Diario AS

What is Diario AS?

Diario AS is a Spanish daily sports newspaper published in Madrid, which also runs a website at as.com. An account of the title's history records that the Montiel company, which had revived the paper in 1967, ran into financial difficulty in 1993, and that Prisa — the publisher of El País — acquired Diario AS in 1996, appointing Alfredo Relaño as director; the same account credits that period with the launch of as.com.^[1]

Its continued position inside that group is attested separately. A media-trade report published in September 2021 compared the audiences of Prisa's titles and recorded AS as carrying the largest Comscore figure within the group for the month it measured, ahead of El País.^[5] That is a dated observation about the group's own titles rather than a standing claim, and it is given here as such.

The paper's own website could not be retrieved for this account. Its masthead, its current director and its statement of editorial principles are therefore not quoted, and no self-description by AS is adopted below.

What does Diario AS cover?

AS is carried in both of the measurement series that describe the Spanish sports press. The Estudio General de Medios places it in the table of daily newspapers alongside Marca, Mundo Deportivo and Sport and the general dailies.^[2][3] Comscore's State of Sports 2025 España report, as reported on 19 November 2025, measured as.com as one of the Spanish sports digital properties, with marca.com, sport.es, mundodeportivo.com and relevo.com.^[4]

The historical shape of the title's coverage is documented for its earlier periods. The 1932 weekly that first bore the name ran to 24 pages "repletas de grandes fotografías", with football prominent alongside boxing, cycling and athletics; an issue of 11 October 1932 is cited as carrying the Athletic Bilbao forward Rubio.^[1] After the 1967 relaunch the paper added a weekly supplement, AS Color, which ran from 1971 to 1982, and the same account says football coverage was expanded after the 1996 change of owner.^[1]

A study of the Spanish sports dailies as a group, published in 2013 by Clara Sainz de Baranda Andújar in Materiales para la Historia del Deporte, treats AS as one of a handful of national sports dailies and describes El Mundo Deportivo as "el decano de los diarios deportivos españoles".^[6] A current desk-by-desk account of AS's sections and supplements could not be sourced, because the paper's own site could not be retrieved.

How large is Diario AS's audience?

For the printed paper, the Estudio General de Medios recorded AS at 369,000 readers a day in its second wave of 2026, whose fieldwork is reported as running from 19 March to 3 June 2026; the same table gave 881,000 for Marca, 276,000 for Mundo Deportivo and 177,000 for Sport.^[2] The first wave of 2026, reported on 15 April 2026, recorded a rise of 0.26 per cent for AS but did not state the figure itself in the account that could be retrieved.^[3]

Those are survey readership estimates. No audited circulation figure from OJD/Introl could be retrieved for AS, so no circulation number is given here.

For the website, Comscore's State of Sports 2025 España report was reported on 19 November 2025 as putting as.com at 15.2 million unique visitors, immediately behind marca.com at 15.3 million; sport.es, mundodeportivo.com and relevo.com were reported only as falling between 14.1 million and 8.9 million, with no figure given for any of them individually.^[4] The month that report measured was not stated in the account retrieved, which limits how precisely the figure can be dated.

One earlier and precisely dated Comscore reading is available. Published in September 2021 and covering August 2021, it recorded as.com at 19,074,000 unique users, elpais.com at 18,861,000, marca.com at 17,698,000 and mundodeportivo.com at 17,652,000, and noted that in July 2021 AS had reached 19.2 million.^[5] That is a five-year-old measurement, offered only as a dated comparison.

Since when has Diario AS existed?

The name and the newspaper have different starting points, and they are kept apart here. Semanario Gráfico AS was a weekly founded in Madrid in 1932 by Luis Montiel Balanzat, a publisher who also directed Estampa and Ahora; it ran until July 1936, when the Civil War ended it.^[1]

The daily newspaper is a later foundation that took the earlier weekly's name. The Montiel family revived it as Diario AS on 6 December 1967, with Luis González de Linares as its first director, and the same account says the initial print run "superó rápidamente los 50.000 ejemplares diarios".^[1] The choice of name was deliberate, the account says, to keep the connection to the 1930s weekly.^[1]

The ownership date is a third and separate one: 1996, when Prisa acquired the paper from the Montiel company after the difficulties of 1993.^[1] Founded in 1932, refounded as a daily in 1967, acquired in 1996 — the three are different events and the page does not merge them.

Why does Diario AS matter in Spain's sport?

The measured case is that AS carries the second-largest readership figure in the EGM's newspaper table among the sports dailies, at 369,000 a day in the second 2026 wave, and a digital figure within a hundred thousand or so of the largest Spanish sports site in the Comscore report reported in November 2025, at 15.2 million against 15.3 million.^[2][4] The gap between the two series — a wide margin in print, a narrow one online — is itself the point, and both are third-party measurements reported with their dates.

The structural case is that AS sits inside Prisa, a group whose other Spanish title is a general national daily, and that its Comscore audience was reported in September 2021 as the largest of that group's titles in the month measured.^[5] A Spanish-language sports daily inside a Spanish-language general-press group has an audience that is not confined to Spain, and the September 2021 comparison was drawn against El País on that basis.^[5]

The competitions AS reports on are described elsewhere on this site under LaLiga and Liga Endesa, the national context under sport in Spain, and the rules governing who may broadcast Spanish sport under broadcast rights.