Liberty Media will not negotiate F1 and MotoGP TV rights together

On Monday 1 April, the American giant Liberty Media announced that it had acquired 86% of Dorna Sports and the MotoGP World Championship in a €4.2 billion deal.

The acquisition, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2024, means Liberty now owns the world's two biggest motorsport series, F1 and MotoGP.

During an investor call on Monday, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei ruled out the company negotiating joint TV deals for MotoGP and F1, largely due to regulatory issues.

But Maffei is confident that Liberty knows how to market MotoGP to potential media partners thanks to its “knowledge of how the media landscape is evolving.”

“The only thing we won't do is negotiate MotoGP and Formula 1 together, both for regulatory issues and for the structure of our agreement with F1 partners and teams,” Maffei said.

“So, it's not a hypothesis to take into consideration. I'd like to think that Liberty has some insights into how the media landscape is evolving and how to make the product attractive to media partners outside of the traditional bases of Italy, Spain and France, and to help grow in other markets. I think we have some insights into that.”

In the same phone call, Maffei said he was “very confident” that Liberty's acquisition of MotoGP will pass the scrutiny of the antitrust authorities without any problems.

While not saying what plans there are to grow MotoGP's fan base, Maffei highlighted the various successes Liberty has achieved in opening up F1 to a wider audience since acquiring it in 2016.

“As far as growing the fan base, I'm talking about a lot of things,” he added. “We've obviously been successful with Netflix, but we've also been successful in opening up F1 in many other ways, whether that's social media, whether it's bringing drivers to race fans on Twitch, fan zones fans, really changing the perspective on how the sport is done.”

“This is a fantastic sport and its passionate fan base knows how exciting it is. But our aim is to somehow expose it to a wider world, as we have done with F1.”