both writers cover different leagues in different languages with distinct sports cultures, but they’ve shared similar paths, pivoting from traditional journalism to newsletters to make a living. I spoke with them about what distinguishes their newsletters from other sports coverage, how they generate growth, and how they try to create an informed, opinionated, and nontoxic online community.  

(These interviews have been condensed, edited, and combined.)

What’s your typical publishing schedule? What do your subscribers expect from you? 

António: Usually, I write a 1,000-word opinion piece every Monday to Friday, reflecting on what’s going on in [Portuguese and European] football. That’s usually for every subscriber, including free subscribers. Today, for instance, I wrote about an interview that a former coach, the Portuguese champion in 2019, gave reflecting on how he was sacked by the club one year after and about the same club, which is now thinking about sacking their coach who was champion one year before.

I have some side projects that I publish once or twice a week. Yesterday, I published something on FC St. Pauli, the German club that recently progressed to the Bundesliga. Now, I’m working on something regarding the history of Portuguese football, which I also do every month. I started in 1922, the year of our first championship. I’m in ’39-’40. I love doing it. I’m reading newspapers from 1939.

Then I have some reporting, some stories I think are interesting. I have sections about football finance and the multi-ownership of clubs: who owns the clubs and how that may affect the outcome of competitions and the outcome of the football business. [Editor’s note: Multi-ownership refers to ownership groups, like City Football Group, that own multiple teams in multiple countries.]

Pit: The Fever Pit’ch newsletter is published weekdays from Monday to Friday at 6:10 a.m., so nobody can forget when it’s delivered. My target group is people who had a newspaper in the past and don’t want to read a newspaper anymore. They stick to an overview of what has happened in sports, especially in football, during the last 24 hours. It’s a collection of links to the best stories in Germany. I try to deliver context, so I’ll send a column or a commentary to talk about how people should see this topic, like the background of some decisions from a match. I deliver stuff people can talk about so that they can make their points when they talk with their colleagues.

The slogan of my newsletter is “I feed your passion.” My approach is [to offer] opinion and background to understand football better. Other publications just have to write about what has happened. There are not many newsletter publishers in Germany [covering sports]. Newsletters are a marketing tool for most publications, so they do newsletters also in sports, but just to promote their own stories. I don’t have to promote any publications. [Ed.’s note: At Gottschalk’s last job in traditional journalism, he spent more than a year trying to convince colleagues to invest in newsletters.] You can find in my newsletter links to serious papers or also to yellow press papers because their story is very interesting. 

What led you from traditional media to newsletters?

António: I left traditional journalism ten years ago, in 2014. There was one guy above me in the sports paper called Record, but we were let go, and the administration decided to change the paper. Since then, I never got a job in traditional journalism in Portugal. The print business is absolutely bankrupt here.

In the dot com blast, newspaper people here thought, “Printing is a cost, distributing is a cost. We have this whole new thing, the internet. Let’s get our journalism to the people without the cost of distributing, without the cost of printing, and then we will get paid by advertising.” As you well know, that didn’t happen. Newspapers today in Portugal sell about a quarter of what they sold in the beginning of the century.

Today, unfortunately, if you want to be a journalist in Portugal, you have to get used to getting minimum wage, which here is about 800 euros per month. That’s what they are paying young reporters fresh out of university. In 2014, I started to consider other choices. I work as a pundit for the RTP, which is the public TV channel here. I make the commentary for those matches and could make a living out of that. But I could not live well. As my job was being a journalist, I started trying to make it by other means. I had a website first in 2015. I gave up on it in 2019 because I couldn’t get the scale or revenue. In 2021, I started my [newsletter].

TV commentary provides me with a little bit more than half of my income. On Substack, I have 250 paying subscribers. Every paying subscriber pays 5 euros per month, but Substack gets 50 cents. Stripe gets another 35 cents. I have to pay VAT over those five euros — it’s another 93 cents.

We have to pay income tax, which is another 20%. Out of every 5 euros, I get 2.50 euros and half. I get 600 euros per month from my newsletter (the equivalent of about $650 U.S.), and I work 40 hours per week on it. I can live off of other things, and my hope is that in two, three years’ time, I would like to retire from TV. It’s very demanding. But right now, it’s not possible. What I really like is to write. Unfortunately, I cannot make a living out of it.

Pit: I was the chief editor of a huge magazine called Sport Bild here in Germany and chief editor of Sport1. This is like ESPN here in Germany. I have a role model in this business, and that’s Bill Simmons. [Ed.’s note: Simmons built his reputation as a writer for ESPN.com in the early 2000s. He founded The Ringer, a website and podcast network, which sold to Spotify in 2020.] He has an international voice; I have a national voice. He creates an ecosystem called The Ringer, mainly on podcasts. I would do the same based on newsletters and podcasts. My biggest challenge is: How can I scale? Should I have ten different newsletters for each part of football? How can I bring in more contributors to Fever Pit’ch and pay them? To create this scale of economy with newsletters, that’s the next big thing.

The biggest challenge is when you create a newsletter on your own, sometimes you make mistakes. There’s nobody else who corrects you. At a traditional media company, you have some colleagues and other guys looking over your story to correct you if there’s a mistake. At midnight for Fever Pit’ch, there’s nobody else to take a look. I made two mistakes this morning in the newsletter issue, and I went crazy about this because I wasn’t able to see it until it was too late.

How did you choose what platform you use to send your newsletters?

António: I did my math, and what I don’t like is that [Substack] takes 10% of our income. I don’t have to worry about servers; I don’t have to worry about web design. I have nobody working with me. Right now, the newsletter doesn’t pay itself yet, after almost three years, but I know that’s the way [to build growth], so I just have to keep on working on it. I just have to write and publish. Right now, 10% of the income I get from there is still not enough to justify living and having to pay for what it would cost me to have the same thing outside of Substack.

