🔴 It's soccer, not football

Today’s guest is Theo Lloyd-Hughes, a British journalist covering women’s soccer in the United States. He has his own newsletter and podcast, Squad Depth, writes freelance for a couple of outlets, and produces The Athletic’s flagship women’s soccer podcast, “Full Time with Meg Linehan.”

In this issue:

• 💰️ Money in women’s soccer vs. men’s soccer

• 🎙️ From DIY podcasting to producing for The Athletic

• 📰 Navigating the line between “creator” and “journalist”

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Theo or watch it on YouTube.

Money and the women’s game

The most valuable team in the MLS, the United States’ top-tier men’s soccer league, is Los Angeles Football Club. At least, it was as of 2023, when Forbes valued it at $1.2 billion.

Earlier this year, in the NWSL — the women’s top-tier American soccer league — Angel City FC, also based in Los Angeles, became not just the most valuable women’s soccer team in the country but the highest-valuation women’s sports team worldwide, at $250 million. But even the lowest valuation of the 29 MLS teams, the Colorado Rapids, is still worth nearly twice as much as Angel City.

The average MLS player salary is $594,390, more than ten times higher than the NWSL average of $56k. It’s a familiar story in women’s sports — you may have read about WNBA number-one draft pick Caitlin Clark signing for a $76,535 salary this year. But she also signed a Nike deal worth $28 million over eight years. Most players, and this applies to the NWSL, too, aren’t getting deals like that.

The NWSL is growing in popularity. Some 7 million viewers had tuned in through Week 13 of this season, an average of nearly 77,000 viewers for each of those 91 games. This is a 95% increase year over year.

There are nowhere near as many journalists covering the women’s game as there are the men’s game, which makes sense — there are fewer people looking for this content, fewer dollars to pay for its production.

Working on “Full Time” part-time

One of the most popular women’s soccer podcasts is The Athletic’s “Full Time with Meg Linehan.” Linehan joined The Athletic ahead of the Women’s World Cup in 2019 and became, according to her website, “the first full time women's soccer reporter in the U.S. for a mainstream sports outlet.”

When the current “Full Time” season launched this May, it was with a new producer, Theo Lloyd-Hughes.

Theo first started writing about soccer in 2019. He’d spent the previous half-decade working in the music world: writing about bands, building a small, independent label, and managing tours. He worked in coffee shops to support himself; in the interest of transparency, I have to say I met Theo when we worked together for a couple of months at a cafe in New Orleans in 2018. We didn’t stay in touch after I moved cities the following year; when I discovered his newsletter this summer, I reached out to find out how he’d found his way into this indie-newsletter industry I now cover.

When the pandemic hit, shuttering music venues and cafes, Theo started a podcast, “Relatively Football,” with his sister, a football journalist in the UK. Over the next 13 months, they’d do 62 episodes.

The podcast regularly approached 500 downloads per episode, and Theo started writing for a website covering the Houston Dash, but he wasn’t being paid. Then, in March 2021, he was hired by a website covering women’s soccer in Texas, The Striker.

It’s tough for independent media outlets to sustainably monetize. The Striker dissolved last summer, but Theo’s two-and-a-half-year stint there was, if not lucrative, at least an education in digital media. The site’s shutdown spurred him to finally start his own newsletter.

The dead publication to indie newsletter pipeline

Squad Depth, Theo’s project, started as a podcast. The first episode — featuring Katelyn Best, a former soccer journalist who’d recently joined the NWSL’s Angel City FC as Editorial Content Manager (more on this later) — was published on Substack in April 2023:

On July 8, 2023, Theo sent out the first proper issue of Squad Depth. Over the next 7 months, he’d send 39 issues, at least one per week. And then he migrated from Substack to Ghost, spurred by “concerns about how Substack is being run.”

These days, Theo tends to publish a roundup of goings-on in the NWSL every Monday, plus at least one more interview or essay most weeks. In just over a year of publishing, he’s built an audience of just under 500 subscribers. Around 5% of those subscribers currently pay $5 per month or $50 per year for his trouble; to date, Theo says the project has made him less than $400.

The open rate is an above-industry-average 61%; the list size is modest, but the readers clearly appreciate Theo’s considered storytelling. His two biggest bursts of subscribers have come via search engines — when he covered the World Cup last summer and the Gold Cup earlier this year. He’s clearly filling a demand.

