MotoGP | Liberty very confident about the approval for the purchase from the antitrust

On Monday 1 April, Liberty Media, the owner of Formula 1, announced that it had acquired MotoGP and parent company Dorna Sports from Bridgepoint Capital for €4.2 billion.

The deal was expected to be finalized before the start of the 2024 MotoGP season, but approval from antitrust commissions, particularly in the European Union, slowed the process.

Former owner CVC Capital was forced to sell MotoGP when it bought F1 in 2006, leading to questions about how Liberty Media plans to avoid the same fate.

In a call with investors, Liberty CEO Greg Maffei said he was confident the deal would get regulators' approval and that there was no leverage in place between the two entities.

“We are very confident in getting regulatory approval because we believe there is a large market for sports and entertainment properties, of which Formula 1 and MotoGP are only a small subset, and the market has continued to change with respect to the period in which it was revised in a major way,” he said.

“We will not treat these properties as a package or try to combine them in the market. These are two separate properties. The things we are bringing to the table in no way leverage the two properties.”

“I think it's about recognizing the patterns and taking advantage of some of the lessons that we've learned from F1 and some of the opportunities that we see to expose MotoGP without exploiting the two in any way. So, I think we're very confident in terms of the regulatory part”.

Renee Wilm, Liberty's chief legal officer, said the company “will be applying to the EU. We will also be applying for antitrust clearance in the UK, Brazil and Australia.”

“Secondly, we will submit applications for foreign direct investment (FDI) in Spain and Italy.
We believe these practices should be completed fairly quickly, and I think antitrust clearance should be issued by the end of the year, so we can close out the fourth quarter.”

Maffei noted that CVC did not have time to go through the regulatory process in 2006 due to the F1 acquisition deadline, and added that he was confident the MotoGP deal would be cleared.

“I would add one more thing, and I remember talking to CVC executives: they had a tight deadline to conclude the deal to buy F1,” he said. “So, they didn't have time to go through the regulatory process.”

“Also, this was a PE (private equity) firm that had a large gain in one product and was moving to buy the other when it had a contract to execute. We are in a very different position.”

“We are absolutely aligned as a group in a changed market. We are not under the same kind of time pressure. We believe the regulatory process will move quickly and smoothly, but it will take as long as it needs to and the deal will get done.”