By By: Sandro Angulo Rincón
Another sports journalism cybermedia just as interesting as Deporadictos is The Mister. The Mister (www.elmister.substack.com) was created in late 2018 by Iván Pérez, a Mexican journalist who resigned from El Economista newspaper to start a media entrepreneurship venture with different, creative, and high-quality content. The first stage of The Mister began as a website (2018-2020), then it became a newsletter (2020-2021), and now it is a platform for content and editorial products with podcasts, dossiers, and a Telegram channel, aiming to become a sports research company. It’s a mission as comprehensive as it is ambitious.
The team has consisted of nine people: Jaír Toledo, Mauricio Cabrera, Daniela Rangel, Enmanuel Toledo, Édgar Sánchez, Erick Villanueva, Jesús Patiño, Julio Flores, Alexander Gutú, along with Juan Carlos Vargas (editor of Patadura, a new editorial production derived from The Mister), and Adriana Lima, CEO/executive director of the company Adlimasports.
The most important achievements in 2021 have been (1) an agreement with Goal, a global football site that shares The Mister’s content videos with its Latin American audience; (2) the publication of a dossier on the Mexico City Formula 1 Grand Prix in partnership with the CIE organization; (3) the release of the first e-book and printed book titled “Olympic Games: The World’s Laboratory,” in collaboration with Adlimasports; (4) the market launch of Patadura, a narrative and fictional sports journalism newsletter; and (5) a 100% growth in its subscriber base.
As stated on its website, the cybermedia caters to the 20% of fans not represented by other sports media and offers a valuable platform for content consumption. Its goal is to become a reference in the industry, enhance its brand, and establish itself within the digital ecosystem. According to the creators, the audience forms communities hungry for analysis, information, reviews, and documents about the sports industry.
The Mister intends to become a practical platform. Therefore, another target audience for its content is sports and marketing companies, with whom they partner to generate mutual revenue and provide excellent information for the sports business. One strategy they often use to engage the audience is through periodic surveys. These surveys serve two purposes: to understand the audience’s preferences regarding sports topics and approaches and to generate data sold to marketing organizations for decision-making in sports management and markets.
The Mister is hosted on the Substack platform, which allows writers, bloggers, brands, and other creators to produce and monetize their newsletters through a simple and user-friendly interface. After designing the newsletter, a subscriber list and promotions can be created and shared on social media. This enables offering exclusive content to subscribers in exchange for a fee and tracking of revenue, performance, open rates, and click-through rates through the platform’s control panel.
The business model is based on subscription and membership for free consumption of articles and multimedia components to build a broad reader base. There is also a premium subscription option in three tiers with different benefits: The Mister Managerial ($7.99 per month) offers access to 12 exclusive newsletters and one open to the entire community. It provides the option to receive promotions and discounts with The Mister’s commercial partners and alliances for merchandising, workshops, and courses. The Mister VIP (Very Important Person) ($9.99 per month) grants access to almost all editorial content, exclusive podcasts with industry-relevant figures, and 12 monthly newsletters exclusively for these subscribers. The Mister CEO (Chief Executive Officer) ($14.99 per month) offers executives of companies access to the newsletter, exclusive podcasts, two monthly dossiers related to the sports industry for decision-making, and in-depth data and research beneficial for business.
Revenue is generated through content production for other sports companies, the launch of their store, e-book writing and downloads, affiliate marketing (discounted event ticket purchases from the cybermedia), promotion of online courses (such as data journalism), and the supply of subscriber data to other companies. Partnerships with other sports organizations are an added aspect of their work to generate economic revenue. This includes the partnership with Adlimasports, where they produce a sports workshop, understood as the creative space of an artist or designer, always from the artisanal approach of the creation process, to help clubs, brands, leagues, and agencies design communication strategies that help achieve corporate objectives.
The concept of The Mister and its logo encapsulate the metaphor for presenting the cybermedia. The English word “Mister,” a formal title for “señor” in Spanish, is commonly associated in Spain with the figure of a football coach or manager. It’s worth noting that its origin in football dates back to the 1920s and 1930s when Athletic Club won two leagues and five Copa del Rey titles under the guidance of the English ex-player ‘Mister’ Pentland (1883-1962), who revolutionized the team’s play by preferring short passes and ball possession over long balls to forwards. Thanks to his successful track record, fans started calling the team’s coach ‘Mister,’ from then on, it has been used to refer to the person who fulfills this role in Spanish and other countries’ football.
Regarding their content, I conducted an analysis of all their articles and multimedia components published in 2021, a total of 226 (an average of three articles per week), to determine the sports they report on most frequently, their thematic focus, and interactive and non-interactive resources on their website.
For example, football (46.7% of the total 227 articles) is the most frequently covered athletic and competitive activity in The Mister, along with general sports (37.9%). There are no significant entries in other sports, with a relative exception in baseball (3.1%). Traditional and iconic Mexican sports like boxing do not have entries on their platform.
The predominant focus in The Mister is on sports and economics (22%), followed closely by sports marketing (21.1%), and sports and technology (19.8%). Other high percentages are recorded in the areas of sports and culture (10.6%), competition and results (6.2%), sports and gender (5.7%), and sports and health (4%) (see chart).
The most frequently used resources are non-interactive photography and social media, both at 38%. They are followed by non-interactive infographics (10.2%), non-interactive data journalism (7.7%), and podcasts (1.7%). Some resources appear with low percentages, such as interactive maps (0.2%), interactive photography (0.2%), and interactive data journalism (0.2%) (see chart).
This media outlet has a higher percentage of international reach for its journalistic pieces (51.1%), although there is also significant national reach (29.1%). The two scopes, national and international (19.8%), but with an emphasis on the national level, incorporate a significant value.
This is a brief description of The Mister, an entrepreneurial sports journalism venture.
