EMBRACE STREAMING

“Cost caps to institute a cost cap on manufacturing. Basically what they're proposing is the F1 equivalent of a salary cap. It instantly makes every team at least close to break even. The average revenue per team today in 2026 is about 430 million. 15 years ago, all four of those teams were operating at a loss. And 10 years ago, most of them were operating at a loss. Forbes estimates team valuations at about $3.6 billion on average.”

“Finally, nineteen o five, there are nineteen fatalities in intercollegiate football in The US, and a serious injury at Harvard to one Theodore Roosevelt junior, son of sitting president Theodore Roosevelt. So this is a major event. After that happens, Teddy Roosevelt calls the summit of all the major colleges and universities in New York City and says he's gonna outlaw the game in The US unless they adopt major changes to make the game safer. This summit that Teddy Roosevelt calls, and then he basically tells all the presidents of the universities, like, hey. You guys gotta figure this out, or I'm gonna outlaw this. In response, they create the NCAA.”

“Pretty immediately, the courts strike down this deal. And there's about, I think, a one to two month period where it's all in limbo. And this is where the Kennedy relationships come in clutch for Roselle and the NFL. So both the president and Bobby Kennedy in congress and whip up enough support to pass through new congressional legislation to allow for national sports contracts on a league wide basis. The day after the bill is passed and signed by John f Kennedy, he literally hosts a party at the White House for the NFL, which is, like this tells you everything you need to know right there.”

“Bernie, meanwhile, is just getting tons of money into his bank accounts. CVC and Bernie, for his portion, spend about $2 billion acquiring 100% ownership. They put $900 million of cash equity into the deal. Compared to, I believe, over $3 billion that Bernie and his trust had pulled out of the company through all the debt and equity machinations that we discussed earlier. There's a great quote from Eddie Jordan. He said that Bernie Ecclestone was someone who sold Formula One four times, has never bought it back, has never lost its control, and still owns it. And do you know the most important thing? He never effing owned it in the first place.”

“In the first year of the relationship, September '23 to September '24, the NFL added 4,000,000 female fans. The Chiefs were 3,400,000 of those. The biggest demographic or sub demographic of those 4,000,000 is women 35, which is a traditionally very weak demographic for the NFL. Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, went on the Pat McAfee Show, and he said that before Taylor, the Chiefs' fan base was about fifty fifty, male, female. But post Taylor, the fan base at the Chiefs is 57% women, 43% men.”

“Forbes now estimates the Cowboys are worth $13,000,000,000. The Cowboys are the high watermark because the Cowboys have an exceptional amount of local revenue that they produce. The estimated twenty twenty four revenue of the cowboys was $1,200,000,000 while posting an operating income of 630,000,000. Sure, the Cowboys can spit off 630,000,000 in profit. The average team spits off a 127,000,000 in profit, and the least profitable team only generates 21,000,000 in profit. This league first mentality is gonna be really tested in the coming years with these enormously profitable teams at the top and these teams at the bottom.”

“Braun is scrambling. He just went from like top of the world at Ferrari to getting to be team principal at Honda and now he's out of a job. So in one year, this team and Ross Braun went from like new Honda team principal to nearly out of the sport to owner of his own team for one pound to world champion. Mercedes buys it a year later, or 75% of it, for 200 million pounds. Today, Mercedes is worth $6 billion under Toto.”

“Monday Night Football invented that was not a part of your typical football NFL broadcast before Monday night football, and it is astonishing. The overriding idea that we are going to cover a football game like show business. This is not a sport we're broadcasting. This is showbiz. We're gonna put cameras at field level. We're gonna put cameras on people's shoulder. We're gonna put cameras on the 20 yard lines. Instead of two commentators, we're gonna have a three man booth, and there's gonna be real action oriented commentary there. They went from the four cameras that typically would cover a Sunday broadcast to nine cameras and then eventually up to 17 cameras.”

“Joe Namath. He was the first modern cultural celebrity athlete. He's also a heartthrob. There's, like, millions of teenage women in America, like, throwing themselves. He was the first professional athlete that appealed equally to men, women, and children. He comes and he's playing in New York, right, in the biggest market, the brightest lights right there with the TV industry, right there with the advertising industry. He knew exactly how to play it. He wore white cleats. Everybody else wore black high tops. Famously, he wore a mink coat on the sidelines.”

