Playground →
The top 10 neighbors for The Athletic span sports journalists, athletes, TV shows, sports teams, and a fictional soccer club — a mixed cluster with no single subcategory dominating and scores compressed between 0.90 and 0.86.
The shape is flat: Ted Lasso leads at 0.90, followed closely by athlete Taylor Twellman at 0.90, magazine Deadspin at 0.88, TV personality Katie Nolan at 0.88, and fictional entity AFC Richmond at 0.88. No single neighbor pulls away from the pack. Tallying subcategories across the top 10: Athletes appear twice (Taylor Twellman and Rex Chapman), Journalists once (Darren Rovell), Sports Teams once (U.S. Soccer WNT), Sports Leagues once (NBC Olympics), and single entries for TV Shows, Magazines, TV Personalities, Fictional Characters, and Websites. The Athletic itself is a Website, and Onion Sports Network is the only other Website in the top 10 (0.86). The cross-kind character of this cluster is its defining feature: most neighbors are not websites at all, but sports-adjacent media personalities, broadcast properties, and editorial brands — the audience shape The Athletic shares most closely is that of engaged sports-media consumers who follow the ecosystem broadly, not just a single format or platform.
The flat distribution across subcategories suggests an audience that is not tightly bound to any one content type, but is consistently drawn to the intersection of sports coverage and media personality.
