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
CVC Capital Partners’ footprint across global sport is difficult to overstate.
Over the last two decades, the firm has been involved in reshaping some of the most commercially significant properties in the modern sports economy. Formula 1. MotoGP. Six Nations Rugby. Premiership Rugby. LaLiga commercial rights. Ligue 1 media structures. Volleyball World. WTA Ventures. Cricket-related investments. Across each of these sectors, the logic was broadly recognizable: premium sports properties with strong underlying audiences, international scalability, and commercial infrastructure capable of becoming significantly more valuable through professionalization, centralization, media optimization, and strategic capital.
In most cases, the pattern made intuitive sense.
Formula 1 already possessed one of the most globally recognizable brands in sport. Football had massive audience aggregation. Rugby offered premium international competition structures. Tennis carried established commercial prestige.
Then came equestrian.
And that is where the story becomes far more interesting.
Because among all the sports properties CVC has touched over the years, the Equine Network acquisition stands out in a particularly revealing way.
Not because horse sport is small. In reality, the broader equine economy is enormous.And not because equestrian suddenly became fashionable. The sport has quietly existed inside affluent global ecosystems for generations. The deal stands out because equestrian is structurally different from almost every other major sports investment category private equity has historically pursued. This is not a centralized league. It is not a straightforward media-rights play. It is not a mature broadcast ecosystem with neatly packaged inventory. It is not a globally unified commercial structure.
Equestrian is fragmented.
Deeply fragmented.
It is fragmented geographically. Fragmented organizationally. Fragmented commercially. Fragmented technologically. Fragmented across disciplines, ownership models, media systems, participation structures, and audience pathways.
Historically, that fragmentation was one of the main reasons many institutional investors struggled to fully understand the sector.
Because modern sports investing traditionally gravitates toward clarity.
Investors like centralized rights. They like measurable audiences. They like consolidated inventory. They like scalable media structures. They like standardized governance.
Equestrian rarely presented itself through that lens and yet, despite this complexity, the sport continuously exhibited many of the characteristics modern sports investors actively search for. Affluent demographics. International mobility. Luxury sponsorship alignment. High-value hospitality environments. Deep emotional engagement. Strong behavioral retention. Long-term participation economics. Destination-event ecosystems. Olympic legitimacy.
In other words, equestrian contained many of the ingredients of a highly valuable premium sports ecosystem.
What it lacked was not value. What it lacked was a coherent commercial architecture capable of making that value legible to sophisticated outside capital.
That is why the Equine Network acquisition matters.
Because the transaction strongly suggests that one of the most experienced sports investors in the world now believes equestrian has reached a point where its fragmentation no longer suppresses opportunity. Instead, fragmentation itself may become the opportunity. That is a very important shift. And it reflects a much broader transformation happening across the global sports economy.
Historically, the most valuable sports properties were those capable of aggregating the largest possible television audiences. Scale dominated everything. Today, however, sophisticated investors increasingly think differently.
The future value of sport is becoming less dependent on pure audience size and increasingly dependent on behavioral depth.
The key question is no longer only:
“How many people watch?”
The more important question increasingly becomes:
“How deeply integrated is this activity inside the consumer’s identity, lifestyle, and recurring behavior?”
That is precisely where equestrian becomes extraordinarily interesting. Because horse sport is not simply consumed. It is inhabited.
A football fan watches matches. A horse owner restructures their life around the sport.
And that distinction changes the economics completely.
One of the central problems in how the wider sports industry has historically analyzed equestrian is that horse sport was almost always evaluated through the wrong economic framework.
The assumption, particularly among investors and media executives outside the industry, was that equestrian behaved like a smaller version of traditional spectator sports. That assumption distorted almost every commercial conclusion that followed. Because equestrian is not fundamentally organized around spectatorship.
It is organized around participation. And the difference between those two models is enormous.
Traditional spectator sports derive the majority of their value from concentrated audience attention. A football league monetizes broadcast rights. A basketball league monetizes scale. A Formula 1 season monetizes global visibility, hospitality, sponsorship integration, and media distribution.
The engine is attention.
Equestrian certainly contains spectator elements particularly at elite level, but the underlying economics of horse sport behave much more like a high-value lifestyle and participation ecosystem. That means the value is distributed across an entire chain of recurring activity rather than concentrated purely around one media product.
This is why equestrian can appear deceptively small from the outside while simultaneously generating enormous economic gravity underneath.
The broader equine economy spans breeding, training, veterinary services, transport, feed, insurance, land management, luxury real estate, hospitality, sponsorship, education, media, tourism, equipment manufacturing, stable infrastructure, rider development, and competition ecosystems.
The horse itself sits at the center of an unusually dense economic network.
And critically, that network operates continuously.
A football stadium generates the majority of its economic activity on matchdays. A horse requires care every single day. That single distinction already changes the structure of the economics dramatically.
