On Monday, 1 April, Liberty, a big American media company, said it bought 86% of Dorna Sports and the MotoGP World Championship. They spent €4.2 billion on this huge deal.
This means that Liberty now owns two of the world’s biggest motorsport series: F1 and MotoGP.
During a talk with investors on Monday, Liberty’s CEO Greg Maffei said they won’t try to make deals to show both MotoGP and F1 on TV together. This is because there are rules about this, and because of how they’ve already set up deals with F1 partners and teams.
Maffei believes that Liberty has good ideas about how to market MotoGP to TV companies. He thinks they understand how media is changing.
He said, “The one thing we will not be doing is negotiating MotoGP and Formula 1 together, both because of the regulatory issues and because of the structure of our deal with our F1 partners and teams. So, that’s a non-starter. I would like to think Liberty has insights into how the media scene is evolving and how to make the product appealing to media partners outside of the traditional bases of Italy and Spain and France, and to help grow in those other markets. I think we have some insights on that.”
Maffei also said he is “very confident” that the deal for Liberty to buy MotoGP will get approval from the regulators.
He didn’t say exactly what plans they have to get more fans for MotoGP, but he talked about how successful they have been with F1 since they took over in 2016.
He said, “As far as growing the fanbase, I point to a lot of things. We obviously had success with Netflix, but we’ve also had success in opening up F1 in many other ways, whether it be social media, whether it be bringing drivers to race fans on Twitch, to fan experience zones, to fan zones, really changing the perspective on how the sport is done. This [MotoGP] is an amazing sport and its passionate fanbase knows how exciting it is. But our goal is to expose that in some ways to a broader world like we’ve done in some ways with F1.”
Also read: Controlling Radio Emotions Tougher than F1 G-Forces, Says Tsunoda