“Everyone talks about the technology and speed, but the under discussed component is the human side. An F1 driver is operating at fighter pilot like cognitive load for 90 minutes straight. Six Gs under pressure, which means their head weighs like 80 pounds at that moment. Their heart rate is 180 beats a minute or more, and they've lost 5% of their body weight during the course of the race. They're doing this making micro decisions of thousands of times with no timeouts, no commercial breaks, and I don't think there's another sport like it.”

“Davis gets the news that the gentleman's agreement has been broken, and the kicker has been signed. The kicker signing heard around the world while he happens to be literally in the middle of meeting with the bill's owner. Supposedly, Davis, he just sits there in his chair and he leans back and he smiles and he says, well, we just got our merger. And the Bills owner is like, what are you talking about? And Davis says, because now we're gonna go out and sign all of their players, and we will destroy them, and they will come begging to the table.”

“The whole corporate operation was run out of a building in London that was also his house. Seriously, like the bottom floor floors of the building were F1 offices. And then he had the floors above. And supposedly, he had all the rooms in the offices bugged. So he could listen to what everybody was saying at every point in time. And famously, he would kick everyone out at 6 p.m. He'd be like, all right, leave my house now. It's time for you all to go home.”

“Drive to Survive worked. It's a human drama. When we said there's three concurrent competitions, there's a driving competition, there's the World Cup of Engineering, and there's the World Cup of Office Politics. It turns out the World Cup of Office Politics is an amazing, amazing thing for effectively a reality TV show. But the human story, that is the killer unlock of Drive to Survive.”

“Red Bull dumps Sauber and makes the radical decision that rather than sponsoring another team, they are going to directly get into the business. And Mateschitz and Red Bull buy the failing Jaguar racing team, which was at this point in time owned by Ford. Things are so bad for the team that Ford is willing to sell the whole team to Red Bull for one British pound. The purchase price that Red Bull paid was one British pound to establish Red Bull racing.”

“Upon any eventual sale or monetization of the ownership stake that private equity would have in an NFL franchise, a portion of the returns on that investment get skimmed off the top and go back to the NFL and then get distributed equally among all 32 NFL team ownership groups. This is wild. That's why there's an anointed set of four. It's not just there's only four PE firms we trust. It's there's four PE firms that we went and we did a deal with where if they buy into our league, we effectively get carry on their investment when they sell.”

“There are 830 million global F1 fans for a league that does 3.4 billion and teams that generate another 2 billion or so on top of what the league pays them. So that's about $5.5 billion gross total revenue across the whole sport for 830 million fans. The NFL generates $23 billion of revenue across just 180 million fans. So that's 4 times the revenue on 1 fifth the number of fans. The NFL monetizes a fan at $127 per year and Formula One monetizes a fan at $7 per year.”

“There's a funny thing here where you might think, oh, Formula One, that's the big established series that legitimizes an automaker by being a part of it. It actually works the other way with Ferrari. Ferrari participating in Formula One legitimizes the series. Ferrari, if they ever decided to stop racing in Formula One, would make people go, oh, so what is the big racing series?”

“Mercedes does an estimated 200 million in operating income from Formula One now. 25% operating income. And on top of being phenomenally profitable, TotalWolf estimated in 2021 that Mercedes, that he thinks Mercedes gets a billion dollars of advertising equivalent value for being involved in the sport. So on $600 million of total spend last year, Mercedes generated a double bottom line of over a billion dollars in marketing equivalent value plus $200 million in actual profit.”

“Bert Bell adopts this as his mantra that literally I mean, they made a movie with this title. On any given Sunday, any team in the league should be able to beat any other team. And he pushes this through with the owners and gets them all to agree to this of, like, hey. The only way we're gonna survive and prosper is if we agree that none of our teams can get so dominant that we end up with a Cleveland Browns situation. Bert and the NFL do two things. First, he completely overhauls the way the schedule works. He realizes that the schedule is actually an incredibly important strategic lever, and he looks at the results from last year's season and arranges the schedule such that the weaker teams from last year play the other weaker teams for the first half of the season.”

“CTE is very real and caused by playing football and causes shorter lifespans and immense physical harm to players. The NFL settled a billion dollar lawsuit to pay out victims and families of CTE. The NFL started doing research into long term effects of concussions and other head trauma from playing football in the nineties, and then they sat on the data for a long time. And then when they did release it, they claimed that there was absolutely no provable link, no evidence at all that head injuries from playing football led to long term damage.”