Because horse sport does not revolve around intermittent bursts of consumption. It revolves around permanent engagement.
Owners remain economically active continuously. Riders remain economically active continuously. Training systems continue regardless of competition schedules. Veterinary services remain essential year-round. Transport, feed, stable management, breeding, coaching, and facility operations do not disappear once the event ends.
This creates a type of economic durability that many traditional sports struggle to replicate. And this is one of the first major reasons why the CVC transaction deserves much deeper attention than it initially received. Because sophisticated investors increasingly prioritize recurring behavioral ecosystems over purely episodic entertainment consumption.
This is one of the defining shifts happening across the entire global sports economy.
Over the last fifteen years, the most successful sports and lifestyle businesses increasingly stopped thinking purely in terms of audience size and started thinking in terms of behavioral depth.
The important question became less:
“How many people watch?” And increasingly:
“How deeply embedded is this activity inside the consumer’s identity and lifestyle?”
That is an entirely different investment question. And equestrian performs unusually strongly once analyzed through that lens. A horse owner is not merely a fan.
A horse owner often structures geography, schedule, travel, social relationships, spending behavior, and lifestyle around the sport. That creates extraordinarily sticky economic behavior.
In modern investment language, horse sport demonstrates very high retention characteristics. And retention is one of the most valuable economic traits any ecosystem can possess. This is partly why the participation economy has become such a major focus for sophisticated investors.
Golf experienced this dramatically after the pandemic. Fitness and wellness platforms exploded because they became integrated into daily routines. Cycling, racket sports, outdoor endurance communities, and connected fitness ecosystems all benefited from the same broader behavioral shift.
The sports industry increasingly realized that recurring participation behavior often generates more resilient long-term economics than passive media consumption alone. Equestrian may be one of the strongest participation-retention ecosystems anywhere in global sport because of the emotional and operational intensity involved.
The relationship between participant and sport is unusually deep. And the financial commitment reinforces the behavioral commitment. This is why equestrian audiences behave differently from most sports audiences. The average equestrian participant is not casually browsing content during a spare hour. They are embedded inside a lifestyle structure.
That matters enormously from a commercial perspective.
Because identity-driven ecosystems create stronger retention, stronger lifetime spending, stronger sponsor alignment, stronger premium purchasing behavior, and stronger community durability. This helps explain why luxury brands historically understood the value of equestrian long before mainstream sports investors did.
Rolex did not become deeply associated with equestrian because the sport generated the largest television audiences. Longines Watch Co. Francillon Ltd. did not build decades-long equestrian integration because of mass-market scale.
These brands recognized something more subtle but commercially powerful:
horse sport concentrated affluent, internationally mobile, relationship-driven audiences operating inside premium experiential environments. And importantly, those audiences were emotionally engaged rather than casually transactional.
That distinction becomes increasingly important in the modern sports economy.
Today, many luxury and premium brands care less about pure reach and far more about audience quality, hospitality environment, contextual positioning, and relationship depth.
Equestrian naturally performs strongly across all four.
A ROLEX activation inside Aachen or Geneva does not function merely as advertising. It functions as ecosystem alignment. The brand becomes embedded inside an environment associated with precision, heritage, internationalism, exclusivity, discipline, and elite performance. That creates a much richer form of commercial association than simple logo exposure. And this is where many outsiders historically misunderstood the economics of horse sport.
The sport often appeared fragmented because its value was not centralized through one dominant media structure.
But fragmentation does not necessarily mean weakness. In some cases, fragmentation can actually conceal deeper ecosystem value. This is particularly true when the fragmentation exists inside high-retention participation economies.
Because once a company successfully positions itself as connective infrastructure across a fragmented ecosystem, the strategic upside can become enormous. This is one reason the Equine Network acquisition matters so much.
CVC is not simply buying into equestrian media.
It appears to be positioning itself inside the connective infrastructure of a highly valuable but commercially under-integrated ecosystem. That is a much more sophisticated investment thesis. And most importantly, it aligns very closely with broader trends occurring across modern sport.
Over the last decade, sports business increasingly moved away from purely linear media economics and toward ecosystem economics. Formula 1 is no longer only a racing series. It is a luxury hospitality platform, fashion ecosystem, tourism engine, content machine, and global cultural property.
The NBA increasingly behaves like a lifestyle media ecosystem. Golf increasingly operates through hospitality, travel, premium participation, and membership behavior. The sports industry itself is becoming more layered.
And equestrian may actually be unusually well positioned for this transition because the sport already sits naturally at the intersection of luxury, travel, wellness, hospitality, real estate, performance, community, and identity.
The problem historically was not lack of value.
The problem was that much of the value remained commercially invisible because the ecosystem lacked coordinated narrative infrastructure capable of explaining itself coherently to sophisticated outside capital.
That may now be changing.
