Sportal

What is Sportal?

Sportal is the sports desk of siol.net, a Slovene general news portal. It is a section of that site rather than a separate publication, and this page follows the domain accordingly: the bare domain given for it is siol.net, the parent site on whose path the sports coverage sits.^[1]

The imprint reached from the section names the publisher as "TSmedia, medijske vsebine in storitve, d.o.o.", at Cigaletova 15, 1000 Ljubljana, with a published editorial contact line.^[1] The Euromedia Ownership Monitor's Slovenia country report, published in December 2025 by a project coordinated at the University of Salzburg with support from the European Commission's DG CONNECT, lists Siol.net under Telekom Slovenije and describes that company as majority state-owned.^[2] That attribution is the monitor's and is dated to its December 2025 edition; ownership statements go stale quickly and no later position was retrieved.

What does Sportal cover?

The section index published on the site runs to nogomet (football), košarka (basketball), kolesarstvo (cycling), rokomet (handball), zima (winter sport), hokej (ice hockey), tenis, odbojka (volleyball), atletika, moto (motorsport), drugo and olimpizem.^[1] The self-description in the section's own metadata promises "najbolj sveže in aktualne športne novice" together with video, reports, live match coverage, standings, comment and interviews; that is the desk's own account of itself and is reported as such.^[1]

Winter sport is a visible strand. A Sportal report of 18 March 2022 by Jaka Lopatič, filed under zimski športi and skoki and tagged to the Letalnica bratov Gorišek, previewed the team competition at Planica at which the ski flying world record was expected to fall, and quoted the competition director saying "Rekord se mora zgoditi. Na to vpliva več dejavnikov" — that the record had to happen, and that several factors bore on it.^[3] The piece carries a named byline, a section path and a keyword set, which is how the desk files its winter coverage generally.^[3]

The section sits inside a general news portal rather than standing alone, so the sports desk shares the domain, the imprint and the publisher with the portal's news, business and lifestyle sections.^[1] That structure is the reason the audience measurement reported below is available only at domain level. The breadth of the section list, rather than any ranking, is what is reported here; no claim is made about which of those sports the desk covers most heavily, because no source retrieved for this page counts its output by section.

How large is Sportal's audience?

The recognised web-audience measurement in Slovenia is MOSS — Merjenje obiskanosti spletnih strani — whose monthly results Marketing magazin publishes. For March 2026, reported on 7 April 2026, MOSS gave siol.net 950,974 different users, within a measured universe of 1,521,902 monthly users across 56 participating sites.^[4] For October 2020, reported on 4 November 2020, the same measurement gave siol.net approximately 814,000 unique users.^[5]

Both figures are for siol.net as a whole. MOSS does not publish a separate figure for the Sportal section, so no audience number specific to the sports desk is given here. Traffic estimates from commercial tools are not audited measurement and are not used.

Since when has Sportal existed?

A launch date for the Sportal section, or for siol.net itself, could not be established from a source retrieved for this page; the site's own pages reached carry the publisher's details and the section structure but no dated account of the portal's establishment.^[1] The oldest Sportal article retrieved directly here is dated 18 March 2022,^[3] and independent measurement of the parent domain is available at least from the October 2020 MOSS release.^[5] Neither of those is a founding date and neither is offered as one.

Three dates would be needed to answer the question properly and none was obtained: the date the portal first published, the date the sports section acquired the Sportal name, and the date the present publishing company took the title over. The Euromedia Ownership Monitor dates its own attribution of the site to Telekom Slovenije to its December 2025 edition, which fixes when that ownership statement was made rather than when the ownership began.^[2]

Why does Sportal matter in Slovenia's sport?

Because it is a sports desk attached to one of the two or three Slovene news domains that MOSS measures at close to a million monthly users, and because its ownership chain runs, on the Euromedia Ownership Monitor's December 2025 account, to a majority state-owned telecommunications company.^[2][4] That combination is precisely what the monitoring bodies examine.

The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, in the 2026 Media Pluralism Monitor, scores Slovenia at 75 per cent risk for Market Plurality and 51 per cent for Political Independence, notes that "The Mass Media Act (ZMed-1) introduced stronger transparency obligations regarding ownership, financing, and public funding, but their effects remain to be seen", and finds that "Editorial independence remains insufficiently protected against commercial and owner influence, with hidden advertising, blurred boundaries between editorial and commercial content, and broader cross-sector ownership raising concerns".^[6] The Euromedia Ownership Monitor's own finding is that "Complex ownership chains, the use of third parties, or formally concealed ownership reduce the effectiveness of legislation".^[2] Both statements are quoted and attributed; neither is restated here as this page's own view.