THE BREAKDOWN: F1 is Back, The Craziest Promotion of All Time & How the Sub-2 Marathon Shows Athletics’ Big Problem (E17)

26:22But in an actual legitimate marathon race, it was something that people said, oh, no, it couldn't happen. And then a young man, well, not such a young man, a 31-year-old Kenyan called Sebastian Sarway came to the London Marathon who actually won the London Marathon last year. And he ran a one-hour, 59-minute, 30-second marathon. 65 seconds faster than the previous record. Now, let me just, I just want to lay this out so people really, I think appreciate what we just saw because it is something absolutely extraordinary this this is this is an incredible sporting achievement so you know this is um he ran the second half of the marathon faster than he ran the first half he ran the first half in 60 minutes 29 seconds he ran the second half in 59 minutes and one second he was injured in January and only started training again in February on the morning of the race he ate two slices of bread with honey and said he didn't believe he could break the two-hour mark the runner behind him who is called Yomov Kajelka also ran a 159.41 the third place ran two hours 28 all three people at the top of that race broke the previous world record so this was just it was an incredible day the greatest marathon of all time the greatest marathon of all time actually question okay what do you think so the first marathon over an official distance was won by an american in 1908 called johnny hayes what do you think the time was um let me guess two hours 30 two hours 55 18 so in 100 years well 120 years it's gone from two hours 55 to one hour 59 which is incredible right it's absolutely incredible um now you know what it takes to achieve this i also found just fascinating really kind of getting into to the world of these runners so i you know i said he's 31 years old so he's not what we in sport would often class as a young man but but that's typical for marathon running so distance running um the the peak um age for very for extreme distance running is is early to mid 30s so it doesn't surprise me that he's reaching his peak at this age right because that is broadly speaking what what is it what is expected yeah and um the kind of controllables that he classed before the race were were a great read so what he put it down to is the adidas super shoe people will have been very familiar i'm sure over the last 10 years or so at least in the development of some of these like cloud-like running shoes i'm sure you will have all seen people running around the streets not quite probably of so as quality but you know budding uh runners some very good some probably not so really hoping for extra bounce his shoe weighed 97 grams his pro evo adidas shoe 97 grams um he trains in an elite training camp in kenya very specific very very rigid incredible like discipline of these runners going through it i highly recommend going and having a look at what these training camps are actually like if you get a moment he also has a very strict anti-doping regime this i found particularly interesting because it is paid for over and beyond what they have to do by Adidas.

29:24So Adidas last year, and they're doing it again this year, gave him$50 ,000 to have 25 tests, which basically meant every three days in training camp, he is tested. That is fascinating. I didn't know that, Charlie. That's absolutely fascinating. And it's basically part of this strive for clean competition. But isn't it interesting that Adidas are funding this for him as a athlete? It makes sense commercially, doesn't it? Because if he's going to be the brand representative that they want, they need to be able to absolutely say with total confidence, no suspicions here, he's a clean athlete. So it makes sense in terms of the total commercial deal to say, well, let's at least be demonstrably transparent on it.

30:05So 25 of those tests. So it's basically$2 ,000 a test is what it really costs. But for athletes now, the band list is so long. You can imagine the detail that's being gone into here. And actually, another thing he said, which is his hydrogel super fueling. So there's a company that's found a gel that doesn't actually hit the gut. So a lot of the problem with gels, again, for any runners who know, if it hits your gut, it can do some quite weird things with your tummy. You speak from experience that, Josh. I'm not actually because I've never run anything close to a marathon before. But I've heard.

30:38You've heard. Rumors have it. But yeah, this gel doesn't actually go to the gut. But let's get to the core of this. and this is where I'll probably bring you into it. We're talking about one of the greatest sporting achievements a human being can achieve. Let's be honest, I would say 99 point whatever percent weren't aware of Sebastian Sarway before this weekend, even though he won the London Marathon last year and even though he had been running incredible times in the last few years. I am now aware of him. People are still aware of him if they've seen it, but I still think if you walked up to the average person in the street, they probably wouldn't have a clue who he is.

31:12so this speaks to a broader problem and this is where we want to take this conversation because for the athletes that can achieve this the ones that really do extraordinary things generally with that should come the recognition of absolute top and elite level performance but there are a number of issues which surround the sport of athletics that don't necessarily allow this to happen and you know if i want to go and watch sebastian sarway next week if i want to get my fill where do i go what do i do what's the circuit like? What's the market like? Charlie, what do you think? I agree with you. Athletics has some really fundamental problems, challenges, because I think when you think about sports, sporting achievement, a lot of games are, when you think about it in any existential detail, quite tenuous.

