How the Ringer Podcast Network Took Over Sports Media

When Bill Simmons launched The Ringer in 2016 after his departure from ESPN, few predicted it would reshape sports media. Spotify acquired the company for approximately $250 million in 2020, validating Simmons' bet that a podcast-first media company could compete with legacy sports networks.

The Ringer was not the first attempt. Simmons built Grantland inside ESPN in 2011 on the same mix of sport, film and long essays, and ESPN shut it down in 2015, months after he left. The Ringer is Grantland with the ownership problem fixed, which is the whole lesson: the format worked, the employment arrangement did not.

The formula was deceptively simple: hire smart, opinionated people and let them talk about sports with the enthusiasm of fans rather than the detachment of analysts. The Bill Simmons Podcast became one of the most downloaded sports shows globally, but the network's depth is what sets it apart.

Ryen Russillo's podcast brought the sports talk radio format into the podcast age with sharper analysis and zero commercial radio constraints. His segment Life Advice, where listeners write in about personal dilemmas, became one of the most popular recurring podcast segments anywhere.

The Ringer's written content, while diminished from its early ambitions, still produces some of the best sports and culture journalism online. Long-form pieces from writers like Kevin O'Connor and Rob Mahoney maintain a standard that many legacy publications have abandoned.

If you are starting from nothing, three shows carry the network. The Rewatchables takes a film everyone has seen twice and argues about it for two hours, and it coined a vocabulary of categories that listeners now use unprompted. The Big Picture, with Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, is the best mainstream film podcast running. Plain English with Derek Thompson handles economics and technology without any sports framing at all. Start there, then find the sport you care about.

The Spotify acquisition created both opportunities and tensions. The production resources improved dramatically, but Simmons' vision sometimes clashes with corporate strategy. The pivot toward video content and celebrity guest bookings reflects the broader podcasting industry's maturation.

One detail the origin story usually omits: the staff unionised with the Writers Guild of America East in 2019, before the Spotify sale, and negotiated a contract. That is rare in podcasting and it mattered when the acquisition landed, because it set floors a new corporate owner had to work around rather than renegotiate.

What Simmons built, intentionally or not, is the blueprint for modern sports media. Personality-driven, platform-native, and audience-responsive. The Ringer proves that you don't need broadcast rights or stadium access to dominate sports conversation. You just need interesting people talking honestly about what they care about.

The model got copied fast and mostly badly. Dan Le Batard left ESPN and built Meadowlark Media in 2021. Colin Cowherd launched The Volume the same year. Pat McAfee took his show to ESPN in 2023 on a deal reported at $85 million over five years, the moment the networks stopped building personalities and started buying them outright. Simmons' bet, that the person is the product, is now the industry's default assumption rather than his edge.

https://www.theringer.com/