News

Grant Wahl Was Fired

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Apr 10th, 2020 · 3:30 PM EDT

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Per him:

Maven just fired me from Sports Illustrated. No severance. Nothing.

— Subscribe to GrantWahl.com (@GrantWahl) April 10, 2020

Grant was one of the bigger/biggest names at Sports Illustrated. He’d been covering international and domestic soccer for the publication for a very long time.

As you know, SI was sold a while back and is now operated by a group called Maven, which axed a ton of the staff last year, then laid off more people when the COVID-19 crisis began. Wahl had been openly critical of these decisions and posted some stories on Instagram recently which were archived by the folks over at Awful Announcing:

If you rip your employer, you’re probably going to be fired, so nobody should really be surprised. I guarantee that he’s not surprised, and he’ll probably be scooped up by The Athletic or ESPN or FOX a better company within 48 hours, so it’s all good. It would have been pointless to stay with Maven anyway, since they very clearly want to cut costs and don’t care too much about the product.

EDIT:

Check this out –

New: Internal memo sent from Maven Founder and CEO James Heckman following the termination of @GrantWahl @SInow: pic.twitter.com/FyVxXIS3ff

— Ian Thomas (@byIanThomas) April 10, 2020

And this:

1) I told Maven I was fine taking a 30% pay cut during the pandemic. But it was shameful to try to push through a permanent 30% cut beyond the pandemic.
2) My base salary was far below that, but I got a bonus because my bosses said my work was very good.
3) I write frequently. https://t.co/Q5BvV2CTeg

— Subscribe to GrantWahl.com (@GrantWahl) April 10, 2020

Crazy.