SailGP, the sailing racing league featuring 10 identical F50 catamarans competing during each two-day event, returns to New York this weekend with the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix.
The $1 million winner-take-all race is the second-to-last stop of the league’s fourth season. Next month, sailors from 10 national teams (USA, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland) will compete to lift the championship trophy—and bank $2 million in prize money—in San Francisco.
“Coming back here to New York City has been a huge coming of age for SailGP,” SailGP’s managing director, Andrew Thompson, said in a video call. New York was one of the five venues for the league’s first season, but SailGP has not returned to the Big Apple until this season. “We’ve been overwhelmed with the response in the city in terms of media, sponsorship and fans turning out.”
Across its first four seasons, SailGP grew from six teams and five events to 10 teams and 12 events this season—and more events will be added to the calendar next season. For the fifth season, 11 out of 12 franchises will be at the start line, as one team will be dropped for the next season based on the commercial performance of the teams at the year’s end.
The league’s co-founders, Larry Ellison (the billionaire owner of Oracle) and five-time America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts, were the original majority owners of SailGP, but five of the 10 teams this season are now owned by outside investors. “Next season, at least nine of the 11 teams will be funded from the outside,” Coutts said in an interview in New York.
The New York race comes on the heels of Mubadala Capital announcing its intention to acquire a newly formed SailGP team to represent Brazil. The Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team will be the league’s 11th team in 2025, and it will be co-owned by Alan Adler, the former Olympian who co-founded the Brazilian sports and entertainment firm IMM and serves as the CEO of Brazil Motor Sports.
And SailGP’s global expansion won’t stop in Brazil—the league already awarded Italy a franchise.
“We have been on a significant growth trajectory since season one,” Thompson said. “Part of that growth journey has been adding new markets and bringing national teams, which immediately provides a fan base in new markets.”
Last October, former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund led an investor group to acquire the U.S. team with owners Ryan and Margaret McKillen and Mike Buckley.
Lasry’s group also included actress and producer Issa Rae, world champion heavyweight boxer Deontay Wilder; NFL stars DeAndre Hopkins, Malik Jackson, Roquan Smith and Kayvon Thibodeaux, University of Alabama football star Dallas Turner; former U.S. soccer player Jozy Altidore; University of Michigan basketball legend Katelynn Flaherty Yates; Muse Capital’s Assia Grazioli-Venier; and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk.
Lasry’s investment, which was over $35 million, was the largest sale to date at the time. Thompson said the valuations have grown another 20% this year and expect to grow more in coming years. “The Brazilian transaction will be our biggest today,” he said. Two years ago, SailGP was selling teams between $5 million and $10 million.
The first team SailGP sold was from Great Britain after Ben Ainslie, the most decorated Olympic sailor of all time, bought the team with commodities trading executive Chris Blake and Misland Capital, an investment arm of Bermuda property tycoon Peter Green in 2020. A consortium of individuals from Switzerland, including driver Sebastian Schneider, owns the Swiss team.
Last May, four-time F1 World Champion Sebastian Vettel and two-time Olympic sailing bronze medalist Erik Heil joined German telecom mogul Thomas Riedel to purchase the German team from SailGP. Soon, ownership of Australia’s team will change hands. “Canada, Spain and France are all subject to individuals or companies coming in to bid on them as well,” Thompson said.
The investor interest in SailGP is not unfounded. The sailing league has grown its audience in the U.S. since its inaugural season in 2019 thanks to the broadcast deal with CBS Sports. SailGP claimed that 13.6 million people tuned into the worldwide broadcast of this year’s race and the audience per event this season is up 24% compared to the third season. Last November, 1.784 million viewers tuned into the CBS broadcast of a race in Spain, a SailGP record for an American audience. That was the most-watched sailing race in the U.S. since 1992.
Like Formula 1, SailGP also produces a behind-the-scenes documentary series called Racing on the Edge for YouTube. In its second season, it has been watched by over 2.5 million viewers since launching in 2021, with a watch time increase of 871% this season.
“We have the fastest boats on the water, and some compare us with Formula 1,” Coutts said. “The difference is our boats are identical, and all the teams get access to the same technology. Here, the team with the best skills wins the race.”
(This story has been updated in the first paragraph to clarify that the Sail GP competition in New York is the weekend of June 22-23.)
