Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP here.
Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds are looking into the camera, standing in front of a beautiful waterfront backdrop, and embarking on a comedic repartee that those familiar with Reynolds’ skits with Rob Mac at Wrexham will be accustomed to. But this time, the Hollywood actors are talking about sailing.
“We’re announcing we’re owners of team Australia,” Jackman tells Reynolds before the 90-second video cuts to an all-action SailGP montage. So, what do they know about this relatively new sports league that the average sports fan doesn’t?
SailGP, a championship where 12 national teams race in identical carbon-fiber catamarans head-to-head over a season, is redefining professional sailing and has caught the attention of some big names from the entertainment world and other sports, as well as blue-chip investment companies.
Outside of the sailing bubble, among the wider public, SailGP can hardly be considered a mainstream sport — the league’s CEO, Sir Russell Coutts, and his 200 staff are on a mission to change that as quickly as possible — but since its launch in 2018, it is among a small collection of new professional sports leagues that have thrived.
With four gold medals and a silver, Sir Ben Ainslie is the most successful Olympic sailor of all time. On the race course, he could read a shifting wind better than anybody. The British sailor was also early to spot the potential of SailGP, purchasing the British franchise for a figure somewhere less than $5 million. Just four years later, the market value of that franchise has grown to at least $60 million.
New professional sports leagues are cropping up almost every year. The rise of the Indian Premier League has been a vital part of cricket’s growth, establishing India as a global sporting superpower on and off the field, as reported by The Athletic this year. But not every new league experiences such success. At the other end of the scale, even with huge financial backing from Saudi Arabia, the controversial LIV Golf tour has found it much harder to gain global acceptance.
Part of LIV Golf’s problem — and a challenge for many new leagues — is fighting for the buy-in of the sport’s top athletes.
SailGP hasn’t suffered from that problem, as managing director Andy Thompson told The Athletic. “There is a cohort of newer sports trying to establish themselves — Formula E, LIV Golf, Extreme H, padel, all kinds of leagues coming to the fore. We have a strength in that we’re not a breakaway. We have a kind of white space in the sport of sailing and there was, and still is, the America’s Cup. But it has had a turbulent history and it felt good that we had a lane we could aim for.”
It also helps that Coutts’ business partner in this venture is Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Software and the world’s third-richest person, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list.
SailGP races are held in some of the world’s most iconic locations, including Sydney. (Patrick Hamilton for SailGP)
The America’s Cup is a 174-year-old international competition traditionally regarded as the pinnacle of the sport. But unencumbered by the history, traditions and politics of the America’s Cup, Coutts and Ellison set about designing a sports league from the ground up. In October 2018, at a lavish launch party next to Tower Bridge in central London, SailGP was unveiled to the world and Coutts laid out a grand vision for a minority sport that had never really managed to reach much beyond a limited fan base of die-hard sailing enthusiasts.
Season 1 was a small but ambitious affair — six national teams competed across five events around the world — but it was a start. The Covid-19 pandemic put the world on pause just as the league was finding its feet, but SailGP weathered the storm.
Since the launch season in 2019, the scale of SailGP’s operation has more than doubled, growing to 12 teams and 12 events for the 2025 season, with more than 200 staff employed in offices in the United States, the UK and Australasia. SailGP claims its events have generated an average $26.2 million of economic impact for the host cities during the current season, compared with $6.8 million in the first season.
Chief marketing officer Leah Davis talked to The Athletic about the advantages of starting a league from scratch.
“It’s a real privilege to write the rules from the start,” she said. “We’ve cracked the code by designing for the future fan. We’re not just inheriting the pre-existing sailing fan. We can literally sit down and say, ‘Right, if we were to write the best world-class sporting experience of tomorrow, what would it be?’.”
Davis points out that a race weekend has to also be about the wider experience, as well as the racing, which is why, for example, at the Portsmouth event in July, after racing finished, there was a DJ set from Pete Tong and a performance from singer-songwriter Tom Grennan for the fans.
“Our race course is wonderful and it’s usually in iconic backdrops and locations,” said Davis. “We’ve been really considerate about how we build around the world of products. So a lot of my time is focused on how to diffuse music, hospitality and entertainment around that world-class sporting product and create this (broader) experience. People are willing to part with their money and their time if the value proposition stacks up.”
DJ Pete Tong performs at the SailGP event in Portsmouth in July. (Jason Ludlow for SailGP)
Speaking last week at the Yacht Racing Forum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Coutts said that SailGP gave backers a “return on their investment.”
“The teams are tradable and when they do decide to exit, the team doesn’t disappear,” he said. “It continues to exist, maybe under new owners, maybe different athletes. Maybe even the team transfers into a different market but the team brand continues to live on.”
It might not sound like rocket science but this type of commercial viability is new to sailing. Frustrated by the stop-start nature and unpredictable timing of the America’s Cup, Coutts is seeking to emulate the year-round story of F1.
