The Athletic make statement on their Celtic coverage

The Athletic has announced that they will no longer have a dedicated Celtic reporter.

Their UK football coverage was given a high profile launch in 2019 with each club in the EPL having a specific reporter writing almost solely about one club.. Mainly someone from traditional media outlets took up the opportunity of a new venture with the subscription based, advert free publisher.

Kieran Devlin landed the Celtic role but wasn’t given the sort of access and accreditation that reporters in the EPL were given.

While producing some good readable content it was left very much on the outside as Alex Kay-Jelski, editor-in-chief of The Athletic explained to subscribers.

Dear readers,

I’ve rightly seen a lot of comments from Celtic fans in recent weeks about the reduction in our content on the club, so I wanted to address it and let you know what things will look like going forward.

As many of you know, our writer Kieran Devlin left for a change of career a few months ago, which gave us an opportunity to reflect on our coverage.

It’s not been an easy decision but we have decided to no longer have a dedicated correspondent for Celtic.

Since we launched football in 2019, we have tried to work with the club as we have with all the other big teams in Europe but, as is their prerogative, they decided not to allow us access to press conferences, home games or their media team to check basic news stories. That made the basics of our job almost impossible, though we hopefully managed to provide some insight for you through analysis of matches, use of data and features.

We will, of course, still write occasionally on the club at big moments but we can’t commit to more without being able to check our stories, hear the club’s perspective on important information we hear or ask the players and manager key things.

It really saddens us to take this step but it’s not something we have faced with any other club so it is best for us to move on. This isn’t to be critical of the club — they are obviously within their rights to work with whoever they choose.

We will also be doing similar with Rangers as we can’t cover just one of the two great Glasgow clubs.

We understand if you wish to cancel your subscriptions and apologise that we couldn’t provide you with what we hoped when we launched The Athletic in August 2019. But we hope you do stick around to read about the big stories in the game and other sports. And we will continue to cover the big stories in Scottish football too.

Either way, thank you for your support and time. We didn’t want this ending.

Celtic do provide very limited media access to a couple of ‘fan sites’ but they are tagged as broadcast media with old school newspaper publishers still getting dedicated and embargoed access even though they are effectively websites with plunging print circulation figures.

The Celtic Way seems to be an exception, launched in July 2021 within the Newsquest Group that includes The Herald and Glasgow Times, the subscription site appears to have greater media access than other fully digital publishers.