Sir Russell Coutts has always been comfortable making a financial case in public, and his recent appearance on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid programme gave him exactly that platform. Seated with Executive Editor Brian Sozzito, the SailGP co-founder presented an investment argument built on numbers that are growing harder to dismiss: team valuations are closing in on $100 million, and the pace of growth shows no sign of easing.
The figures he put forward tell their own story. League sales reached $200 million last year, a reported year-on-year increase of 68%. A quarter of the teams are already profitable on sponsorship alone, before licensing or broadcast revenue enters the equation. The next franchise to come to market is expected to be priced at $70 million, and Coutts believes the $100 million valuation threshold could be crossed before the end of 2026. That number only lands with its full force when set against the starting point: at SailGP's launch in 2019, those same franchises were worth somewhere between $5 million and $10 million.
The growth model Coutts describes is, by his account, a simple one. Every nation that enters the league brings an existing audience with it. He returns to Brazil as his clearest example. Before a Brazilian team joined the competition, the country was drawing around 600,000 committed viewers on Globo TV. When a Brazilian team joined the fleet, that figure climbed to 1.6 million. Adding a Brazilian event to the racing calendar pushed it further still. The pattern is consistent: plant a flag, gain a fanbase.
The league operates under a hard cap of 20 teams, with one franchise allocated per country. Coutts was direct about what that structure means for anyone weighing an entry now. The cost of buying in is not coming down. Institutional investors already inside the competition, among them firms such as Ares Capital and Blue Pool alongside a steady flow of celebrity backers, are treating the asset as a long-term position with a minimum five-year holding horizon. It is patient capital, deployed accordingly.
For New Zealanders who follow sailing seriously, the conversation Coutts is having with the investment world deserves close attention. He is a five-time America's Cup winner who built SailGP alongside Oracle's Larry Ellison around the F50 foiling technology that New Zealand's sailing culture was instrumental in developing. Kiwi sailors are woven through the fleet. Andy Maloney and Brad Farrand compete for Sweden's Artemis Racing. Phil Robertson steers for Red Bull Italy. The sport carries an unmistakably New Zealand character, even without a New Zealand team.
That absence is becoming harder to treat as a minor detail. The New Zealand government's decision not to fund an Auckland event in 2027 pushed the conversation well beyond a single lapsed funding application. The question it raises is a more searching one: what does New Zealand's place look like inside a sport it played a meaningful role in creating? With franchise values climbing toward figures that put entry increasingly out of reach for local investors, the shape of that future is sharpening into view. Kiwi expertise continues to drive results across the fleet, but New Zealand holds no equity in the enterprise itself.
New Zealand built its reputation as a country that not only competed at the highest level of the sport but held a stake in it. The harder question now is whether that remains the aspiration, or whether the country is settling into a role as primarily a supplier of talent to franchises owned and directed elsewhere. If the window to ownership is narrowing as quickly as the valuation trajectory suggests, there is real reason to ask whether we are watching the close of an era in which New Zealand participated not just as athletes, but as stakeholders in the sport itself.
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