The Athletic

What reviewers actually said

Built only from these 120 real reviews (foreign ones translated). Superscripts jump to the quote here. Apple has no per-review links, so [ref] opens that app's reviews on the App Store.

1. [R10] 5/5 · US Amazing: So much pro insight easy access to so many games well actually all games 5 stars love it
2. [R24] 5/5 · US Awesome Soccer Reports: Amazing insight into world soccer news from all regions, leagues, and cups.
3. [R27] 5/5 · US Best Premier League coverage anywhere: My trial subscription to the NY Times netted me access to The Athletic which I have enjoyed since day one. I gift articles to my sports fan sons-in-law about their favorite teams and I plan to include them in a family membership next.
4. [R33] 5/5 · US Best content: Love following all my sports teams. The writing and insight is top notch.
5. [R16] 5/5 · US Love this App: It’s an all in one, so I even keep up with sports I don’t think I like. At age 84 it makes things easier😊.
6. [R161] 5/5 · US Great app: Such a smooth experience on mobile with stories and videos, unlike the MLB app which is an abomination.
7. [R365] 5/5 · GB Awesome: An awesome app that lets you customise which team or leagues you want to follow; crucially the stories are in depth, with good analysis and insight, not veil, generalised stories other providers offer.
8. [R3] 3/5 · US Fine: Love the content, but I should have ads in app behind a pay wall that I’ve already paid. They need to be taken out if I pay for a subscription. Or add a “no ad subscription”
9. [R11] 2/5 · US App forces you to dig through trash to read: Extremely cluttered ui makes it difficult to actually read articles. Users must navigate not only ads but 30 second videos that do nothing but read a headline of an actual article, on sports you don’t care about Please add a way to filter out sports you don’t want to read about as well as videos
10. [R12] 1/5 · US Stop Feeding Us Videos: I subscribed to the Athletic for articles, not to doom scroll reels. Give us the option to remove them please.
11. [R13] 1/5 · US Pretty much unusable: Now that the app has added an advertisement between every other paragraph and a video that automatically plays between the other paragraphs, I can’t even get to the end of a story half the time without my phone completely freezing up.
12. [R4] 2/5 · US Control over notifications is significantly lacking: For many years, I've been able to configure push notifications in-app to suit my preferences perfectly. I set up notifications for the teams, sports and leagues that I enjoy following, and disallowed all other notifications. Recently they started giving push notifications for the Pulse Newsletter; theres no way to turn these off in the app. The
13. [R6] 1/5 · US Unwanted notifications and no way to provide feedback: Every morning, the app pushes notifications for the “pulse newsletter” and sometimes also some big sports event, today it was “meet summer’s soccer stars”, even though I have no soccer teams/leagues flagged to follow. There are no settings to turn these notifications on/off. I only have notifications on for my teams. To make it worse, the f
14. [R7] 1/5 · US Unwanted Notifications: I only want notifications for teams and leagues I follow. But every morning I get a notification for “The Pulse” newsletter which I cannot disable. This has been happening for months and still isn’t fixed. I’m about ready to uninstall the app.
15. [R49] 1/5 · US NFL: Cannot block nfl draft notifications so you get a 1 only because I can’t give you a negative number
16. [R9] 1/5 · US Very glitchy app: Slow load times
17. [R20] 1/5 · US Something has gone wrong: I always receive the something has gone wrong pop up on the app. Hitting reload doesn’t solve it. I’ve tried signing out, deleting/reinstalling, and nothing seems to work.
18. [R32] 2/5 · US Lots of great content, brutal app: Why do articles take 5-20 seconds to load on fast WiFi?
19. [R17] 3/5 · US Cannot comment: The content is good but I’m unable to comment on anything
20. [R62] 3/5 · US Notifications are the app’s main issue: This review is about the app notifications appears the writing and reporting. The app is fine except for notifications. 1. Comments. A user may enter comments and replies but it is impossible to find them and you aren’t notified if you have a direct tagged reply. 2. App icon badge. I frequently see numbers on the app icon but clicking on the app does not
21. [R152] 3/5 · US Micro management of comment section of posts: I seriously have left all of one or two comments, and for whatever the reason is I can’t leave comments now, (but I can certainly leave a review obviously). The only thing I can think of as to why, is there was a troll leaving ridiculous posts, and comments and I told him to get lost, in so many words). So if that’s how it goes, no warning, no referral
22. [R174] 3/5 · US Unable to add comments: Hello, content is phenomenal. But for the past week at least I have not been able to add comments to articles that have a comment section. I obviously haven’t been banned, but I’ve tried updating the app, updating my phone, reinstalling the app, clearing my Cash, logging out… Nothing seems to work. The community is one of the best parts of The Athletic, and it’s very disapp
