Revenue beyond wagering: A global look at financing sport

Cover image courtesy of The Image Is Everything

In Monday’s edition, Henry Field identified racing’s dependence on wagering as the industry’s greatest long-term financial risk. Turnover funds product fees and taxes, which fund prizemoney and much of the sport beneath it. As wagering slows, racing will likely need other sources of recurring income.

To examine what those might look like, TTR studied the assets and business models used by racing jurisdictions and other major sports.

The warning from Britain

Field pointed to Britain as the wagering warning. Online betting turnover on British racing fell from around £10 billion (approximately AU$19.3 billion) in 2022 to £8.4 billion (AU$16.2 billion) in 2024, a decline of 16%. British racing has linked the contraction to operators’ affordability measures, warning that restrictive checks risk pushing customers towards offshore operators, where their wagering contributes nothing to the sport.

The pattern is milder at home but following the same trend. Total wagering on Australian thoroughbred racing peaked at about $29 billion in 2021-22, inflated by a pandemic in which racing was one of the few sports still running, and is now falling back towards its pre-pandemic level of roughly $20 billion.

Industry estimates suggest offshore wagering costs Australian racing between $100 million and $135 million annually in foregone product fees. Because Australian racing's funding leans on race-fields fees and point-of-consumption tax, both tied to turnover, that decline feeds straight through to prizemoney.

Unlocking the value of land assets

Field identified property as racing's richest untapped asset, and as Australian tracks are mostly owned by clubs or industry bodies, the value released stays in the sport.

An experienced property developer consulted by TTR said the weakness in the traditional racecourse model was its reliance on occasional event-day earnings against year-round costs.

The instinct is to sell, however his argument is that selling is the weakest option: “The problem with selling off land is it's a short-term solution. Once they're gone, they're gone.”

The stronger play, in his view, is to develop in partnership and retain income-producing assets. Those assets could include build-to-rent housing, student accommodation, hotels, offices, retirement living or other commercial uses suited to the site.

The same logic shows up overseas in the casinos run under South American grandstands and the apartments packed around Hong Kong's tracks: uses that earn on the days there is no racing.

Live Australian and New Zealand examples show both routes.

At Moonee Valley, the racing club's redevelopment with developer Hamton and super fund Hostplus will deliver more than 2000 homes in a project worth roughly $2 billion, with the proceeds funding a new track.

At Ellerslie, Auckland Thoroughbred Racing sold a 6.2-hectare parcel into a NZ$500 million housing estate and, separately, sold land for 330 build-to-rent apartments, putting about NZ$33 million of the proceeds towards a NZ$55 million track upgrade. Both shared the development risk with experienced partners.

The counter-example is Alexandra Park, where Auckland Trotting Club began building apartment towers in 2015 without that expertise. The project blew out: a projected NZ$30 million profit became a roughly NZ$40 million loss, a NZ$70 million turnaround driven largely by having to replace the builder mid-project, and left the club owing tens of millions to its banks and selling land to save itself.

Acting chief executive Rod Croon was blunt about why: “The lesson is the board and management didn't have the experience to take on the property project,” he said.

That point was a core concern raised by Australian Turf Club members when asked to approve the proposed sale and redevelopment of Rosehill Gardens, which was promoted as potentially unlocking up to $5 billion in value.

However, the developer told TTR, while doubting the site would ever realise anything close to $5 billion in cash: “You don't want to go selling the whole farm. That was one of the bigger issues with Rosehill. It's all well and good selling it, but what's the actual benefit going forward?”

The bigger prize, he argued, is breaking the one-off habit altogether.

He pointed to the Brisbane Broncos, a listed company that has built diversified, recurring earnings to cover its fixed costs rather than living season to season.

Broadcast deals: the NRL's new benchmark

If property is the underused asset, broadcasting is where the money has moved fastest.

On July 7 the Australian Rugby League Commission announced a seven-year, $5.3 billion media deal, the largest in Australian sporting history. The agreement also includes expanded international distribution through DAZN. ARLC chairman Peter V'landys framed it as “future-proofing the code.”

The NRL is not an outlier in global sports. The NFL’s national media agreements are worth roughly US$10 billion (AU$14.4 billion) annually, with central distributions providing each franchise hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The NBA’s new 11-year media package is worth about US$6.9 billion (AU$9.9 billion) annually. The Premier League earns more than £3 billion (AU$5.8 billion) a year from domestic and international media rights, while cricket’s Indian Premier League earns about US$1.2 billion (AU$1.7 billion) annually.

