SailGP: Feeling good about its chances

Most new businesses face a tough first five years, with roughly 50% surviving past this mark, highlighting a critical survival window. The SailGP league is feeling good its chances, with their Season 5 summary report doing some chest pounding:

SailGP closed its 2025 Season with unmatched audience growth, new commercial partnerships, high-profile investors, and scaled global operations. For the numbers, click here.

The review marks an inflection point for the global racing championship, launched in 2019 by co-founder and CEO Sir Russell Coutts and Oracle founder and chief technology officer, Larry Ellison – celebrating five seasons of remarkable progress, as the league charts its course for 2026 and beyond.

The 2025 Season marked SailGP’s most ambitious calendar yet, featuring 12 Grand Prix events and expanding into four new venues – Portsmouth (United Kingdom), Sassnitz (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), and Auckland (New Zealand).

Twelve teams took to the start line – SailGP’s largest fleet yet – including two new nations, the Red Bull Italy SailGP Team and Mubadala Brazil, the league’s first South American entry. Brazil’s debut was historic, introducing SailGP’s first-ever female driver in two-time Olympic champion, Martine Grael.

In 2025, fans turned out in force, with more than 112,000 ticketed spectators attending in person, including 25,000 in Auckland and 20,000 in Portsmouth.

There were 10,000 fans that enjoyed world-class hospitality in SailGP’s bespoke Adrenaline Lounge, a first-of-its-kind waterside hospitality experience for partners and invited guests, while a vibrant on-shore fan experience – complete with live Après-Sail music acts, entertainment and more – contributed to an average net promoter score (NPS) of +58 across SailGP events. Standout ratings in Auckland and Sassnitz surpassed industry standards, at +80 and +72, respectively.

In returning cities such as Dubai, Sydney, San Francisco, and Cádiz, nearly half of ticket purchasers were repeat SailGP attendees, while 68% of fans traveled to events from outside the host region. Across the 12-month calendar, SailGP events drove more than US $230 million in regional economic impact.

SailGP’s dedicated broadcast audience soared to nearly 215 million, averaging 18 million viewers per event. The league broke its own record for single-event viewership twice – first with 21.2 million viewers for the KPMG Sydney Sail Grand Prix in February, followed by 23 million tuning in to watch the DP World Spain Sail Grand Prix in October.

In the U.S., the Race to Abu Dhabi broadcast on CBS in November reached 3.469 million live linear viewers – the most-watched sailing race in U.S. history, surpassing the 1992 America’s Cup. The Germany Sail Grand Prix in Sassnitz drew a SailGP record 2 million viewers live on national broadcaster ZDF.

Digital and social channels surged to new heights, with total social views surpassing 1.65 billion – a 90% increase from Season 4 – alongside 20.7 million engagements with SailGP’s social channels.

SailGP’s YouTube subscribers surpassed 1 million, a milestone in the championship’s industry-leading long-form content strategy, while total followers across major social platforms reached 2.7 million. SailGP’s first premium docuseries ‘Uncharted’ had viewership of more than 4 million globally, including streaming partnerships with Paramount+, Discovery, CANAL+ and others.

SailGP’s commercial performance accelerated in 2025, driven by the expansion of the relationship with Rolex as new Title Partner of the Championship, alongside the entry of new multi-season global league partnerships DP World, Emirates, Accor, KPMG, and Fever.

Valuations of SailGP teams also continued to climb, with a number of new investors joining the global sail racing championship – from celebrity owners to established venture capital and private equity funds – with team valuations now well in excess of US$60 million.

SailGP teams welcomed new title partners BONDS (Australia), Red Bull (Italy), Mubadala (Brazil) in 2025, alongside the Germany SailGP Team’s presenting partner Deutsche Bank. ROCKWOOL’s seven-season extension with the Danish team marked a new chapter in the league’s longest-standing team partnership.

In July, SailGP officially opened its global headquarters for design, manufacturing, and innovation excellence. Located in Southampton, UK, SailGP Technologies marked a US $10 million investment into the future of the global racing championship, home to more than 115 of the world’s leading designers, engineers, boat builders, and composites specialists.

Throughout the season, innovation powered performance, including the introduction of titanium T-Foils to unlock a new standard of elite sail racing. Equipped with the new high-speed configuration, several teams surpassed the 100 km/h speed barrier in 2025, including a new speed record – 103.93 km/h – set by ROCKWOOL Racing in Germany.

Off the water, SailGP continued to set new global standards for sports events – with 100% of SailGP events powered entirely by clean energy. More than 10,500 young people were engaged through SailGP Inspire – delivered in partnership with Mubadala – including more than 5,300 in the UAE region alone. Total participation in SailGP Inspire now tallies 33,261 since inception.

Reflecting on the year, Andrew Thompson, SailGP Managing Director noted how the 2025 Season reinforced SailGP’s position as a global leader in sport and entertainment, with record audiences and world-class racing bringing our championship to new heights.

Thompson adds, “In just five seasons, we’ve exceeded all the initial major targets set in 2019 – doubling the number of teams and events, while increasing annual audience and revenue by 12x and 20x, respectively, since Season 1.

“As SailGP enters our next era, we are enormously grateful for our growing family of partners and teams. Together, we’re reimagining the sport and sponsorship landscape, demonstrating SailGP’s growing influence and relevance worldwide and we have plans to continue to scale for the next years and beyond.”

SailGP information – Season 5 results – Facebook

Season 5 Schedule and Winners – 14 events*
2024
November 23-24 – Dubai, UAE – Team New Zealand

2025
January 18-19 – Auckland, New Zealand – Team Australia
February 8-9 – Sydney, Australia – Team Great Britain
March 15-16 – Los Angeles, USA – Team Canada
March 22-23 – San Francisco, USA – Team Spain
May 3-4 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
June 7-8 – New York City, USA – Team Spain
July 19-20 – Portsmouth, Great Britain – Team New Zealand
August 16-17 – Sassnitz, Germany – Team France
September 6-7 – Taranto, Italy
September 12-13 – Saint-Tropez, France – Team Great Britain
September 20-21 – Geneva, Switzerland – Team Germany
October 4-5 – Andalucía – Cádiz, Spain – Team Great Britain
November 7-8 – Middle East
November 29-30 – Grand Final – Abu Dhabi, UAE – Team Denmark
* The season began with 14 events but Tranto was replaced with Saint-Tropez, while Rio and Middle East were cancelled.

Format for Season 5:
• Teams compete in identical F50 catamarans.
• Each event runs across two days.
• Up to seven qualifying fleet races of approximately 15 minutes may be scheduled for each regatta.
• The top three teams from qualifying advance to a final race to be crowned event champion. The season ends with the Grand Final, which includes the Championship Final Race for the top three teams in the season standing.
• The league still owns the New Zealand and Spain teams and are looking at how they can bring new investment into them.

Prize money:
Over the course of the 2025 Season, a total of $12M USD is up for grabs – the largest prize purse in the sport of sailing. Teams earn prize money at each event along with the final season leaderboard, and then the top three teams of the season face off for a $2m winner-take-all final race.

Established in 2018, SailGP seeks to be an annual, global sports league featuring fan-centric inshore racing among national teams in some of the iconic harbors around the globe.

Source: SailGP