23. [R28] 1/5 · US You can’t find anything: I see there’s an article that interests me but when I go to the app I can’t find it. Doesn’t show up in search in Discover. There’s no overall search that works.
24. [R48] 2/5 · US Quickly becoming poor: What used to be a fantastic source of creative writing and unique stories has become clickbait superficial slop. The app itself promotes stories that are up to five days old, and some algorithm predicts what content you like instead of the most recent stories. Also the search bar is absolutely worthless - I mean you’re better off using google’s results if you want to find an
25. [R471] 3/5 · CA Search function is useless: It’s impossible to search for any articles in the app, even if I know exactly what I’m looking for. Completely useless
26. [R31] 1/5 · US Add a cardinals beat writer: National stories are good and all but why would I pay for an additional subscription with no coverage for my team?
27. [R37] 1/5 · US Why no StL Cards beat writer?: Given the Cards start why did you choose to NOT have a beat writer in St Louis? Enjoyed Kitty Woo …. Dodgers really?
28. [R38] 1/5 · US such a letdown: when the athletic started it was filled with interesting bits from all sports. Including the lowly ny islanders. it was a treat for a diehard isles fans. even after they switched the dedicated reporters. now, bubkas! Direct live coverage of Premier League, Toronto hockey, etc., etc., etc., er.al! Tired of complaining but it’s a disgrace for a NY located newspaper.
29. [R59] 4/5 · US Good, not perfect: The NHL standings are very tight right now, but The Athletic doesn’t show the RWs or other tiebreaker stats in their standings for some reason.
30. [R1] 1/5 · US Ridiculous Password Protection: Won’t let me select teams to follow
31. [R40] 1/5 · US Login and payment nightmare: The end
32. [R45] 3/5 · US Logging On: Tired of bringing asked to subscribe or sign in when I have a subscription. May cancel because of this inconvenience. Too many other options for sports news.
33. [R46] 1/5 · US Continuing problems trying to access my subscription to The Athletic: Extremely frustrated with the Athletic website.
34. [R39] 2/5 · US Some high quality writers: I do enjoy the writers and writing, but I’m sick of the feed showing me irrelevant articles. The app knows writers and teams and leagues I follow, but the feed ignores all that and promotes sensationalist works.
35. [R50] 1/5 · US They don’t care about your preferences: I don’t follow NBA on Athletic. And yet I go to the front page and it is inundated with NBA articles. They don’t listen to your preferences when you select them so don’t even bother.
36. [R282] 3/5 · GB Sort out the all: I love the content on the athletic but the audio aspects are very glitchy. Minor thing too but the team line up writing is way too small
37. [R300] 3/5 · GB Unstable podcast player: I love the Athletic content, but I find the podcast player to be frustratingly unstable. I often have to try multiple times, refresh the app or update it to get it to eventually play.
38. [R326] 3/5 · GB Issues: Often issues with the podcasts e.g. They won't play. Atm I can't write any comments I just get an error message. The comment section and formatting and writing texts is pretty rubbish
39. [R376] 3/5 · GB Not a great app for the service: Podcasts appear on Apple Podcasts earlier than they do on here, where I pay not to have to listen to adverts.
40. [R8] 1/5 · US NYT: Dropping this leftist agenda for anyone who will simply tell me the scores and the stories behind them. Been a subscriber from the early days, but sick of this.
41. [R21] 1/5 · US Leftist journalists- not worth the $1.00 a month: Pushing the Democrat Party’s talking points on THEIR open border crimes, for voter replacement, into the sports section, again. Goodbye.
42. [R25] 1/5 · US If you love politics and a little sports, this is for you!: Well. If you love a lot of political commentary with a tiny bit of sports mixed in- this sites definitely for you.
43. [R34] 1/5 · US NYT Ruined It For Me: I’ve been subscribed for 6yrs, initially got a scrip cause of the WC. NYT is destroying the product post-acquisition. They made so many cuts, beat writing went out the door, and all any subscriber talks about is politics, even on a report about last night’s game. One of the worst things that happened to this paper was the mass immigration of NYT subscribers who all of sudden
44. [R18] 1/5 · US Predatory renewals: Can’t get money on the strength of their product so they have to rely on sneaky auto-renew to lock you into expensive annual subscriptions. Feels like I’ve been duped into paying for the service rather than signing up for another year on my own.
45. [R29] 1/5 · US The Athletic is a CC fan club.: 5 of the first 8 articles today have Caitlin Clark in the headline. If you scroll down that ratio is constant. I thought I would be able to read about the WNBA but The Athletic has chosen not to report on the league, any team, or any player but CC.
46. [R2] 2/5 · US No free version: There is no real access to this app without paying for it
47. [R96] 5/5 · US I’d give it a zero if I could: The whole thing here was “pay for it, no advertising”. Well, no. It’s now plastered with ads. I’m paying way too much to also put up with this nonsense.