What is The Playbook?

The Playbook is a personalized AI-generated daily sports newsletter. Instead of a one-size-fits-all sports digest, every subscriber selects the teams they actually follow across 13 leagues, and every morning at 6 AM ET they receive one custom newspaper-style broadsheet covering only those teams — no fillers, no irrelevant content.

How it works

When you sign up, you pick the teams you care about across any combination of supported leagues. There are no required picks and no league bundles — a Manchester United fan who also follows the New York Rangers and Boston Red Sox can build that exact mix.

Every morning, an automated pipeline fetches live data from public sports APIs (ESPN, official league feeds), composes a per-team brief using a large language model, runs the result through a 9-rule fact-check validator, and assembles a personalized broadsheet email that lands in your inbox by 6 AM ET. One subscriber. One email. Only their teams.

What makes it different

Personalization beats personalization-by-section

Most "personalized" sports newsletters let you pick a section preference (e.g. NFL-heavy or NBA-heavy) but still deliver league-wide content. The Playbook is granular at the team level: if you follow only Liverpool and the Jacksonville Jaguars, you get one section about Liverpool and one about the Jaguars — nothing else. No Manchester City news, no Buffalo Bills coverage, no PGA filler.

Hallucination defenses

AI-generated sports coverage is famously prone to factual errors — wrong scores, players assigned to old teams, fabricated stats. Every brief from The Playbook passes a 9-rule validator before sending. The validator catches transferred players (Sainz at Ferrari when he's at Williams), score mismatches, fabricated advanced stats, banned coach mentions, impossible game states, and stale year references. Critical violations trigger an automatic re-prompt; if a transferred-player leak survives the retry, the offending sentence is redacted from the email before delivery.

Newspaper-style design

Every issue is rendered as a single-email broadsheet with named sections by sport: The Red Report for Manchester United, The Tifosi Report for Ferrari, The Papaya Report for McLaren, The Silver Arrows Report for Mercedes-AMG, The Tour Report for PGA Tour. The lead story — an extended brief at the top of the broadsheet — is auto-selected each day based on which of your teams has the most newsworthy moment.

What's covered

• Soccer: Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, MLS, plus selected European cup competition (UEFA Champions League and Europa League)
• Ice hockey: NHL — playoff bracket awareness during the post-season
• Basketball: NBA — playoff series awareness during the post-season
• Baseball: MLB — divisional standing and L10 record context
• American football: NFL — season record and period anchor
• Motorsport: Formula 1 — constructor coverage including driver lineups and standings
• Golf: PGA Tour — current tournament leaderboard and field

Tiers

Free Analyst's Daily Brief

Every team you select gets a paragraph-length summary of yesterday's results, current form, and the next fixture. Free forever, no credit card required.

Paid Subscriber Deep Dive

Adds a longer per-team analysis with tactical context, statistical depth, and editorial framing tailored to whether the team is on a matchday, just played, has a rest day, or is in the off-season. The lead story is also extended with deeper context.

How The Playbook compares

Newsletters like Yahoo Sports AM, The Athletic Daily, and The GIST are excellent at curating the day's biggest sports stories — but every reader gets the same content. The Playbook is the opposite philosophy: hyper-narrow, hyper-personal. If you only care about three teams, you get three sections. No editorial filler.

Newsletters like Morning Brew Sports or Front Office Sports focus on business and culture around sports. The Playbook is purely about on-field performance: results, form, fixtures, tactics, stats.

Operational details

• Send time: 6 AM Eastern Time, every day
• Delivery: Resend (primary) with Gmail SMTP fallback
• Pipeline: GitHub Actions cron, Cloudflare Pages for the website
• Pricing: Free Analyst's Brief (every team, every day). Paid Deep Dive available for subscribers who want longer per-team analysis.
• Pilot status: Launched April 17, 2026. Currently free during pilot phase.

Read before subscribing

You can read five real published editions from May 2, 2026 — actual issues sent to actual subscribers, with names removed. They show the format, length, and editorial voice across different team combinations.