32:00So you think that's the pursuit of golf. So you get a stick, you get a ball, and the number of times you hit the ball before you manage to get it to disappear into a hole, that's then reckoned to be some phenomenal achievement. Okay, maybe. A bit odd though, isn't it? Sort of go on to it. So, you know, various other sports, the same. Athletics. Who's the fastest? Who can jump the furthest? Who can jump the highest? Who can last the longest? This is the core of what all of us start with as wannabe athletes. we're at school we're seven or eight there's school sports day before we started playing organized other types of sports who's the quickest who's the strongest who can jump the highest who can jump the furthest etc so this is the sport where if you are naturally good at it you're going to get funneled towards this sport before any other sport because it's the first thing you do and talent is so inherent and so apparent because whilst towards the top end there are of course technical elements to it the truth is as we all know from having been at school is is that the ones who are really good at it it's it's natural it's absolutely natural and you see it straight away um so this is the apex of sport is that controversial i don't think it's controversial to say that the top top athletes are at the very pinnacle of the whole sporting world you know Usain Bolt, the fastest man ever.

33:31It's one thing to say, well, you know, is Lionel Messi quite as good as George Best? You know, that type of stuff, right? But that's all subjective. And in a sport which is very multifaceted and has lots of different sort of elements to it and has also changed a lot over a period of time, Usain Bolt, fastest athlete ever. Sawe, best endurance athlete ever. And so on and so forth. So why is it that they get paid so little? How much did Sawe win, Charlie? I don't know. 40 ,000. 40 ,000 for winning the London Marathon? Yes. Wow. 40 ,000. Which, you know, to put it in some context, leaving aside the utterly absurd numbers paid to professional footballers, but if you were playing, let's say you're a tennis player and you weren't even playing on the main tour.

34:18You were playing what might be called a challenger tour. That's about what you'd make for winning one of those events. a tennis player who no one's ever heard of, playing in a tournament with very few people watching it, with very little media coverage, with no legacy, with no, you know, real sort of existential meaning to it. That's about what they would earn. So$40 ,000 for winning, for being, you know, for one of the greatest athletic achievements ever. So this speaks to, I think, I think we have to scrape back and go back to where athletics has come from as a sport. And remember that until relatively recently, it was an amateur sport.

34:56And it's only, I think, since the sort of 1980s that the IAAF, which is the governing body of athletics, which is run by Seb Co., really allowed athletes to earn money at all. And in those early stages in the 1980s, it was in the form of sort of trust funds that were allowed to be set up to fund their training and so on and so forth. and they were sort of a bit of commercial endorsement and this kind of stuff. But fundamentally, the heroes of that era, including Seb Coe himself, but also if you go back to my youth, some of the most famous sports people in Britain were athletes. Daley Thompson.

35:34You couldn't have got more famous than Daley Thompson in the 1980s. He was absolutely mega. Seb Coe, Steve Ovette, going on to the early 1990s, Linford Christie. In British terms, these guys were megastars. And in global terms, Carl Lewis was the most famous sportsman on earth, pretty much. Michael Johnson. Later on, Michael Johnson and so on and so forth. And then, of course, Bolt. But in the 1990s, it started to professionalize, but obviously from a very, very low base. Now, the challenge here is that what is the greatest athletics competition on earth? The Olympics. And the Olympics remains essentially amateur.

36:14Okay? So even though the IOC, which is the International Olympic Committee's total revenue, is$8 billion over an Olympic cycle, so you're talking about effectively$2 billion a year, and even though athletics is at the core of the Olympics, so if you think about, okay, if you were going to try and split out the IOC's revenues and you were going to say, right, okay, how much of that are we going to apportion to athletics? right the answer would be a lot but i would say at least a half of that two billion a year that the ioc is raking in is down to the fact that each summer olympics the biggest events that most people want to watch are the athletics apply the nba and nfl models of split revenue between the players things is right it's 50 right so 50 of that one billion a year in theory should mean that 500 million a year is being split between the athletes.

