2026 will be the season that brings the SailGP League into the mainstream sports world . . .
Or that is the hope of SailGP CEO Sir Russell Coutts, who has turned traditional open-sea racing into a spectator friendly, stadium sailing event, with his Formula 1 circuit style series, featuring thirteen teams (with No. 14 waiting in the wings) competing at 13 global venues per season.
Season 6 of the Rolex SailGP Championship opens with the Oracle Perth Sail Grand Prix in Fremantle, Australia on 17–18 January 2026. Then over to New Zealand for the ITM New Zealand Sail Grand Prix in Auckland on 14-15 February and back to Australia for the KPMG Sydney GP at the end of February.
And while the events have seen a growth of paying spectators at the venues, Coutts has made no secret of his main target of the live TV and on-line media audience, and that has been even more spectacular in 2025.
Coutts has claimed that dedicated viewers went from 3.4 million per event in Season 1, to average 18 million per event in 2025, peaking at 23 million in Cádiz. And importantly including the most-watched sailing race in US history on CBS in the US (3,469 million viewers) plus 1.67 billion social views in 2025.
This rapid audience growth has sparked a bidding war, both in team ownership and in crew movements with an active transfer market. The original teams were funded by co-founder Larry Ellison, with the premise that they would attract sponsors to cover running costs.
That initial plan has paid-off in spades and the target of 20 fully funded teams now looks to be a realistic target for 2027/28, if SailGP can build new hulls quickly enough.
Talk is now of the build delayed team 14, believed to involve United Arab Emirates backers, who already have an interest in Ben Ainslie’s Emirates GB team, which scooped both the 2025 overall season and 2025 Final.
Across the 2025 season, Emirates GBR picked up a staggering US $4.4 million (£3.3M).
For the 2026 season a total of US $12M (£9.2m) in prize money will be available over the season, and feature US $2M (£1.5m) for the winner of the three-boat Grand Final race.
Team valuations are now claimed well in excess of US $60 million, with France CEO Bruno Dubois talking of teams being sold for US$70 million.
But this does not seem to have dampened the interest of outside investors in getting a piece of the SailGP pie.
This could also be the year that the crews step out into the rough and tumble world of media recognition.
In the forefront of that spotlight is Sir Ben Ainslie. After a run of five consecutive Olympics, winning four gold and a silver, he has come to even greater public notice through his continuing efforts to win the America’s Cup with a British team.
His recent spat with Sir Jim Ratcliffe over ownership of the British America’s Cup team, has seen him come out smiling as the next America’s Cup Challenger (due in 2027) and boss of the highly successful Emirates Great Britain SailGP team.
Even reaching the Daily Telegraph magazine ‘My Saturday’ feature . . . Anyone for poached eggs?
And as SailGP, with its regular monthly circuit events, ramps up the on-line action, team crews will also become familiar faces on our screens, with the ubiquitous podcasts providing the necessary background noise.
The printed mainstream press may continue to ignore anything not on terra firma, but the ever headline hungry on-line media has no such problem, and that means SailGP still has a long way to go.
And Russell Coutts is doing a pretty good job of convincing a non-sailing public that SailGP really is Formula 1 on water.
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