The Scoop
A new brand is hoping to provide a hub for the booming conversation around the culture of sports.
OffBall launched Sunday as a website, newsletter, and social feed that seeks to apply a human touch to curate the flood of conversations about sports in popular culture.
OffBall’s co-founders are Michaela Hammond, who was part of the founding team of The Players’ Tribune; former Sports Illustrated editor-in-chief Chris Stone; and Adam Mendelsohn, whose comms firm Upland Workshop played a role in starting new media outlets Puck and LeBron James’ SpringHill Company.
The new outlet’s homepage directs users to posts on X and Instagram and to other websites, rather than its own pages — which its founders see as an alternative to ubiquitous, low-quality aggregation. They said the goal is to help users navigate the sprawling online conversation, and to combat what they see as a cheapening of sports culture online.
“There is nothing more compelling than sports. The characters and narratives in sports [are] one of the last shared experiences. But the internet isn’t designed for the way people want to enjoy sports. When you take out algorithms and aggregation, have real people curating the best stuff, and prioritize creators and journalism, it’s very different. Sports is the perfect place to try something unapologetically optimistic,” said Mendelsohn.
On Sunday, the OffBall homepage linked to a New York Times story on Yankees fashion, a YouTube ad teasing Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl performance, a ranking of links to top NFL “hype videos,” and a link to fashion site Highsnobriety proclaiming that “Willy Chavarria’s Adidas Collab Is Literally on Point.”
The project has a team of six, Mendelsohn said, including former Business Insider and TMZ Sports writers and a former Athletic staffer, Taylor Patterson, who will lead brand partnerships.
OffBall is “a reflection of where we are in culture,” said Hammond, whose sister, Madison, is a forward on the Los Angeles soccer club Angel City FC. It’s directed at “more mainstream, casual sports fans — who, increasingly, are women.”
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Ben’s view
OffBall is a reaction to the sprawling boom in sports, which is dominant across American culture and media. Sports media is a huge business, a prized target for wealthy investors and gaming companies, a safe space for advertisers, and a boon to streamers. And it seems to offer an antidote to both political division and cultural fragmentation. (The boom has generated an echo in media: Publications covering the business of sports are also proliferating.)
But OffBall is also a bet on a different kind of internet: a hand-curated alternative to algorithmic feeds, and a business model rooted in brand rather than scale.
Notable
- Former ESPN chief John Skipper said on this week’s Mixed Signals podcast that we’re at a moment “where everyone along a continuum of traditional media to disruptive media is finding that sports is the best and most valuable content.” One reason why: Sports is still “a safe subject in a world where you’re not going to say, ‘Do you hate or love Trump?’”
- Americans’ sports-mania has also driven up interest in the Paralympics, which concluded Sunday. NBC, the exclusive rights-holder for U.S. Paralympic coverage, reported a 60% spike in ad sales for its coverage of the event since the last Paralympics in Tokyo.
- A new study by Horizon Media suggests Gen Z is just as “sports-curious,” even if they’re not watching linear TV, Sportico’s Anthony Crupi writes: “These days, fans have a direct line into the lives of their favorite athletes, and it seems as if there’s very little about them that isn’t in circulation.”
Correction An earlier version of this article misstated Chris Stone’s title when he was editor-in-chief of Sports Illustrated.