37:06But in actual fact, they see nothing of it. They see absolutely nothing of their one pinnacle moment that happens. So instead of which, what they're doing is they're sharing out what the IAAF makes. And the IAAF has the World Championships that runs once every two years, and then also has the Diamond League, which is the circuit, the professional circuit that happens in 14 meets running from the spring until the autumn at various different places around the world. And the IAAF, as you'd expect, has commercial partners, TDK, ASICS, Deloitte, Seiko, et cetera, et cetera. So that's 60 million US dollars in 2024 was what the IAAF generated in commercial partnerships.

37:49So suddenly it's that that's being shared out rather than the IOC's massive 1 billion a year that potentially has been made by athletics. So the IOC is using that for all sorts of things all around the world, but it's not going to the athletes. The IAAF is getting this tiny sum, 60 million, which is distributing through the Diamond League. And the amount that these athletes earn through the Diamond League is basically peanuts. Okay, so even if you are a top, top athlete and you are very successful on the Diamond League, you'll be making a few hundred thousand bucks a year. Just to be clear for people that don't know, the Diamond League is kind of an elite one-day track and field meetings that go, I think there's 13 to 15 of them throughout the year.

38:32And it was created in 2010, I think. But that was taken over from the Gold League, which had been established in the 1990s. And the Gold League was primarily European. The advent of the Diamond League was to take it more global. But it's really important that something like the Diamond League exists because as you've just highlighted, the Olympics is the biggest moment, yet it happens once every four years. So what happens in the time in between for these athletes? You have to have something. There's no year-round consumer product, really. But the problem is there's no link between the IOC and its massive revenues and the Diamond League.

38:59So therefore, there just isn't the revenue there. Then you have like World Athletics Championships, right? Which is part of it. In 2022, the World Athletics Championships were in Eugene in America, specifically designed in statements running up to the games to grow the US market. It drew under 2 million viewers on MVC on its best weekend. Now, to put that into context, the British Open golf drew in 4.5 million on the same network in the same year. And golf has a product all year round. So Sebastian Coe himself said about the US market, he said we need to be in this market it's not punching its weight yeah but it's not like there are lots of other geographies where it is punching its weight you know we discussed last week how snooker is being driven forward by the fact that 200 million chinese people can watch one of their players on an annual basis in in playing snooker in sheffield okay now is it the case there are 200 million people in china because at least one if not two of the diamond league events are taking place in China.

39:55Are 200 million Chinese people tuning into the Diamond League? No. So there are two fundamental problems. One of which is that the athletics event that everyone does watch, the Olympics, does not pass its money down into professional athletics on an annual basis. And then the other problem is that the circuit, the Diamond League, has not sufficiently captured the imagination of the global viewing public so as to convert the people who watch the Olympics and go, I want to watch this. Now, I just want to, we are recording this in the UK. Okay, so I'm conscious that even though our audience is global, we are recording this in the UK.

40:31Now, try where possible to make things globally relevant, but please excuse us if sometimes our examples are domestic here in the UK. So there is a top, top British athlete who is one of the two top performers in one of the blue-ribboned events. The blue-ribboned events are the 100-meter sprint, it's the marathon and it's the one it's the mile 1 ,500 meters josh carr is either top or second at the 1 ,500 meters this was seb co's event this is what made seb co a global star i'll be fascinated to see a poll done on name and face recognition of josh carr in this country in terms of how many people would recognize him and recognize his achievements but when um he won the indoor world championships, okay, the winner of that event, 31 ,000.

41:22Okay, so world champion at a blue ribbon event in the indoor arena, 30 grand. Now, this is what then created the conditions for an attempt to change all this last year. And the attempt was being led by the athletics legend, Michael Johnson. And Michael Johnson set up something called Grand Slam Track. And the idea was to have a smaller number of events, but with much more prize money. And its first year was last year. That's 2025. And the intention were to have events in Kingston, Jamaica, in LA, in Miramar and Philadelphia. This was the intention. And they went out, they raised money, but clearly not enough money.

42:06because after the first three events, it came to an end. Yeah, they raised$30 million. Yeah, they raised$30 million. Dollars. And the intention was that $12.5 million prize money would be shared with each race winner of these smaller number of events receiving$100 ,000 for winning a race, which is obviously transformational when you consider that even winning the world title only gets you$30 ,000 and even winning the London Marathon only gets you 40 ,000, right? So if you're talking about 100 ,000 per race and you've got four meetings, you're starting to look at a situation where people like Josh Kerr could potentially be taking home 400, 500, 600 ,000 a year in prize money, which is obviously totally different to where they are right now.

