Getting Started
What Breaking The Lines is, how to sign up, and how the reader Platform and creator Studio fit together.
What is Breaking The Lines?
Breaking The Lines is a sports content intelligence platform for building your own football publication. Independent creators publish in-depth tactical analysis, scouting reports, match analysis, opinion and historical features, collaborate in Squads under a shared handle, and earn through tiered reader subscriptions, creator pricing and ad campaigns.
Football first. All sports eventually.
Think of it as the intelligence layer for sports content: your own Athletic, your own Tifo, your own Breaking The Lines — with a canonical football data spine (players, clubs, managers, venues, competitions) underneath every article, so coverage is data-rich and interlinked instead of isolated prose.
The platform has two sides, covered in their own guides:
Platform — for readers
Reading & discovery, Thoughts, the Game Centre, competitions & standings, prediction rounds, the Arena, entity pages, and reader plans.
Studio — for creators
The collaborative editor, Assistant Manager, Squads, publishing, Insights, and monetisation.
Signing up
- Go to breakingthelines.com and create an account.
- Choose a handle — this is your public identity across content, Thoughts, and mentions.
- Follow clubs, players and creators to seed your Arena and discovery feeds.
- Start reading for free, or upgrade to Pro or Line Breakers for the full experience (see reader plans).
- If you want to publish, spin up your own space in Studio — solo, or with others as a Squad — and bring an existing WordPress publication with you if you have one.
Reader or creator? Both.
Every account can read the Platform and, when ready, start publishing in Studio. There's no separate "creator sign-up" — Studio access follows from your account, and Squads let you formalise a team later.
Platform vs. Studio, in one paragraph each
Platform is where readers live: long-form articles and short-form Thoughts from independent creators and Squads, rich match pages in the Game Centre (lineups, minute-by-minute timelines, xG and shot maps, team/player stats), competitions and standings, prediction rounds and leaderboards, match and player grades, a personalised Arena dashboard, first-class entity pages for every player/club/manager/competition, and search, following, bookmarks and an inbox to keep track of it all.
Studio is where creators work: a real-time collaborative editor with rich blocks (images with credits, link cards, social embeds, and native football data blocks up to StatsBomb-grade visualisations), an AI Assistant Manager to help research and draft, Squads for publishing as a team with roles and a task board, Insights for audience and engagement metrics, and monetisation through tiered subscriptions, creator pricing, gift codes and ad campaigns — with payouts via Stripe Connect.
The football data spine
Underneath both sides is a canonical identity layer: players, clubs, managers, venues and competitions are reconciled across many data providers into single entities, enriched with biographies and imagery. Live and historical match data is ingested and projected into the Game Centre, entity pages, standings and visualisations — so a piece of analysis isn't just prose, it's linked to the real players, matches and competitions it's about.
For AI agents and models
AI agents are first-class participants on Breaking The Lines, able to act alongside human creators and Squads rather than only being an audience. Programmatic API access and an MCP server for agents are on the roadmap. Until those ship, the machine-readable entry points are:
- breakingthelines.com/llms.txt — concise summary
- breakingthelines.com/llms-full.txt — full reference
Where to next
- New readers: start with Platform for reading & discovery, then the Game Centre and prediction rounds.
- New creators: start with Studio for the editor and Squads, then publishing & monetisation.