How to Get Featured in Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated is one of the most recognised names in sport, built on reporting, long-form writing and photography. It is a realistic target for a narrow group of people and an unrealistic one for almost everybody else, and the second half of that sentence is the useful part.

What Sports Illustrated covers

Sport. Athletes, teams, coaches, results, records, rivalries, injuries, comebacks and the human stories underneath competition, alongside the business and governance questions that decide how sport is run.

The writing tends to want access and detail rather than announcements. A profile works because the writer spent time with someone and came back with things nobody else has. That is a high bar, and it is the bar.

Expert commentary is part of the mix as well, usually from people in sports medicine, performance, officiating, law or the economics of the game, when a story already in motion needs someone credible to explain it.

Who realistically gets covered

Competitors, at a level where a general sports audience has a reason to care. Teams and organisations doing something consequential. Coaches and officials. People whose work shapes how a sport is played, watched, funded or governed.

Brands and founders sit outside that unless the story has a genuine sporting dimension. A technology that changes how an event is officiated is a story. A supplement company run by someone who likes sport is not, and no amount of pitching turns the second into the first.

If you are in that position, the honest advice is to look at where your actual buyers read. Our guide on choosing the right publication goes through how to work that out.

How access actually works

In sport, more than almost any other beat, the route to a writer runs through the people around the subject. Agents, clubs, governing bodies, leagues, universities and press officers control availability, and reporters work those relationships continuously.

That has a practical consequence. If you represent an athlete, the useful work is making them genuinely available at the moment a story is live, with something to say and a person authorised to say yes quickly. If you do not have that access, a cold pitch about someone a reporter cannot reach goes nowhere.

Timing is unforgiving. Sport runs on fixtures, seasons, transfers, drafts and results, and a story that is interesting on the Monday after a match is dead by Thursday.

The routes in, and what to call them

• Earned editorial on the main masthead. A reporter or editor decides to cover you. Free, competitive, and not for sale by anyone.
• Expert comment. Being reachable and qualified when a live story needs explaining.
• Team and fan-facing sites under the brand. A broad network publishes under the name with different writers and different standards. Real coverage, but not the main title.
• Advertising, sponsorship and branded content. Paid, labelled, and a commercial product rather than an editorial decision.

Separate franchises within the brand run their own selection processes on published terms, and those are worth reading at source rather than through an intermediary offering access.

Naming matters afterwards. If your piece ran on a team site under the brand, say so. Describing it as the magazine invites the one conversation you do not want, where an investor or a journalist checks and finds the claim inflated. The distinction between what you earned and what you bought is covered in what earned media actually means.

What to do if you are not an athlete

Start where the sport is actually covered. Specialist publications, governing body channels, regional and local sports desks, coaching and performance press, and the trade titles serving the business of sport all publish people the national brands will not, and they are reachable.

That is not a downgrade. It is how a record gets built, and a record is what makes a national reporter take a later pitch seriously. Coverage follows coverage in sport as much as anywhere else.

If your interest in sport is commercial rather than sporting, be honest about that and target accordingly. A business title covering sponsorship, broadcasting, participation or sports technology will often reach the people you actually need, and it will run the story a sports desk would decline. Our guide on tier one and tier two publications sets out how those trade-offs work.

What we do

We start by telling you whether there is a sporting story here at all. When there is, we build it properly, get the access and assets in order, and approach the right people at the right moment in the calendar.

When there is not, we say so and point the budget somewhere it can work. We do not sell placements at newsroom titles, because nobody can deliver them.

Frequently asked questions

Can a business get covered here?

Only with a real sporting angle, such as technology, health, governance or economics that changes something about the sport itself. Company news alone is not enough.

Is a team site under the brand the same as the magazine?

No. It is genuine coverage, written by different people to different standards, and it should be described by what it actually is.

I am an amateur athlete. Is this realistic?

Usually not at national level, though a genuinely unusual story can travel. Local and specialist sports media is a far better starting point and builds a record that helps later.