42:53Unfortunately, it collapsed and they have not even been able to pay out all the prize money, which the athletes were owed for the events they did take part in. Now, there's quite a lot of controversy surrounding that collapse. And I don't really want to go into that here because it's not particularly germane to our discussion. But what's clear is that this brave new attempt to break this paradigm and try and create something new clearly did not attract enough commercial or spectator interest to really make the whole thing fly. Otherwise, it wouldn't have collapsed. So can I just jump in? Because I think this is an interesting discussion to me because quite often we sit here and we could criticize where there's a body or a sport that don't recognize or have the intention or ambition to make the changes required to improve that given sport.

43:37and when we're talking about these types of things, there does seem to be a lot of attempts made to do things. But you just touched on something there, which is actually at the heart of this, which is for every sport to be successful, it needs an audience, and it needs a passionate audience that turns up regularly. And even the Diamond League, when you were talking about it in meetings, some of the numbers that it actually gets to the events are very good. There were 60 ,000 people in London for the Diamond League meeting, but the average is far lower. So outside of a flagship, where's the consistency?

44:04and this like for something like a grand slam track again in principle and in theory you're going it ticks all the boxes reduce the number of events make it easier for people to follow and broadcast and give a great experience live yeah but when a huge part of your business model as you said is like continual paying of cash a bit like live right to the stars you need the revenue you need the business model around it that can support that and like free cash flow without getting too nerdy is the most important thing in businesses now how they would have made money would have been on TV deals and commercial deals.

44:35Now, a lot of those wouldn't have been in place to upfront a lot of that money the way they needed to. 30 million to set up a series, when you're having to pay for everything around it, is a big challenge. Yeah, it's undercapitalized. There's no doubt about that. And we do talk about this in sport. And as you said, I think we don't want to stray too far on that specific example. But for all of Liv's faults, it had the capital to at least go and make those faults right rightly or wrongly quite often you know when you're starting this you know people think raising less money is good they think it's good and think that appeals to an investor but if i'm an investor and i'm looking at it i'm going have you got enough money to achieve what you need to do in that first period because if you don't you're going to present yourself with far more issues than asking me for another 20 asking us as a group for another 20 million because now the creditors of this situation are the very people that they started the tournament to support, i.e.

45:28the athletes. Yeah, I agree with all that, Charlie. I mean, instinctively, you're right. It was undercapitalized. But over and above that, I haven't got a detailed breakdown. I tried to find one, but I haven't got a detailed breakdown of what the TV rights situation was in terms of where you could actually see these events. I didn't watch them myself, which is probably not a great sign because I do watch pretty much everything that's put in front of me. Have broadcast deals with CW and Peacock, but free-to-air TV deals don't generate the kind of immediate cash flow you need to pay 100 ,000 first prizes at multiple events but my notes specifically so I think they've basically got a couple of broadcast deals paid but there was also free-to-air deals in there which again free-to-air great but you need an audience then to commercialize free-to-air so business model challenges but really bring this back to the whole piece we're not talking about they have attempted Diamond League meetings and structures to boost the sport.

46:26They've attempted things like Grand Slam Track to elevate it. World Athletics have actually done, you know, a decent job in trying to do things. I don't know if you saw it, but they had a kind of Drive to Survive product on Netflix called Sprint. I didn't actually. What was that like? It was good. It was good. But like a lot of these sports things, I don't know, maybe a bit harsh. To me, it kind of fell into the trying to replicate some of the other shows rather than actually carve out what made it really unique. A bit like Six Nations rugby one, If I say Finn Russell having a coffee with his wife versus Finn Russell smashing into someone at training.

47:01I know what part of the sport I really want to see. Anyway, it had two seasons. I'm not sure if it's coming back, but they built it around the Paris Olympics for season two. And they had Shelley-Ann Fraser Prize. They had Noah Lyles. They had Fred Curley. They had Gabby Thomas. They had the big names of the sport you would want in it. But does it drive that sport forward? Did it capture the attention? Not really. I do think they had to get back to this thing of who's the quickest on earth, who jumps the furthest on earth, who jumps the highest on earth. That's the core to the fascination with athletics, isn't it?

47:35Well, do you remember when we were talking about the Winter Olympics, we had one comment on the types of events we said just weren't really capturing us. And it was the events where it was generally like point scoring or skills based. I didn't really understand the metrics because you had the commentators and the amazing knowledge. We had a slight disagreement over curling. We had a slight disagreement over curling. But hey, look, I know I've got to land that stone right on the middle. I've still got a direct point of achievement. Things that are scores-based, you know, I don't know, harder to follow.

