Newspapers are a classic example of a bundle. Subscribers might read just one section, but their subscription gets them the entire paper. Mather and Hansmann believe that sports is an undervalued part of that bundle, and that there are tens of thousands of sports fans in each city who don’t care about the other sections, and would rather jettison their subscription and pay for The Athletic instead.

“I think the sports page has carried local papers for a while, and they don’t treat it well,” Mather said.

After waiting nine months to debut its second local site, Toronto, and another five months for its third, Cleveland, the company planned to grow the number of local sites slowly, before tackling national ones. But that timeline was drastically altered after layoffs at ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, Vice Sports and Vocativ this spring and summer put dozens of talented, well-connected journalists on the market.

“I’d say it’s probably the largest talent displacement in sports media ever,” Hansmann said.

The Athletic raised $5.6 million in venture capital financing in July to take advantage of the moment, adding to the $2.3 million seed round it raised in January.

“It was really hard to see everything that was happening in terms of the layoffs,” said Deepen Parikh, an executive at Courtside Ventures, one of The Athletic’s largest investors, “and knowing we really, genuinely had an opportunity to capitalize on it and not take it.”

The Athletic did not need to raise any financing, its executives said. Only one of the local sites, Toronto, breaks even — Chicago and the Bay Area and “a few smaller markets” are on track to do so by the end of the year, executives said — but most subscribers pay upfront for an annual subscription, so The Athletic had cash in hand to continue operations.

The company has wasted no time spending the new money. It started sites in Detroit, Philadelphia, the Bay Area and Minnesota, brought on the former Fox Sports writer Stewart Mandel to lead a national college football site and hired the former Sports Illustrated writer Seth Davis to head up another for national college basketball.