The Maths Don't Work
I'll skip the tired preaching about values and ideals. If you think the Sports and Briefing is useful to you, help us out!
The Sports and Crime Briefing published 114 articles this year.
Over 50,000 people read them.
Seventy-six people paid for them.
The maths don’t work yet. So if you’ve read the newsletter regularly, or even just once or twice, and you found it useful, please help keep it going. For the price of a cup of coffee a month, you get 110+ articles a year.
The Offer: To say thank you, anyone who gets a paid subscription between now and 7 January will receive a 30-minute confidential consultation with me, Chris Dalby, at a time that suits them in 2026.
I explain why, and what that looks like, further down.
Why we need you
Over the past year, I’ve been trying to understand how to make those numbers work better, and things are improving. From January to June, we added 22 new paying subscribers. From July to December, we added 54.
Why? Because we asked what you needed.
Most niche media grow their community around a single, repeated interest: one sport, one country, one problem.
The Sports and Crime Briefing doesn’t work like that. One day we report on match-fixing in French tennis. The next on FIFA corruption. The next on fake football agents in Africa.
We do this to show how crime affects the whole sports ecosystem worldwide, but it makes paying for it a harder decision.
So we asked our readers how we could really help add value to their work or research.
First: follow the story. Don’t just reveal corruption or match-fixing, tell us what happens at the end of an investigation. We’ve done that.
Second: tell us what works, what helped in one sport or one country can help in another. We’re doing that too.
Third: let us hear directly from the people involved. Interviews, voices from inside sport, in their own words. Done.
We also launched Free2Play, the first fact-checking tool in football designed to help combat human trafficking. Since August, it’s already been used more than 50 times.
And in February, we will be launching Sports and Crime Brasil in Portuguese, dedicated to uncovering the convergence of organised crime, illegal betting, match-fixing, athlete abuse and much more in that country.
(Also, our most-read article this year is still about Chilean thieves targeting American sports stars. I suspect mentioning Taylor Swift helped, but I’ll take the readership wherever it comes.)
And about that consultation, it can be about any topic you choose related to sports and crime, a case you’re following, an article recommendation, a trend you want to understand better, anything. I’ll follow up personally with new subscribers to schedule.
Thank you very much in advance and very happy holidays!
Best,
Chris Dalby
Editor, Sports and Crime Briefing