48:01The things that we loved, who gets down there, you know, you watch the downhill skiing on the edges of those skis for 0.01 of a second. Of course, we have your family pursuit of ski jumping. Exactly. Yeah. You know, yeah, me and my Norwegians. We absolutely, we love that. Which again, it's a very straightforward one. So anyway, however far you jump. I think we digress a little bit. Look, it seems to be a very difficult problem to solve. And what we've tried to do here is lay out the landscape. I don't think really, and I've got huge respect for Sebastian Coe, I don't think we're really sat here saying there's an easy solution here.

48:40And some great minds are putting their minds to it because the fundamental structural problem, rather like the fundamental structural problem of UK horse racing is that they don't get the betting revenues from the bookmakers that in other jurisdictions other racing bodies do get. Here there is a fundamental problem, which is that the Olympics is the pinnacle, and the Olympics mops up all the revenue, because if you are going to get involved in athletics, that's where you get involved in from a commercial perspective. But it doesn't get passed down to the circuit on an annual basis. And that just causes a really fundamental problem.

49:12You just need to be from Singapore, because they pay their gold medalist$750 ,000. Or you need to be a, what do they call, a freestyle skier from China. in which case you get a signing on bonus. 13 million signing on bonus for China. As you said, not something that we wanted to position with a solution, something we wanted to highlight as a man in Sawe that has just achieved something absolutely incredible but is symptomatic of the broader environment when you don't see the potential for him to get rewarded according to the level of his achievement. In prize money terms. I think it is worth saying that the ones who are at the very, very pinnacle can do quite well out of endorsements.

49:51So if you look at Bolt, Bolt at his peak was making 20 to 30 million a year for endorsements. And Sawe, because of what he's achieved in terms of his running shoe endorsements, will do extremely well. But it is very much on that side of things. It's not on the prize money side of things. Moving on. Moving on. Charlie, Formula One is back. The Miami Grand Prix this weekend. It's probably a bit of a relief to the rulers of the sport that they've had this break. Well, it's funny you should say that. It's very funny you should say that. I wouldn't often say that. Normally, it'd be an absolute nightmare, but it sort of feels to me like they've needed this break.

50:24Well, yes. Why have they needed this break, Charles? And I think they can look at it. So just if everyone remembers, this break happened between Suzuka in Japan and now the Miami Grand Prix because there were two races scheduled in the Middle East, one in Bahrain, one in Saudi, in Jeddah. And with the Iran War, the US-Iran War, those two races were cancelled. So that creates a five-week gap in the calendar. normally I don't know how that would be felt you know in a year where there hadn't been massive regulation change and everything was as normal would have been quite an interesting time to to ask some of these team principals whether the breaking momentum would have harmed them however as has been talked of so much around this Formula One season this year was a standout year it was the most radical regulation changes in F1 history that had been implemented as they moved to a hybrid car so half electric half combustion the question that I think we need to really look at here is in that time period that we just had in those five weeks why has there had to be regulation change already to the regulation changes so there have been a number of changes that have been put in by the FIA and Formula One that have addressed issues that came up in those first few races but also in testing before the start of the season which drivers and team principals had raised as as concerns for mostly safety of the drivers now why did it take for a 20 year old to smash into a wall at 194 kilometers an hour 50 g's of force to to make this happen you said something to me the other day that was quite interesting and i'm going to look at it on both sides and see your thoughts but you think that formula one's got off a little lightly with these changes because this has been positioned as such a momentous moment in in f1's history now i'll present you a critical and a positive i kind of wrote two down and just let's start with that and see your thoughts so if i'm being critical about changes having to be made within the first three weeks i go this is a governance failure yeah shambles it's it's a potentially very costly one yeah um everything's been built up to this moment and you're basically saying well you got that wrong yeah if i'm putting In the positive case across, it's new regulation is unlikely to ever be perfect.

52:33Acting within three races with unanimous buy-in from all stakeholders is actually a sign of a functioning system. Two things can be true at the same time. It can be a total shambles, which is then addressed in a competent way. So what do I mean by saying I think they got off lightly? Well, because when you start a sporting competition, and within a couple of months of starting that sporting competition, you have to rip up your rulebook because it hasn't worked for whatever reason. that is a crashing failure, crushing and crashing. And it's the type of thing under normal circumstances which would get people pointing fingers left, right and centre.

