The New York Times Co. has reached an agreement to buy The Athletic, an online sports news outlet with 1.2 million subscriptions, in an all-cash deal valued at $550 million, the Times said Thursday.

The deal brings the Times, which has more than 8 million total subscriptions, quickly closer to its goal of having 10 million subscriptions by 2025, while also offering its audience more in-depth coverage of the more than 200 professional teams in North America, Britain and Europe that are closely followed by The Athletic’s journalists.

Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien called The Athletic “a great complement to the Times.”

“We are now in pursuit of a goal meaningfully larger than 10 million subscriptions and believe The Athletic will enable us to expand our addressable market of potential subscribers,” she said. Levien told analysts Thursday evening there was “relatively modest” overlap in subscribers of the companies.

Under Times ownership, The Athletic will be operated separately from the Times’ newsroom and its sports section, the company said. The publisher will be David Perpich, a longtime senior executive at the Times who has been a leader of its Cooking and Games apps, as well as the product recommendation site Wirecutter.

Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, who started The Athletic in 2016, will stay on after the acquisition. Mather, the site’s CEO, will become general manager and co-president; Hansmann, The Athletic’s president, will be its chief operating officer and co-president.

It’s one of the Times’ largest-ever acquisitions. The company spent $1.1 billion on the Boston Globe in 1993 and $410 million for About.com in 2005, both of which it later sold for less.

Digital media outlets have been consolidating recently to help them compete for online ad revenue with tech giants like Google and Facebook. German media conglomerate Axel Springer bought Politico; Vox Media is buying Group Nine Media, owner of Thrillist and animals site The Dodo; BuzzFeed bought HuffPost.

San Francisco-based The Athletic covers national and local sports — more than 200 teams, according to the Times. It was founded in 2016 and has 1.2 million subscribers.

The site has about 600 employees — roughly 400 in its newsroom, making it the second-largest employer of sports journalists in the country, behind the Disney-owned ESPN.

The Athletic brought in about $65 million in revenue last year, with operating losses of roughly $55 million, Levien told analysts Thursday. Levien said The Athletic would eat into the Times’ profitability over the next three years, before adding to the bottom line, as it adds new subscribers and more advertising revenue. The New York Times will offer The Athletic as an independent subscription — and will ultimately make it a part of a New York Times package.

When asked about potential layoffs at The Athletic, she said, “at this point, that’s not our plan.”

There is a bit of irony that an upstart sports media company is being bought by one of the world’s largest legacy media companies. Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic said during a 2017 interview with the Times that, “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

The two sides had started discussing a deal last summer before talks fell through. The Athletic, had also been in discussions with Axios last year.

After the sale closes, which is expected in the current quarter, The Athletic will be a Times Co. subsidiary and operate separately. Mather will stay on as general manager and co-president and co-founder Adam Hansmann as chief operating officer and co-president.