Its hard to understand why someone called Tom Worville is writing about Manchester City when the whole selling point of the Athletic is you have dedicated correspodants.
Tom Worville is supposed to be their football analytics expert, and thus expected to bring additional expertise to an assessment of the impact of a new player such as Dias. Whether he does so effectively is another matter and, as the post immediately above makes clear, he has a track record of digs at us, but I assume that's the theory.
I let my subscription lapse with the Athletic in December. The majority of the written articles are puff pieces in the PL. Sam Lee has definitely lost his edge there too. He used to get exclusive stuff before but now anything worthwhile reading on City is from their A list writers... which is quarterly, and with CAS where it had a bit of Sam proved to be poorly researched and sourced.
I subscribed to The Athletic in August 2019 under the half-price offer they had upon their launch. At the start, I was reasonably impressed, and was finding four or five decent articles to read each day, most of them not relating to City; I was quite happy to read quality stuff about, say, West Ham, Newcastle or Sheffield Wednesday. I avoided anything relating to United or Liverpool. From the little I could bear to look at, these pieces could sometimes be the same kind of embarrassing clickbait-driven guff as in the rest of the media concerning these clubs, especially the Liverpool output.
I did think at that point that I'd probably renew at the full price after a year. But as time went on, I found there were fewer of the in-depth analytical pieces I'd originally enjoyed, presumably because they didn't generate the required numbers of clicks. But the tipping point for me came in February 2020 with the coverage of City's FFP sanction. I flatter myself that I know a bit more than your average punter and your average journo about this topic, and have the professional background to back that up. The Athletic's coverage was as utterly fucking dreadful as anywhere else in the media, so I unsubscribed and wrote to tell them why. As I'd paid for a year up front, I could continue to access the site until August but I was never tempted to reconsider my decision and extend at that point.
I do think that Sam Lee is a decent City correspondent, but I note that he's on his own as far as City are concerned. United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs all have two. I assume we don't generate enough subscribers to justify a second correspondent, and I did often get the feeling with Sam that it was just a job to him, that his material didn't portray much passion for City. I don't want someone to blow smoke up our arses in the laughable way, say, James Pearce does for Liverpool, and Sam did seem quite well connected as well as capable of producing some decent analysis (FFP excepted). But I like to feel that a dedicated City correspondent writing for me has a greater affinity for the club than I perceived with him. That may be harsh, but it was how I felt.
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