53:11It was his fault, it was that fault, or should never have been here or should never have been there. Sackings, resignations and all this type of stuff. I think the general sentiment around Formula One over the last five years has been so positive and the view about what Liberty have done since taking over the running of Formula One has been so positive that there's this sort of inset narrative that basically sport's going great, industry's going great, everything's great, and the people that run it are great, and so on and so forth. So that when something terrible happens, there's almost a sort of see no evil, hear no evil.

53:43Oh, right, I had to change a few regulations. Oh, that's a bit embarrassing. Well, it's still all great, by the way. Whereas if you look at, for instance, on a different topic, once a narrative sets in, like it has done in your head and the general sporting public's head, that the people running Chelsea are a bunch of Muppets who don't know what they're doing, then even things which happen, which actually are not that abnormal, suddenly becomes supposedly symptomatic of much broader failures, right? And which maybe they are, right? So it's not abnormal for a manager to be fired. But the extent to which that's taken on an existential meaning, a much broader meaning, is because of an established narrative that's been taking place over a period of time.

54:25and F1's rulers are benefiting right now from the exact opposite which is there is an established narrative that the people who are running Formula 1 are brilliant, know what they're doing, really get it, etc. So that when something terrible happens like this, it's almost sort of, well, it clearly can't really be their fault really because they are geniuses who know exactly what they're doing. So it's just an adjustment we need to make and let's just try and brush it on the carpet and forget it ever happened. So I guess it's a way of saying that. I don't want to hang people out to dry just for the sake of it.

54:53But we should acknowledge, you know, when we're talking about, I think, you know, we asked the question last week with reference to Live about great sporting disasters, great sporting commercial disasters. And we were saying, crikey, Riley, six billion on something like that. That surely is the biggest sporting disaster of all time without any question, et cetera, which it is. And people then were sending in other stuff, like, for instance, talking about Michael Johnson's athletics Grand Slam track that we were discussing just now, which lost 30 million bucks. I rather suspect this mistake cost more than 30 million bucks.

55:29I just gently suggest that this is quite a large sum of money that's going to be wasted here. Oh, completely. And if you think about the broader value of what this regulation change brings in, if it actually isn't that consumable and people don't enjoy it and the drivers don't like it and the success that the sport's quickly grown and the financial power that it has being then corrupted and harnessed, people have said, well, that impact is going to be huge. So to make the change is not good. But I want to just be really clear that people understand this because it has been a bit technical and even these changes have been a bit technical.

56:02So I wrote some stuff on it beforehand, but I mentioned the Oli Behrman crash in Suzuka. So he was basically approaching Franco Colopinto, who drives for Alpine, at a closing speed of 50 kilometers an hour in a turn, not because either of them were driving recklessly, but because the regulations basically created this situation. Now, what do I mean by that? Beerman was deploying his battery boost mode. So something that's come in with the electric. So what was the speed again? 50 kilometers an hour. I mean, really, we're talking 190 he crashed at. So Beerman was deploying his battery boost mode.

56:31Yeah. Colopinto was harvesting his, like super clipping, it's called, which basically meant the car effectively is decelerating. Beerman goes off the track going round him at a huge speed of 190 kilometers an hour and hits the wall with 50 G's of force. Now, the stewards investigated this and they didn't take any action against either driver and their reasoning was clear on that because the fault was structural. It wasn't human. Now, Charlie, if you remember, we've talked about some great quotes from drivers, mostly laughing at some of Max Verstappen's comments being rather unhappy. But, you know, there was one in particular that stood out for me from Lando Norris that we had brought up before, right after the Melbourne Grand Prix, so the first race of the season.

57:11And he said, it's chaos and we're going to have a big accident. Carlos Sainz followed that up just after Suzuka when Vim in a crash. And he said, we've been warning this kind of accident will always happen. In Suzuka, we were lucky. There was an escape road. Imagine going off in Baku or Singapore or Las Vegas with those speeds. Now, just to be clear for people that don't know, those are what you call city tracks. They are very close, tight-walled races. Whether the racetrack, you know, you normally have long sweeping corners, which give you some chance to decelerate this still still hit it pretty hard the four to five changes that have been made without getting too technical again people they're basically done to improve safety what i do want to say is you know f1 has a history of regulation change what's happened this year isn't new and sometimes it does take a long time for them to actually prove valuable why you know why they work uh the ground effect cars in the 19th in the 1980s produced aerodynamic instability um if you well i don't remember that but you probably will the refueling era which then came after that creates a serious fire hazard in a lot of the cars but i'm looking at this again from the part positive side of going well they've made a change relatively soon after implemented because it's been seen to be dangerous but i think toto wolf's and i want to leave this with you toto wolf's key point on this seems about right because he said he basically called for a scalpel, not a baseball bat.