Australian racing’s media rights are divided across jurisdictions, clubs, wagering broadcasters and free-to-air partners, limiting its ability to present the sport as one national product. Nine's six-year deal for the Melbourne Cup carnival, the sport's marquee domestic event, is worth a reported $80 million, which puts the scale gap in perspective.

In Britain, Racecourse Media Group, owned by its 37 racecourse shareholders, returned a record £118.4 million (AU$228 million) to its member tracks from media and data rights as a package in 2025.

But packaging alone does not create value. The NRL, NFL and Formula 1 can command large rights fees because they offer broadcasters concentrated audiences, recognisable seasons and products that are easy to follow. Racing would need to organise its audience before aggregation could produce a premium.

Selling a stake, or taking a partner

Some sports have raised money by selling a share of themselves, and both models come with a warning.

The first is institutional investment.

Private equity firm CVC bought a stake of about 14% in the Six Nations for £365 million (AU$704 million), while New Zealand Rugby sold roughly 8% of NZR CommercialCo to Silver Lake for around NZ$262 million (AU$218 million).

The deals have since attracted scrutiny. New Zealand Rugby chairman David Kirk said in May that the organisation was considering buying out Silver Lake’s stake, while the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association has described the arrangement as expensive capital. That does not prove the investment failed, but it shows how costly permanent equity can become when expected commercial growth is slow to arrive.

The second is the sovereign partner, such as Qatar's state-backed Qatar Sports Investments, which bought Paris Saint-Germain in 2011.

PSG had not won the French league since 1994 and finished fourth in the season before the takeover. Over the following 14 years, QSI absorbed sustained losses and regulatory scrutiny while annual revenue grew to around €840 million (AU$1.38 billion). Recent estimates have placed the club’s value at several billion euros, building a wider portfolio that now spans other clubs and the global padel tour.

A cautionary example is LIV Golf. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than US$5 billion (AU$7.2 billion) from the league’s launch in 2022 but confirmed in April that its funding would end after the 2026 season. LIV is now seeking outside investors after failing to establish media-rights and audience income capable of supporting its cost base. Its proposed agreement with the PGA Tour, announced in 2023, was never completed.

Other lessons for racing

Formula 1 is the sport most often held up as a commercial turnaround.

One of its fastest-growing supplementary businesses is premium hospitality, including the Paddock Club, where packages can cost several thousand dollars for a race weekend.

Formula 1 also became the promoter of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, allowing it to retain more ticketing, hospitality, sponsorship and event income while accepting the event’s substantial operating risk.

Content was one contributor to Formula 1’s audience growth. Drive to Survive helped introduce the sport to new viewers, alongside expanded digital access, social media, calendar growth and the addition of more races in the United States. Formula 1’s 10-year global partnership with LVMH has been reported as worth up to US$150 million (AU$216 million) a season.

F1 stopped behaving like a niche sport and started behaving like an entertainment brand, monetised across broadcast, live experience, sponsorship and content at once.

Racing also owns intellectual property that it has barely begun to commercialise: famous horses, bloodlines, rivalries, colours and stories accumulated over centuries.

Disney’s commercial strength comes from treating its characters as assets that can move between films, television, games, merchandise, live events and theme parks. Each format introduces the characters to another audience and increases the value of the others.

With Japan’s Uma Musume, Pretty Derby applies a version of that model to racing. Cygames reimagined famous racehorses as fictional characters and built an interconnected franchise spanning a mobile game, anime, manga, music, concerts and merchandise. The mobile game alone was approaching US$2.5 billion in cumulative consumer spending by July 2024, with most of that revenue generated in Japan.

The commercial lesson is larger than producing a racing game. Uma Musume turned the identities and histories of real horses into characters that could live across several forms of entertainment. It gave younger audiences a way into racing without first asking them to understand breeding, form or wagering.

None of these ideas replace wagering, but they reduce the risk of relying on it alone. Every successful sporting business examined here found additional ways to turn its audience, assets or intellectual property into recurring income.

Field's point wasn't that racing should abandon its existing model, but it needs another engine before the current one starts losing power.