“Consistency of format, of venue, of calendar, of broadcast, it’s really important because when you put in your marketing dollars into a one-off venue, then you’ve got to spend all that money again and build the property from the ground up again, and so on,” he added.
As Season 5 is about to reach its climax this weekend in Abu Dhabi, SailGP’s stock is riding high. On Tuesday, Reynolds and Jackman did their bit to gee up fans of the Flying Roos, having become the co-owners of Australia’s SailGP team in May.
While Jackman enjoys a bit of sailing on his own terms, Reynolds has said he’s a newcomer to the sport.
Top-tier sailing has enjoyed its share of high-profile, high-net-worth sponsors and supporters over the decades, but mostly these have been people, including Ellison, who have an emotional attachment to the sport. What’s interesting about SailGP is that it’s attracting investment from sports stars such as former F1 world champion Sebastien Vettel and France’s football great Kylian Mbappé, Hollywood A-listers, including the aforementioned Jackman and Reynolds, and Anne Hathaway, who has a stake in the Italian team.
With Ainslie’s British team leading the standings going into the Grand Final in Abu Dhabi, his investment is looking shrewd. As Ainslie told The Athletic, when he became majority owner of the British franchise in October 2021, he was reassured to see some blue-chip investors making an early commitment to the league.
“A couple of early believers came in, including Rolex, but a lot have joined within the last two or three seasons,” Ainslie said. “The first three seasons were about the league proving itself, and the last couple of seasons, having done that, have seen a big growth in the league and team sponsors. And those sponsors are right at the very top, Emirates, Rolex, Red Bull … they are all brands you see at the top of major sporting events, and that gives the league a lot of credibility.”
Singer Tinie Tempah and Ben Ainslie (right) pictured at the Dubai Sail Grand Prix in November 2024. (Jason Ludlow for SailGP)
With F1’s stock reaching an all-time high, given the recent valuation of the Mercedes team at $6bn, perhaps SailGP can ride on its coattails, be a sort of “F1 on water”, as SailGP likes to describe itself to newcomers.
Ainslie agrees, up to a point. “There is more to it. With F1, you have the technology element, and that is why a lot of brands come into F1 and the media numbers are really credible. We all know the story of Drive to Survive and the impact it has made. The numbers are mind-boggling for the team valuations.
“With SailGP, while it is one design (all the boats are identical and centrally provided by the organization), a lot of technology is involved. The boats are constantly developing to be cutting-edge and there is a strong narrative there for team partners.”
In some areas, SailGP is pushing ahead in areas where F1 could not follow. From the 11 events held this season, there have been seven different overall winners. Phil Kennard, Canada’s team boss who spent 20 years working in F1 with Lotus F1 and Williams Racing, attributed this to how all the millions of data points flow off the boats and back into SailGP’s data centre held in the Oracle Cloud.
Where data is jealously held by each team in F1, it’s much harder to keep secrets in SailGP.
“It was a master stroke when SailGP was set up that everyone has access to all the data because it means that nobody ever really gets a leg-up on another team, at least not for long,” he said. “If you got rid of it (the centrally shared data), you would probably end up with one or two teams popping out at the front and for it all to become more processional.”
Another element of SailGP that’s almost unique in top-level sport is seeing men and women competing alongside each other. Each team is mandated to have at least one woman on board, but Coutts said, “Watch this space,” for further developments.
There are rumors of an all-female team for the 2027 season, for example. Where most of the women operate in the strategist’s role, calling the moves around the tight race track, this season Martine Grael became the first female driver in the league. It was a milestone moment in New York in May when the double Olympic gold medalist steered the Brazilian boat to its first race win.
Hannah Mills, another double Olympic gold medalist, calls the shots for driver Dylan Fletcher on the British boat. “As athletes in the professional sport, this is the first time there has ever been continuity — it’s the top of our sport and it’s all the best people competing,” she told The Athletic. “For the athletes, it has been a game-changer in opportunity.”
Martine Grael runs across the boat in Cadiz, Spain, in October. (Ricardo Pinto for SailGP)
Can SailGP really hope to go mainstream in the coming years? “It’s definitely got a shot,” said Mills. “ More non-sailors are coming up to us to say it’s amazing and that they can actually watch it and understand enough.
“It’s like F1 — the more you watch it, the more you understand the detail around the tyres, the pit stops and what is going on with the strategy. That is when people get hooked, that level of understanding.”
Back in the 1970s, no one saw the commercial potential of F1 quite like former ‘supremo’ Bernie Ecclestone, who sold the sport’s commercial rights in an $8bn deal in 2017. Five decades later, Coutts sees similar untapped potential for sailing, and SailGP is his vehicle.
His greatest ambition is for SailGP to become a league that you’ve heard of and, maybe one day, even care about.
The Athletic‘s Dan Sheldon contributed to reporting.