Pit: I started with Revue, which started off Twitter. Then Elon [Musk] decided to close down Revue, and now my main website is Ghost, which I use for sending out the newsletter, but I don’t use their [payments] tool. I use Steady (a German-based membership platform), and the easy reason is for tax reasons because when people pay you in Germany, it’s easier to handle the tax issue.

Do you know how many of your readers come from outside your home country?

António: I’d say 30% to 40% of my most active subscribers are Portuguese people living abroad.  Boston and Newark are full of Portuguese people. We have a lot of people in Germany, a lot of people in France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the U.K. We have people in Angola, people in Mozambique, which were former colonies of Portugal.

Pit: I would say 5%. Many are in German-speaking areas of other countries like Switzerland. For Germans who went to the United States, the newsletter is their bridge to the old country. To bring my newsletter international is a little bit difficult because I stick to German football. All the clubs here in Germany are not owned by owners but by the people in the city. The law in Germany is called the 50 + 1 rule. All the members of a club own their own club. It’s different than in England or the U.S., where you always have millionaires who own a club. Here, the people on the street own their club, and they have to decide which hard decisions are made.

When you speak with your readership, via email, comments sections, or in public, how would you describe your community?

António: In 2019, I started a show on YouTube. You know, it was absolutely unbearable. There were comments, and I read them and debated with them. There was a very aggressive community. I had to stop it. It was starting to affect me. I was starting to lose my temper sometimes.

In my posts, only paying subscribers can comment; the others cannot. I still do my posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. But I stopped answering comments there. Everything you write, you are automatically accused of being corrupt. This is something which is very Latin. This culture of always reducing sports to something other than sporting merit — either it is refereeing, or it is corruption. It’s very Mediterranean.

Right now, I only interact with those who pay. It’s a good community. At the end of the season, I’m going to set up a lunch here in Lisbon and another one in Porto for paying subscribers so that we can interact with each other live because we were never together physically.

Pit: The most important thing in Germany is to talk and to have an argument with each other, but in a way that you can drink a beer after. Whenever I see someone who cannot behave, I get rid of them. I threw them out of my subscriber list because we want to talk about football in an appropriate way. My target group is a little bit older. Okay — it’s old, but they know how to behave. There are two or three cases in five years where I said, “Red card. Out of the game.”

What are your growth strategies?

António: It started when I told my social media audience that my newsletter was going to start. My initial readers were basically those who were following me either on Twitter or on Facebook, not so much on Instagram because I tend to not convert so much there. My YouTube show brought me a lot of people. I do other things, but the sponsorship business is also very tough right now in Portugal and only betting outlets keep on sponsoring material.

Pit: I started the newsletter for free because, in the beginning, it was just a hobby. But I had some costs for photos and so on, so I started to ask people, “Okay, would you like to become a supporter? What is worth? Is it worth [the equivalent of a cup of] coffee, a pizza or a six-pack of beer?” [This worked] — people said, “I’ll support you with a membership.”

I want to expand my funnel. The next milestone will be to get 100,000 subscribers. Then I can see how many out of 100,000 would pay me. Then, you have a good foundation to invest this money for growth and for improvements.

I send my columns to big sports portals, and they publish the columns on their pages with a hint where the original initial column was published. It’s a little kind of promotion on different publications. Twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, I produce a podcast and always say, “Hey, here’s a good opportunity for you to subscribe to my newsletter.”

Facebook is very important for me. It’s the main source for new subscribers of the newsletter because my target group is a little bit older than the TikTok generation.

Do you ever wish that you did not specialize in football and you could just enjoy football as a fan?

António: Every day. I never could go to a stadium with my 19-year-old son because if you go to a stadium with someone dressed in a kit of one team, you are lost. I haven’t been to a stadium, not working, for 12 years. I go to my son’s rugby matches. That’s what I do when I want to feel the passion of sport.

With all the pressure work puts on you, I really don’t watch football outside of work. I see a lot of rugby, cycling, and basketball. A friend of mine, who is a coach, told me the other day when he goes to see his kids’ football games, it’s the only time he doesn’t count the amount of defenders on the ball.

Pit: I’ve been editor-in-chief for 20 years, and you lose the naive point of view on football. You cannot see the game as a fan anymore because of whatever happens on the pitch. I’m just thinking, “Why?” and “What is the headline?” This is the fate of sports journalists who cannot see the match as a football fan. Sometimes, I can feel it when I’m in a stadium and with my son. I want to see a football match at home alone. It’s better for me — I cannot talk about football during the match. I cannot enjoy the match as a football fan. That’s not possible anymore.

Four things newsletters can learn from António and Pit

1.) Give readers something extra as part of their subscription or membership — Access to exclusive content is a compelling reason to pay, but António and Pit both offer something extra for their paying supporters. For António, it’s access to exclusive conversations and audio versions of stories; for Pit, it’s copies of his book and a limited-edition coffee mug. Those bonuses might give readers one more reason to pull out their credit card.

2.) Local laws and rules may affect your newsletter — Many newsletter operators in Europe, for instance, choose to work with a European-based email or membership platform to make things easier when it comes to local laws, like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or handling taxes. Before you launch, make sure you understand the email rules and payment complications you might face.

3.) Set clear rules for your community — As Pit explained, he’s thrown readers out of his community for failing to be civil in public discussions. Having a clear set of rules can make those community forums a place where everyone feels welcome and eager to participate.

4.) Monetizing a newsletter takes time — António has been writing his newsletter for three years, and Pit has been writing his for five years, but both are continuing to work to build out the revenue strategy for these newsletters. You may, as both António and Pit have done, need to operate a newsletter as a side project until it reaches a point where it can become a full-time gig.

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