Sportnet

What is Sportnet?

Sportnet is the sports site of the SME group, reached at sportnet.sme.sk; the Euromedia Ownership Monitor gives the publisher as Petit Press.^[2] The site describes itself as carrying current sports reporting from football, ice hockey, tennis, MMA, cycling and other sports in one place, and links to the parent title sme.sk and its subscription service.^[1] The sports title is served from a host of the parent newspaper's domain rather than from a domain of its own.^[1]

Its ownership is documented by a named monitor rather than by the publisher's own statement. The Euromedia Ownership Monitor's Slovakia report for the 2025 edition, written by Ivan Godársky and Marek Mračka of MEMO 98 under the coordination of the University of Salzburg, states that Petit Press's majority shareholder remains Prvá slovenská investičná spoločnosť, and that Penta fully exited in April 2021 when the Media Development Investment Fund purchased 34 per cent.^[2]

What does Sportnet cover?

The site covers domestic and international sport across disciplines: football including the domestic league, European club competition and the World Cup; ice hockey including the NHL and domestic competition; tennis including the Grand Slams and the ATP and WTA tours; cycling including the Tour de France and the world championships; and athletics, motorsport and winter sports.^[1]

Beyond those, the sections list motorsport, darts, snooker, boxing, golf, American football, floorball and water sports, and a standing section for the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.^[1]

It carries agency copy as well as its own, under the agency's byline rather than the site's. Its report of 13 June 2025 on the Niké liga's 2024/25 attendance — 499,593 spectators across the season at an average of 2,536 a match, against 508,384 and 2,620 the season before, with per-club averages headed by ŠK Slovan Bratislava at 7,359 from 117,738 spectators over sixteen home matches, FC Spartak Trnava at 4,602 and FC DAC 1904 Dunajská Streda at 4,370 — carries TASR as its source.^[3] That story is the completed-season count for that season, and the same figures appeared the same day in the Slovak sports daily.^[3]

How large is Sportnet's audience?

No audited per-domain figure for sportnet.sme.sk could be retrieved for this page, and the site publishes no audience statement of its own alongside its sections.^[1]

The recognised online measurement in Slovakia is the joint industry research run through IAB Slovakia. Its 2025 annual report gives an internet population aged 12 and over of 3.7 million, 3.1 million monthly visitors to the sites in the research, 34 publishers and 73 domains measured, and names aktuality.sk as the largest single site at 2.5 million monthly visitors; no figure for this site appears in it.^[4] From 1 April 2026 the research has been operated by Gemius Slovakia as gemiusAudience, in succession to IABmonitor, with public data published through the Gemius portal.^[5]

Traffic estimators are not audited measurement and no figure from one is given here.

Since when has Sportnet existed?

The site's own pages give no launch date for Sportnet, and no independently published date could be retrieved for this page.^[1] The absence is about the evidence retrieved, not about the site's history: the title sits on a host of a parent newspaper's domain, and the parent's own founding is not given on the sports pages either.^[1]

The dated facts are on the ownership side. The Euromedia Ownership Monitor's 2025 Slovakia report puts Penta's full exit from Petit Press in April 2021, when the Media Development Investment Fund purchased 34 per cent, and names Prvá slovenská investičná spoločnosť as the continuing majority shareholder.^[2]

Why does Sportnet matter in Slovakia's sport?

It is one of the outlets through which the national agency's sport wire reaches the general reader: the completed-season Niké liga attendance count for 2024/25, on which any structural account of Slovak spectator football rests, was published there on 13 June 2025 with TASR given as the source.^[3]

Its publisher is also the one Slovak group whose ownership the Euromedia Ownership Monitor describes as having moved away from a domestic investment group: the 2025 Slovakia report records Penta's full exit in April 2021, against a market it otherwise describes as a “clear dual structure” in which diversified domestic groups hold major outlets alongside extensive non-media interests, with “structural risks of instrumentalisation and conflicts of interest”.^[2] The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom's Media Pluralism Monitor 2026 states that “Slovakia faces high levels of media ownership concentration, with the top four owners controlling over 60% of the audience in the newspaper, TV, and radio sectors”, and puts the country's market plurality risk at 69 per cent.^[6] Both statements are quoted and attributed and neither is a finding about this site.