27 August 2026
The Code-Share Era: Why Sport's Next Growth Market Is Someone Else's Audience
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
Read article →Strategy
There is a version of this story that writes itself easily. A private equity firm buys into a sailing league. The press release mentions adventure, sustainability, elite athleticism. The deal gets filed under “sports passion project” and forgotten by the next news cycle.
That version is wrong.
MSP Sports Capital’s majority stake acquisition in the SailGP New Zealand franchise is not a lifestyle decision dressed up in institutional language. It is a calculated bet on a specific architectural model, one that PE firms have already proven they can monetise in motorsport, rugby and football, and one that SailGP has been quietly building toward since its founding in 2018. The sailing is almost incidental. The structure is the point.
SailGP was not founded as a sailing competition that later tried to attract investment. It was designed from the outset as a franchise league built for institutional legibility. The boats are centrally owned and standardised. The cost model is controlled. The broadcast rights, event infrastructure and franchise licensing layer sit at the league level, not the team level. According to SailGP’s own communications, reported by Reuters, the league has operated this centralised model since its launch in 2018, a deliberate structural choice rather than an operational convenience.
That design decision changes the nature of the asset entirely.
When a PE firm buys into a traditionally structured sports team, it is acquiring a bundle of performance risk, wage inflation risk and competitive uncertainty. The team’s value is tied, at least partially, to results. The cost base is variable and often politically difficult to control. The upside is real but so is the fragility.
SailGP’s model strips most of that out. The boats do not depreciate differently depending on which national flag they carry. The operating costs are capped and comparable across franchises. The league controls the IP that appreciates as the property grows. A team owner in SailGP is not buying a sports club in the traditional sense. They are buying a licensed position inside a centrally managed commercial infrastructure.
That is a different kind of asset. And it is exactly the kind of asset that institutional capital has learned to price.
CVC Capital Partners did not invent this logic, but it industrialised it. CVC’s investments in Formula 1, the Six Nations, La Liga and MotoGP, involving multiple nine-figure rights transactions reported by the Financial Times, were not bets on which team would win the championship. They were bets on the commercial infrastructure surrounding competition: the rights packages, the sponsorship frameworks, the broadcast deals, the licensing architecture. CVC extracted value from the layer above the teams, not from the teams themselves.
The lesson the broader PE market drew from CVC’s Formula 1 exit, which generated returns that reshaped how the industry thought about sports rights, was not that motorsport is uniquely valuable. It was that a centrally controlled, commercially disciplined league structure creates a category of appreciating asset that is largely insulated from the volatility of individual team performance.
Formula E followed a similar logic. A cost-capped, technology-standardised electric racing franchise, designed from inception with institutional ownership in mind, it offered PE-legible economics in a format that traditional motorsport did not. The Premier Lacrosse League took the same approach in the US: a centrally owned franchise model, standardised costs, league-level IP, deliberately structured to make institutional entry straightforward.
SailGP is the nautical iteration of the same thesis.
MSP Sports Capital is not a first-time buyer making an exploratory bet. According to public announcements reported by Bloomberg and Sports Business Journal, the firm has previously acquired stakes in McLaren Racing, Fenway Sports Group and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Three prior major sports portfolio positions, each chosen for its multi-property logic rather than its single-asset upside.
That pattern matters. MSP does not buy into sports properties because it wants exposure to one team’s fortunes. It builds portfolios of positions across properties that share structural characteristics: strong IP, scalable commercial infrastructure, and the kind of brand architecture that compounds over time. The SailGP New Zealand stake fits that pattern precisely. It is not a bet on New Zealand winning races. It is a position inside a league structure that MSP believes will appreciate as the property matures.
RedBird Capital Partners has followed a comparable playbook, co-investing in Fenway Sports Group alongside MSP and acquiring AC Milan, building a portfolio in which the value of each position is partly a function of the network of positions around it. The logic is explicitly cross-property: owning multiple nodes in a maturing sports commercial ecosystem generates returns that no single asset could produce alone.
This is not passion capital. This is portfolio construction.