58:36They've taken swift action. They haven't let the whole thing play out over six months, eight months, or even to the end of the season with problems escalating left, right, and center. They've jumped in and they've gone, okay, we've taken it on board. We are changing it. And I guess you would say that is the sign of functionality within a sport and an industry. They haven't waited for the whole thing to become sort of too dramatic, too bad. They have applied their scalpel quite quickly and efficiently. Well, we hope efficiently. We haven't seen yet. We haven't seen what the outturn of it is, but we assume that they've got it right the second time around.

59:08No, and we'll get a good grasp of it this weekend. And I'll be interested to see how the drivers speak about it as well. Drivers interviewed throughout an entire weekend. Yeah, it will. I think the other point which you kind of touched on at the start of this conversation is we still don't know yet what the impact this is going to be on viewers, on whether these changes actually are good for racing full stop. because the outturn from an uneducated perspective, so from a normal viewer who just likes watching cars racing as opposed to the more technical level of people who's really interested in the intricacies of what's happening with the engines.

59:44Basically, what this has led to is more overtaking. So the question is, is, you know, which something that Max Verstappen is sneery about and which Lewis Hamilton says he likes. We don't yet know whether the viewing public likes to see what I think it was Verstappen or somebody else called Mario racing, where it's literally backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Or if, you know, actually they prefer it when an overtaking manoeuvre is, it happens, but it's a rare event. So when it does happen, it's actually dramatic. Because I have to say, when I've been live, been at Silverstone or when I was working on the Bahrain Grand Prix, and you're watching the race and you're aware, like, sort of, it's a big battle and it's very hard to get past, when the overtaking manoeuvre eventually happens, the whole place lifts off because they're in recognition that was an amazing piece of driving to be able to pull that off under the circumstances.

1:00:38So I just am interested on whether making it a more common occurrence genuinely adds to the sport for the mass viewing public or it doesn't. I have found the first few races an enjoyable consumer experience, but I also firmly understand that I don't want, what we do not want to see is a return to days where drivers get in, cars have major accidents and die. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I want to enjoy it, but I don't want it to be dangerous to do so. Finally, just on Formula One, before we move on, have you seen some of the comments that Zac Brown's made about the potential Toto Wolff? Yes, yes.

1:01:10Now, this is something that we highlighted quite early on in our breakdown journey, is that there was the possibility, or in fact, not the possibility, there was a sort of corporate battle going on in terms of who would be able to buy which team was it? Is it Charlie? The Alpine team and there were two contenders for this one of which was a consortium led by Christian Horner coming back into the sport to introduce a new independent team that would be able to compete and the other one of which was Toto Wolff the Mercedes boss effectively being allowed to buy up a second team to help his overall effort within the industry and I think at the time our conclusion was that we wanted Horner back and we wanted another independent team We wanted more competition.

1:01:56What's Zac Brown said about it? Zac Brown being the McLaren boss. Zac Brown is the CEO of McLaren. He said something very similar. Zac's always been very consistent on his position on this. So I'm going to say this because he's treading a slightly careful line in saying that he doesn't want Toto and Mercedes to have it because Mercedes supply the power unit for McLaren. So he needs to have a good relationship there. But I think he can say what he said because he has always been very consistent. He does not agree with an A and B team structure, shall we say. He doesn't agree. In this day and age where Formula One is so strong, two owners having two teams.

1:02:33Sorry, the same owner having two teams. Otro Capital and Renault own Alpine. Otro Capital is a financer. They have 24%. Renault is the car manufacturer. They have 76%. But key, a bit Jim Ratcliffe-y in Man United. Otro Capital's 24 % is like the, should we say, the sporting operational side. So whoever hones that 24 % will have a huge say of how the team is run. Zach's key point, right, is that it creates unfair advantages for teams to have a direct relationship. And he's not wrong, of course. He's not wrong. The reason it exists in one part on the grid at the moment, in Red Bulls and Racing Bulls.

