[forzaferrari]

Mark Gallagher: Seeing the RTL-to-Sky shift in Germany I remain convinced that the current #F1 business model does not work. Limiting audiences behind the pay wall kills audience size & the pipeline of new fans. Ironically it makes the sport more unattainable at a time when the opportunity to share content has never been greater. To deny mass market access to your sport is bad for business. The drop in live audiences hampers teams & F1 in securing sponsors. Don’t quote those cumulative viewing figures please. As sponsorship has drifted away from teams it has not migrated to F1/Liberty. As live audience size & sponsorship has diminished, so the reliance on TV rights & promoter fees has increased to the point where most teams are dependent on it. And why races have to be sold wherever the money is on the table.

To see Williams F1 and McLaren F1 (before Covid & setting the McL Group issues aside) losing money & having to sell equity shows how bad things have become. And let us remember that when live audience size was huge & sponsors came in, those sponsors promoted the sport superbly and brought their marketing skills & brand associations to bear. So much of that is gone. To see a United States team like Haas essentially unable to secure major sponsors is a metric worth reflecting upon. The key thing for F1/Liberty is growth & profitability, but by quadrupling live audiences in key markets, or more, sponsorship would come both centrally to F1 as well as teams (reducing dependence on prize fund). Instead of losing 80% of your audience so that 20% pay a subscription, provide the sport to 100% of those who want to watch live races. Limit the free race broadcast to a 10 min lead in & 5 mins post race. Die hard fans wanting premium; practice, qualy, full build up, post race interviews, press conferences & analysis have to subscribe. I believe you’d get your 20% subs, especially if premium subs get ad free coverage while free to air is ad-dependent. Somehow to arrive at a time when free to air has died in key markets, live audiences down, sponsors departed, teams struggling unless paid by F1, is a wrong turn for a sport that continues to have global appeal if not global live audiences of the kind we used to enjoy & somewhat took for granted. There is no doubt that revenue to F1/Liberty would fall, but profitability would increase if top team’s were flush with sponsorship & mid ranking teams generating income more readily, thus not requiring $1bn a year from F1.
I know that the straits being faced by Williams & McLaren have been coming for a while & are not the fault of F1/Liberty, but structurally the business model of the sport does not support teams in a healthy manner. In the post Covid world, with a likely recession bigger than ‘08

Fresh thinking is needed as we head into a decade of profound change. One in which it would be better to see F1 flourish, audiences grow, sponsors return, teams survive, new teams arrive, more media attend, F1 & broadcasters benefit from many more eyeballs on the live show.