The commercial architecture SailGP has assembled is worth examining in detail, because it explains why the franchise layer is now attractive to buyers like MSP even before the league has achieved the scale of Formula 1 or the Premier League.
SailGP controls the boat technology, which means it controls the cost floor and the performance ceiling simultaneously. It controls the broadcast rights at the league level, which means commercial deals compound upward regardless of which franchise is performing on the water. It controls the event infrastructure, which means the destination-event economics, hospitality, sponsorship activation, and venue relationships sit with the league rather than being fragmented across individual teams. And it controls the franchise licensing layer, which means that as new national teams are added, the league captures the entry fee and the ongoing commercial participation.
Each of these layers reinforces the others. Better broadcast deals make the franchise licenses more valuable. More franchises increase the global footprint, which improves the broadcast deal. The event infrastructure creates premium hospitality inventory that attracts the kind of luxury and financial services sponsors that are willing to pay for access to the audience SailGP has deliberately cultivated.
The result is a structure in which value accrues to the league layer first, and to franchise holders second, but in which franchise holders benefit from league-level appreciation without bearing league-level operational risk.
That is the architecture PE firms have been trying to find in sport for two decades. SailGP built it from scratch.
The table below maps SailGP’s franchise architecture against the comparable models that have already attracted institutional capital, across four dimensions that PE firms use to assess sports property risk and upside.
| Property | Cost structure | IP control | Franchise model | PE entry point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Formula 1 (pre-Liberty) | Variable, team-level | Fragmented | No formal franchise | Rights layer (CVC) |
| Formula E | Capped, centralised | League-controlled | Yes, standardised | Team and league level |
| Premier Lacrosse League | Capped, centralised | League-controlled | Yes, centrally owned | League level |
| Six Nations Rugby | Variable, union-level | Partially centralised | No | Commercial rights (CVC) |
| SailGP | Capped, centralised | League-controlled | Yes, standardised | Franchise level (MSP) |
The pattern is consistent. The properties that have attracted the most disciplined institutional capital share two characteristics: centralised IP control and a cost structure that limits downside. SailGP has both. The MSP deal is not an outlier. It is a confirmation.
PwC’s Sports Outlook estimates the global sports market at over 500 billion USD, with institutional capital increasingly targeting non-traditional properties as the major league assets in North America and Europe become fully priced. That dynamic is not incidental to the SailGP story. It is the macro condition that makes the deal legible.
When the obvious assets, the Premier League clubs, the NFL franchises, the Formula 1 teams, trade at valuations that leave limited room for the kind of returns PE firms require, capital moves toward properties where the structural work has been done but the commercial scale has not yet been achieved. SailGP is at exactly that inflection point. The architecture is proven. The audience is growing. The franchise layer is beginning to attract the kind of buyers who validate the model for the next tier of institutional capital behind them.
According to Sportico’s analysis of comparable motorsport valuations, the average Formula 1 team is now worth approximately 3.42 billion USD, up 48% year on year, a figure that reflects not team performance but league-level commercial appreciation. SailGP is not Formula 1. But the structural logic is the same, and the gap between current franchise valuations and the ceiling implied by that logic is where MSP is placing its bet.
The MSP investment in SailGP New Zealand will be written about as a sailing story. It is not a sailing story.
It is a story about what happens when a league is deliberately engineered to be institutionally legible from day one, when the cost structure, the IP architecture and the franchise model are all designed with the PE investment thesis in mind rather than retrofitted to it. SailGP’s founders made a series of structural choices in 2018 that looked, at the time, like operational decisions. They were actually commercial ones. The centralised boats, the cost caps, the league-controlled rights: each of those choices was a signal to a specific category of capital that this property was being built for them.
MSP read the signal. The deal is the confirmation.
The question that remains is not whether SailGP’s model works. It is which other cost-capped, technology-standardised league formats are sitting one institutional deal away from a full revaluation. Because the architecture SailGP built is not unique to sailing. It is replicable. And the PE firms that have learned to read it are actively looking for the next property that has done the structural work but not yet received the institutional validation.
The lifestyle story ends here. The infrastructure story is just beginning.
Vinciamo Sports · Sport. Reimagined.@VinciamoSports
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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