The World Behind the Cup is the latest short-run newsletter series from The Guardian. Head of Newsletters, Toby Moses, explains how the publisher’s strategy for pop-ups – and newsletters more generally – has evolved over his five years.
The World Cup (which ends this week) got underway last month, but The Guardian’s The World Behind the Cup – a limited newsletter series looking at the tournament’s ‘cultural, social and political’ influence – launched back in March. Toby Moses, head of newsletters at the Guardian, told us this week on the Publisher Podcast that the pop-up newsletter was designed to make the most of the interest around the World Cup, especially with the publisher’s US audience.
The Guardian is doing better than ever in the US and, according to Toby, has a ‘really engaged’ US audience for its football coverage. With matches taking place across America, The Guardian team saw an obvious opportunity to expand the reach of its football coverage in its fastest growing market.
Toby said: “We think this is a moment where we, if we invest – adding editors, adding writers, adding resources, adding promotion – we can capture some of the hype around the World Cup.”
However, it wasn’t simply a case of shipping an existing newsletter across the pond; although Football Daily is one of The Guardian’s longest running newsletters, it wasn’t going to work for an American audience. “If you talk about football in the US, you’re not talking about soccer, you’re not talking about the World Cup, you’re talking about the NFL.”
Calling the pop-up ‘The World Behind the Cup’ was a clever way to avoid this linguistic conundrum, and being focused on the behind-the-scenes history of the tournament, was well placed to engage fans less familiar with the tournament.
Pop-up transitions
Pop-up newsletters have a track record of incredibly high-engagement, especially those centered on a real-world, real-time event, but the long term goal is to transition short-run readers to a more permanent newsletter property. Toby explained: “In an ideal world, when you start a pop-up newsletter, you have already worked out where you’re taking those readers.”
For The World Behind the Cup readers, that destination is the twice weekly Soccer Desk: World Cup Edition and then, the weekly Soccer Desk newsletter. Toby noted that the focus on the US audience is clear. “As soon as you put soccer in the title, you’re telling people that it’s aimed at a certain audience,” he pointed out.
However, it’s not just about the name. “You don’t want to patronise readers. There are a lot of very informed US soccer fans out there,” Toby explained, “but you do want to write about the sport in a slightly different way than you would for a UK Premier League audience, and so that’s what this newsletter will do.”
The transition from World Cup pop-up to regular soccer weekly is clear, but Toby said it can be trickier with subjects that have a less obvious follow-on. “That’s something that I’ve learned over the course of doing this job,” he said, highlighting the lessons learned from publishing the Reclaim Your Brain series.
Launched in January 2025, Toby said the eight-week, asynchronous series ‘really caught fire’, but explained that The Guardian’s strict focus on data privacy meant he couldn’t just pass email addresses from one list to another. “We got hundreds of thousands of sign ups to that newsletter. If we’d realised how successful it was going to be, we’d have thought, ‘Right, is there a newsletter that we would be allowed to move them to automatically’.”
He said that, now, from the earliest stages of coming up with an idea for a short-run newsletter, it is really important to think about next steps. “It’s something we thought about from the start when we were coming up with the World Cup coverage and that’s partly where Soccer Desk comes from, making sure we can maintain those relationships. The ‘What’s Next?’ is crucial.”
A strategic look at newsletters
Toby became the Guardian’s first Head of Newsletters in 2021 and joining the dots on pop-up newsletter strategy is just one of the things he’s taken away from the five years he’s been in the role.
The Guardian had newsletters before he took up the role, but Toby said they had developed organically when desk editors thought they might be an interesting add on. “There had never been someone in editorial who was thinking about newsletters as a whole, as a strategy,” he said.
His first strategic move was to shift focus away from newsletters as a referral tool seeing them as content to be enjoyed on their own platform. He said: “I wanted to angle [them] more towards written-through, authored newsletters, creating that human connection between our writers, our journalism and our readers, rather than just replicating what was on the web already.”
Toby’s first success was the technology update Techscape, written originally by Alex Hern, who was the paper’s technology correspondent at the time. “We used that as a kind of experiment to see [if it] could work. It grew pretty quickly and is still going.”
In terms of judging success today, Toby looks at the usual KPIs – sign ups, unsubscribes, open rates, even click throughs. But he also looks at revenue. “Obviously, we operate with a reader-funded model, and so reader revenue is something which we look at. We’re quite unusual in that most Guardian editors don’t have sight of those reader revenue figures, but on newsletters we do because it’s just a useful piece of engagement tracking.
Editorial instincts
Beyond the data, Toby also emphasises the importance of editorial instincts. “You have to trust that we have people in the building that have some feel for what’s going to work, and I lean on that a lot.”
Feedback from readers is also key, and Toby spotlighted The Guardian’s gaming newsletter, Pushing Buttons, written by Keza MacDonald, as an example of why audience interactions matter. If he was only to look at the numbers for Pushing Buttons, Toby said he might wonder if it was worth carrying on with it. “It’s a brilliant newsletter, she’s a great writer, but the audience we have for it is quite small.”
However, the level of reader interaction paints a very different picture. “The engagement on that list is huge,” said Toby, “and they’re readers who wouldn’t necessarily be signing up to anything else we do…that newsletter skews a good deal younger than the rest of our list and it skews more female. It’s fantastic.”
Toby was hesitant to say what made a perfect newsletter – every reader will have their own favourites – but he said great newsletters are written by journalists that are having a good time writing them. “They are interested in the subject, they are engaged in the subject, they are really informed.”
He switched back to Keza MacDonald’s Pushing Buttons: “She’s so great at it. She loves writing what she is writing. It comes across in what she’s doing and the [newsletter format] allows her to write in a way that she wouldn’t if she was just writing news stories or features for the website. That to me is what makes a perfect newsletter.”
Listen to the whole episode above, or search MediaVoices’ ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.
Listen to the full episode above, or by searching MediaVoices’ ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice. MediaVoices is part of Flashes & Flames Media Ltd.
