The Athletic blasted for omitting feature context

While so much information can be accessed from anywhere around the world these days, especially when it pertains to sports, many local jurisdictions have dramatically different rules on what’s publishable.

The standards for what’s safe to run and what might lead to legal action often change dramatically from country to country, which impacts publications based in or read in multiple jurisdictions.

The latest example comes from The Athletic, which got heavily criticized for leaving out part of a player’s background that they say they’re not legally allowed to mention.

On Sunday, that publication (part of The New York Times and based in New York City, but with a significant UK office) ran a profile by Daniel Taylor on pro soccer player Gylfi Sigurðsson. The 35-year-old Sigurðsson is playing with the Icelandic national team and with Reykjavík-based club Valur this year. He previously was in the Premier League with Tottenham Hotspur and Everton.

Sigurðsson’s exit from the latter saw him not play for them in the entire 2021-22 season before his contract expired. He then was in talks to join MLS’ DC United (led by his former Everton teammate Wayne Rooney) last summer but wound up with Denmark’s Lyngby Boldklub instead. His contract with them was “mutually terminated” in January before signing with Valur in March.

You’d think a feature on a player with the kind of unusual exit Sigurðsson had from Everton would cover that. Instead, Taylor’s piece only said “But there are good reasons why Sigurdsson, who turned 35 yesterday, has preferred to go back to Reykjavik, the world’s most northern capital, after his absence from the Everton line-up for the year before his contract expired in 2022. That absence has never been publicly explained.” That was similar language to that used in an Athletic FC (their soccer vertical) tweet that was later deleted.

That tweet deletion was notable considering much of the criticism stemmed from the piece and tweet not referencing what happened with that absence (which we’ll get into below). However, the piece remains visible on The Athletic’s site . According to an Athletic spokesperson’s comments to Awful Announcing, the Community Notes in response to the tweet, which came from people referencing other reports from other countries on Sigurðsson and that absence, was why the tweet was deleted.

Here’s what that spokesperson told AA:

Please see this link for a clear explainer from The Athletic on what we can and cannot report under UK law – and why comments are sometimes turned off. The post in question was deleted to ensure we still abide by UK legal rules after “added context” appeared under it on X.

That link is to an Athletic piece from Luke Brown initially published in July 2022 and updated in August 2023. It says they “are not legally able to” name arrested players in the UK, as “arrested suspects have the right to privacy until the police see fit to charge them. That is because being charged is the point in the legal process when the courts have decided there is enough substance to the allegations to warrant linking someone to them. Before that, the courts consider there is no ‘public interest’ in knowing what someone is being investigated for or has been arrested over.”

As Brown notes, that’s quite different from the situation in the U.S. and many other countries. There, many investigations and detainments that don’t even lead to arrests (such as Tyreek Hill’s Sunday) are generally fair game for reporting. But in the UK, that means arrests that don’t lead to charges are often only vaguely reported on, with even the player’s club often left out.

However, not all outlets and people play by the UK rules even when it comes to reports on things that happen in that country. That was the case when Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið reported in 2021 on UK reports on a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a Premier League player, with Morgunblaðið linking that investigation to Sigurðsson. That report and others tying that investigation to Sigurdsson were referenced in much of the criticism for The Athletic and Taylor on X/Twitter, which led to that community note and the tweet being pulled down.

An investigation that seemingly matches some of the details of that previous investigation was closed in 2023 with no charges laid . That came with a police spokesperson saying then “The evidence available at this time does not reach the threshold set out on the Code for Crown Prosecutors.” So the UK legal system (or, at least, The Athletic’s policy towards it) is that the player involved in that investigation cannot be specifically publicly linked to it because it didn’t reach the standard of “public interest” with no charges laid.

But that’s not how much of the world acts towards investigations and arrests. So that’s how you get publicly available criticisms of this piece citing publicly available information The Athletic opted not to include. And that’s how you get The Athletic saying their understanding of UK law is that they legally couldn’t do so, and with them using that as their rationale for deleting the tweet once X added that community note context.

Notably, a significant portion of what’s going on here appears to involve the scale of The Athletic’s UK operations. They launched the soccer-focused “The Athletic UK” in August 2019 with more than 40 writers, long before their 2022 acquisition by The New York Times . They have pruned some of those writers in various rounds of layoffs, but they still have an extensive UK operation.

While The Athletic as a whole is based in New York, the scale of their UK business perhaps means they’re more cautious there than outlets with little to no UK presence might be. As Brown wrote in that previous piece , each outlet sets its own standards for how they approach UK rules, and those based in other jurisdictions are often more aggressive with reporting on things that happen in the UK.

Anybody who names an individual in relation to a criminal investigation risks breaking the law.

…Other publications may handle stories differently than The Athletic for different reasons. The most common is because they are located in a different jurisdiction, so are bound by completely different laws.

…There are still some general, non-identifying details that we can responsibly reveal without identifying someone.

Unhelpfully, there is no list of what is and what is not allowed, which explains why rival news organisations covering the same story can end up with subtly different reports with different details.

Again, rules on what you can publish vary by country. People can take legal action against publications not based in the country where the action was filed; Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s criminal complaint/lawsuit filed in France (French law is why those two usually distinct categories are combined) includes figures from the U.S. and UK. But that often is more difficult than complaints against a publication with an office in that country.

(This is part of what’s going on with the Brazil X/Twitter ban . That ban was implemented by a judge after X owner Elon Musk decided to withdraw all personnel from their local office so they wouldn’t wind up facing legal consequences for refusing to implement judicial orders. Without a local office, there’s less that the judiciary can do to X apart from implementing service bans and freezing other accounts like Starlink’s. Thus, The Athletic does have more to worry about with UK rules than publications without an extensive UK presence might.)

Another important element to note with this case is that it goes beyond defamation (damaging someone’s reputation through printed (libel) or spoken (slander) material) to invasion of privacy . There are often overlapping elements between laws on those subjects (which, again, vary country-by-country), but there are notable distinctions.

Invasion of privacy sometimes works out worse for media outlets. That’s true even in jurisdictions with generally more media-friendly rules, including the United States. Notably, the Gawker-Hulk Hogan case that led to Gawker Media’s bankruptcy and sale was about invasion of privacy, not libel. So there are reasons to be leery of privacy-related reports, especially around UK rules linking reports on arrests but not charges of invasion of privacy.

The big question is why The Athletic would go ahead with a feature on a player like this when they knew their policies around UK law would prevent them from including information that critics were sure to mention.

Of course, The Athletic can take the stance that they can’t publish those details. And that certainly will help them avoid any potential problems with UK law.

However, the criticism The Athletic took here for a feature that leaves out important and relevant information mentioned in several other publications was completely predictable. And if they’re going to operate under such strict approaches to off-field issues in the UK, it might make sense for them not to do extensive features on people where others are going to bring up additional context of this kind that they can’t mention.

If they can’t cover Sigurðsson in the way he is going to be discussed elsewhere, it might have made more sense for them to sit this one out.

[ The Athletic ]

The post The Athletic predictably criticized for omitting vital context they say they can’t mention appeared first on Awful Announcing .