His interview work, both written and podcasted, is carefully curated and researched — he mentions taking “personal storytelling very seriously, and this idea that the world has so many stories that we’re missing.” There are interviews with people in the game, like former Houston Dash midfielder Brittany Bock, and people around the game, like Brazilian photographer Georgia Soares.

Five years ago, Theo was just a soccer fan who had never been paid to create content around the sport. Now he’s built a many-fragments career in the game — he writes his newsletter, produces his podcast, writes freelance for a couple of different outlets, researches the NWSL on contract for the company behind the massively popular Football Manager video game, and produces one of the best-known podcasts in the women’s game. He’s also a parent, and all those part-time and freelance gigs aren’t enough to make a decent living; he still works two shifts a week at a coffee shop.

Is a journalist a creator? Is a creator a journalist?

If you’re interested in soccer and spend time on Twitter, you’ve seen a Fabrizio Romano post. SocialBlade says he’s the 133rd most-followed account on the platform, and at one point during the writing of this piece, he’d tweeted 2,297 times in the previous 30 days.

Romano is one of the most-platformed figures in global football media, with 22 million Twitter followers. He and The Athletic’s David Ornstein own the transfer media market, which is exciting, all rumors and weeks of gossip until contracts get signed. Ornstein has a smaller platform — 3.1 million Twitter followers. He’s more strictly a journalist, on-staff at The Athletic, whereas Romano is more of an independent creator.

What’s the difference? Scrolling through either of the two Twitter accounts, Ornstein’s posts are fewer and all link to nytimes.com/theathletic URLs. Romano is more fast-paced, rarely linking out, all platform-native content. He’s often accused, on Twitter, of taking commissions from players’ agents to help fan rumors and drive up transfer fees.

I share this context from the busiest end of the football media spectrum only to illustrate that contentious line between journalist and creator, something we often talk about in the Spotlight. There’s clearly room for both. Theo leans more towards the journalist side. Perhaps he could learn from the more attention-grabbing creator-journalist model Romano practices to grow a bigger audience and make more money; perhaps he doesn’t want to.

Theo describes his podcast as a place “to tell slow-paced, soft, and curious stories” about soccer and the people in and around the game.

Recall what Theo’s first podcast guest, Katelyn Best, said in her quote shared earlier in this piece: “It’s just a really hard field to get into at all. If your niche is women’s soccer, it’s obviously even harder.”

You either die DIY or live long enough to go pro

Best started her career as a fact checker and writer for Portland Monthly before getting into women’s soccer and writing about the game. She even founded a publication, Rose City Review, dedicated to the Portland Thorns and the Timbers. But in 2022, she moved to Los Angeles to take on a role as Editorial Content Manager for Angel City FC; it offered a better income, a more sustainable lifestyle.

When I asked Theo where he sees his soccer media career going, he said, “Sometimes I daydream about getting involved, a bit like Katelyn Best, on the club side.” He dreams, too, of writing for a major publication or producing podcasts full-time. He’s applied for many of these jobs; he’s received no offers.

For now, he will continue to produce Squad Depth alongside his freelance work, though it’s that paying work he prioritizes. There was little Olympics coverage in his newsletter, even as the US Women’s National Team blazed a path to gold; “Full Time” was working overtime, taking all his time and energy.

Theo is a passionate, talented storyteller; a podcaster and journalist; a creator. But he’s not, currently, much of a businessman. Can a newsletter and podcast like his survive as a loss leader for a freelance journalist-producer career? Time will tell. His path so far is replicable, though, for any budding journalist trying to break into a field they’re passionate about, especially if that field is as underserved as women’s soccer.

Connect with Theo on Twitter/X.
Read and subscribe to Squad Depth.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Say hi: Twitter / LinkedIn

Here’s some of what we touch on in this week’s podcast:

• 🎙️ Everything Theo has learned about hosting and producing podcasts

• 📰 Are newsletters the future of journalism?

• 💷 Soccer journalism salary talk

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

• Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, a podcast hosted by Spotlight editor Francis and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

  • This week: "cozytech," tiny smartphones that aren't phones, $35 lobster rolls, car crash music, kid football journalists imitating the 133rd-most-followed Twitter user, and “Tech” vs. “tech.”

• In February we wrote about a very different football newsletter — LazyFPL. The weekly Fantasy Premier League newsletter had gone from 0 to 48.5k subs in just under 2 years. In the 7 months since, they’ve apparently added another 22k.