And that is why the CVC move deserves to be interpreted as far more than a conventional private equity transaction. It may ultimately represent one of the clearest signals yet that institutional sports investors increasingly believe equestrian is not a niche category sitting outside the future sports economy.
It may instead be one of the premium participation ecosystems most naturally aligned with where the future sports economy itself is heading.
One of the laziest comparisons already emerging around the industry is the idea that equestrian could become “the next Formula 1.”
That comparison misunderstands both sports. Formula 1 is fundamentally a centralized global media and entertainment property. Equestrian is structurally decentralized and culturally rooted in participation. The useful comparison is not the product itself.
The useful comparison is the investment pattern.
When CVC invested in Formula 1 in 2006, the firm identified a sport with extraordinary international prestige but significant commercial inefficiencies. The audience was global. The sponsors were premium. The hospitality product was elite. The calendar was international. But media packaging, digital accessibility, and audience expansion remained underdeveloped relative to the sport’s underlying prestige.
That asymmetry created opportunity. Equestrian today presents a different but equally interesting asymmetry.
The sport already possesses affluent international audiences, premium hospitality ecosystems, luxury sponsor alignment, Olympic legitimacy, strong female participation, destination-event infrastructure, emotionally powerful storytelling, and unusually high participant retention.
Yet commercially, much of the ecosystem remains operationally fragmented.
This fragmentation appears everywhere.
Media production quality varies dramatically. Audience data remains inconsistent. Streaming infrastructure is uneven. Athlete branding remains underdeveloped compared to other elite sports. Commercial rights are dispersed. Sponsor activation is often localized rather than integrated globally.
From the perspective of institutional investors, fragmentation historically created friction. But in modern digital economies, fragmentation can also create opportunity. Because once an ecosystem lacks coordinated infrastructure, the company capable of building connective layers between communities, content, events, education, commerce, and media can become extraordinarily valuable.
This is where Equine Network becomes strategically important.
On the surface, many observers initially interpreted Equine Network primarily as a specialist equestrian media business.
That interpretation misses the deeper strategic logic entirely.
Equine Network is better understood as a vertically integrated participation platform. The company operates across media, streaming, education, competitions, memberships, digital communities, event infrastructure, training, and consumer engagement.
This positioning matters enormously, because the future value in sports increasingly sits not only in rights ownership, but in behavioral ecosystems.
The company that owns the relationship with participants across multiple touchpoints becomes significantly more valuable than a business dependent solely on intermittent audience attention.
This is exactly why the deal stands out inside CVC’s broader sports portfolio.
Formula 1 monetizes spectacle. Rugby monetizes competition. Football monetizes audience aggregation. Equine Network monetizes ecosystem participation.
That is a fundamentally different commercial structure. And potentially a much more durable one.
Why?
Because participation-driven ecosystems generate recurring economic interaction even when media cycles fluctuate.
A rider still trains. An owner still travels. A horse still requires care. Participants still attend clinics. Competitors still register. Communities still consume educational content. Brands still target identity-driven audiences.
This creates economic continuity. And continuity is extremely attractive to long-term investors.
Especially in a sports industry increasingly worried about fragmented media consumption, declining linear television audiences, subscription fatigue, rising rights costs, and unstable attention economics.
Participation ecosystems are more resilient because they are behaviorally embedded. That resilience may ultimately become one of equestrian’s greatest strategic advantages.
One of the most interesting dimensions of the Equine Network transaction is that it signals a shift in how equestrian itself may increasingly be understood.
Historically, many observers viewed horse sport primarily through the lens of competition. But modern sports investors increasingly think in terms of infrastructure.
The question is no longer only:
“How valuable is the event?” The more important question becomes:
“Who controls the ecosystem surrounding the event?”
This is precisely why Equine Network matters, because underneath the visible layer of competitions and content sits something much more strategically valuable:
behavioral infrastructure.
Modern sports businesses increasingly compete to own recurring relationships with audiences. Netflix owns entertainment attention. Spotify owns audio behavior. Peloton attempted to own connected fitness behavior. Fanatics increasingly attempts to sit across merchandise, betting, collectibles, and fan commerce.
Equestrian’s infrastructure remains much less consolidated and that creates opportunity.
Equine Network already touches multiple recurring user behaviors: education, streaming, competition, memberships, training, community, and media consumption.
The strategic importance of this should not be underestimated, because once a company becomes embedded across multiple layers of a participation ecosystem, it gains something far more valuable than occasional viewership:
behavioral continuity.
This is particularly important in an era where traditional sports media economics are under pressure. Linear television fragmentation continues accelerating. Younger audiences consume sports non-linearly. Subscription fatigue is increasing. Rights inflation is becoming more difficult in several mature markets.
