Liberty Media are confident their bid to own both Formula 1 and Moto GP will not be blocked by regulators.
The company announced today it will spend £3 billion to acquire the motorcycling world championship. It purchased F1 from CVC Capital Partners, which had to sell Moto GP in 2006 to avoid falling foul of antitrust rules.
However Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei says he is “very confident we will get this through regulators” and complete the purchase of Moto GP before the end of the year.
“We believe there is a broad market for sports and entertainment properties of which both Formula 1 and Moto GP are only a small subset,” he told investors in a call today. “The market has continued to change from the time when this was previously reviewed in a major way.”
He said Liberty Media did not intend to merge the two series in any way, such as by offering joint deals on rounds of both series to race promoters.
“We are going to not treat these as a bundle or try and bring them together in the market. These are both separate properties.”
Liberty Media believes it can increase Moto GP’s revenues in the same way it has F1’s. “The things we bring to the table here are not in any way leveraging the two,” he said. “It’s pattern recognition and leveraging some of the learnings we’ve had from F1 and some of the opportunity we see to expose Moto GP, not in any way to leverage the two. So I think we’re very confident in the regulatory side.”
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He pointed out CVC already owned Moto GP when it took over F1, a key difference to Liberty Media’s approach to the two series.
“I remember speaking to the CVC management, they were under a tight timeframe to get a deal done on buying F1,” he said. “They did not have the time to go and work through the regulatory process.
“They were a [private equity] firm which had a big gain in one product and they were moving on to buy the other one when they had a contract they had to execute on,” he said.
“We’re in a very different position. We are absolutely aligned as a group into a changed market. We’re not under at the same sort of time pressures. We believe that the regulatory process will move smoothly and quickly, but we will take the time they need and this deal will get done.”
Chief legal officer Renee Wilm believes today’s regulators will take a different view of whether one organisation should own both championships.
“The CVC decision, which is almost 20 years old, was never really followed up on in terms of any kind of an in-depth investigation or appeal process,” she said. “They chose to just quickly close and move on.
“I think when you factor in that we are going to engage very quickly with the regulators, making all the points that Greg just very clearly articulated, and also just noting the change in media landscape over the last 20 years, we’re pretty confident we can get this done quickly and get the transaction cleared.”
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