Under those conditions, participation ecosystems become strategically attractive because they generate recurring engagement independent of a single broadcast window. A rider remains connected to the ecosystem year-round. A horse owner remains economically active continuously. A trainer consumes tools, education, competition systems, and media constantly.
That creates monetization durability and durability is one of the most valuable assets in modern sports business.
This is also why the deal stands apart from many traditional sports-rights transactions. CVC is not merely acquiring audience exposure.
It is acquiring ecosystem access, and that may ultimately prove far more valuable over the long term.
Another reason this transaction deserves closer attention is because equestrian may actually align more naturally with several major future sports-business trends than many larger traditional sports.
The first trend is the rise of premiumization.
Across global sport, commercial growth is increasingly concentrated around premium experiences rather than purely mass-market exposure.
Formula 1 is the clearest example. The NFL increasingly prioritizes premium hospitality. Tennis has expanded high-end experiential products. Golf has aggressively pursued luxury positioning.
Equestrian has operated inside premium experiential environments for decades. Its audiences are affluent. Its venues are often destination-based. Its sponsorship ecosystem aligns naturally with luxury positioning. Its hospitality structures are relationship-driven rather than purely volume-driven.
This matters because luxury ecosystems often generate stronger long-term monetization than mass-market ecosystems with weaker spending behavior.
The second trend is direct-to-community economics.
The most valuable future sports businesses may not simply own events. They may own communities. This is increasingly visible across fitness, golf, outdoor sports, and wellness ecosystems.
Communities with strong identity dynamics generate higher retention, stronger lifetime spending, better data, more resilient subscription models, and deeper sponsor integration and Equestrian naturally performs strongly across all these dimensions because the sport already operates through identity-based participation.
The third trend is year-round engagement.
Traditional sports monetization historically revolved around seasonality. Modern digital ecosystems increasingly reward continuous engagement.
Horse sport is inherently continuous.
Training never stops. Horse care never stops. Development pathways never stop. Breeding cycles never stop. Community interaction never stops. That creates unusually rich opportunities for subscription products, education platforms, digital media, sponsor activation, e-commerce, and audience segmentation.
Again, this is likely one of the deeper reasons CVC became interested.
The firm appears to recognize that equestrian is not merely an event economy. It is a continuous behavioral economy.
That distinction may ultimately define the future value of the sector.
At the same time, equestrian presents challenges that make it fundamentally different from many other sports investments.
Most importantly: legitimacy.
Unlike purely entertainment-driven sports properties, equestrian’s long-term commercial future depends directly on public trust. Horse welfare is not a secondary communications issue.
It is existential and this changes the investment environment dramatically.
The sport cannot simply maximize spectacle at all costs. It cannot prioritize visibility over credibility. It cannot pursue commercial expansion detached from welfare standards and governance legitimacy.
This is precisely why institutions such as the Federation Equestre Internationale (FEI) remain critically important.
The FEI’s role in strengthening veterinary frameworks, integrity systems, anti-doping protocols, officiating consistency, and international governance is one of the reasons equestrian is becoming more investable today.
Sophisticated investors understand this. Institutional capital does not only evaluate audience size.
It evaluates systemic risk and in equestrian, systemic trust matters enormously which is one of the reasons why the CVC move should not be interpreted as an attempt to bypass or replace the sport’s governance structures.
The stronger interpretation is almost the opposite.
The sport’s governance infrastructure is part of what makes long-term commercialization possible. Without international legitimacy, modern equestrian investment would remain structurally limited. This is why the next phase of equestrian business will likely revolve around balance.
Commercial modernization on one side. Institutional credibility on the other.
The sport’s future depends on both.
The deeper significance of the Equine Network acquisition is not simply that private equity entered horse sport.
Private equity entered sports years ago.
The significance is that one of the most experienced sports investors in the world appears to believe equestrian has reached a point where its fragmentation is no longer merely a limitation.
It is an opportunity and that is a major shift.
Because for decades, equestrian’s complexity discouraged institutional investment. Now, increasingly, that same complexity is being interpreted as evidence of untapped commercial depth and this is happening at a moment when the broader sports industry itself is changing.
The future of sports business is moving toward premium communities, participation economies, direct audience relationships, lifestyle integration, experiential hospitality, and ecosystem monetization.
Equestrian fits naturally inside all of those trends.
In many ways, the industry may simply have arrived earlier than the market’s understanding of it and that is why the CVC move matters.
Not because equestrian suddenly became valuable but because sophisticated institutional capital is finally beginning to recognize how much value was already there and once investors like CVC begin building infrastructure around a category, the effects tend to extend far beyond the original transaction itself.
The next decade of equestrian business may ultimately be defined by one central question:
Can the sport modernize its commercial architecture without losing the authenticity, trust, and emotional depth that made it valuable in the first place?
If the answer is yes then that balance will determine whether equestrian becomes merely more visible or a genuine powerhouse in the global sports economy within its own right.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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