1:03:15Now, the environment for Formula 1 was very, very different when that deal happened. It happened in 2005. A long time ago. When teams were basically not valuable assets. They were being given away pretty much. Well, they weren't just not valuable, Charlie. There were seasons when you couldn't fill the whole grid up. So anyone who wanted a team, you were going to like come in and do it. So Red Bull taking two, brilliant. That's one less we have to worry about. Absolutely. Now, fast forward 21 years, the sport is in a completely different place and these are now multi-billion assets even at the back end of the grid.

1:03:43so Zach's point is this compromises sporting integrity and fairness the sport is in the strongest it has ever been and his quote can you imagine a Premier League game where you've got two teams competing owned by the same person no you couldn't can't have that so he's basically trying to get he has previously been suggesting that FIA should force Red Bull to sell one of those teams now that's of the existing landscape let alone letting Mercedes purchased a very significant stake in another team. And he previously has highlighted examples of why it's unfair. Daniel Ricciardo, which we've mentioned before in 2024, took the fastest lap, basically changed his tyres for the last lap of the race and took it off Lando Norris, which got an extra point at the time.

1:04:31That had a say in the title in the championship race. But also this is the other interesting one, which people must consider. And it's the movement of the executive between teams. so Red Bull when Christian Horner left just took Lauren Meckes from Racing Bulls a very respected and established engineer slash team principal McLaren have just signed Verstappen's race engineer called Jean-Pierre Lambias from Red Bull but he can't join until 2028 because he has to see how his contract at McLaren the free-flowing movement of executives on one side versus we're getting a top-level engineer from another and we have to pay compensation and wait for his contract to end.

1:05:13So there's a driver perspective and what happens on the track. There's a development perspective, what happens behind the scenes. Toto, very specifically, to be clear, said this is not a feeder team play. His quote is no, and I'm telling you in big capital letters, no, we do not want to create a feeder team. But surely it will be. Look, there's a very good reason why in football, Not only are you not allowed to own two clubs in the same domestic ecosystem, even at UEFA level, as became clear with the whole controversy over Crystal Palace last summer, where the fact that John Texter had owned 40 % of Palace, but also owned Olympique Lyon, that was enough basically to push Palace out of the Europa League.

1:06:00Okay? So even though they were in totally different countries, even though the likelihood of them actually ending up facing each other was very very small they were palace were pushed down and out of the Europa League because UEFA couldn't accept it it's partially to do with reality so let's just imagine that there was a situation where you're coming to the last race of the season and it was a pitch battle as you would want it to be between Mercedes and McLaren and there was a situation that happened out on the track where Toto Wolff being desperate for Mercedes to win that was in a position to influence how his other team acted during that race.

1:06:37No one can tell me there wouldn't be more than a temptation, a major, serious, obvious incentive to try and control things in that way, as you mentioned with Ricciardo in the Red Bull group. But then there's also perception as well. And perception is really important because ultimately it's all about the punters. It's all about that, the audience that drives the commercials and drives the TV audience. So even if Toto could put his hands on his heart and say, no, I would never do that, the questions would be out there every race. Surely he must be directing what's going on. He controls the sporting operation there.

1:07:12He controls the sporting operation here. And that is a major perception problem. You just can't get around it. It just is. So I think, you know, you and I agreed on this. 20 years ago, it was a question needs must. and that's when you had Red Bull and Toro Rosso as it was then called and Bernie who was running the sport at the time needed to fill out the grid okay if you guys want to have two teams have two teams because I need to make sure we've got enough cars racing otherwise we've got a serious problem they don't need that anymore if there is a spare place on the grid for an expansion franchise let's say imagine what that would go for it would go for absolutely vast amounts of money so there's no need to bend to somebody's desire to start monopolizing different parts of the grid.

1:07:58And I agree with Zac Brown. I think there should be a three-year period when Red Bull are told, right, over the next three years, you need to divest that team, right? It's a seller's market. Why wouldn't you? I mean, you're going to make a lot of money out of it. You're going to make a lot of money out of it. But from the sporting perspective, the more competitive teams you have on the grid, the better. Completely agree. Let's move on. Football, finally, quickly. Back to football. Because we had the most incredible scenario at the weekend happened. Now, this is very domestic. I think we have to say, again, to our foreign audiences.

1:08:27We've been discussing F1. We've been discussing World Athletics. Those are genuine global things. This is quite domestic. Strap in because it's amazing. It is. It's domestic, but it's an incredible story. Sporting contest. Yeah. So I'm going to lay it up and then you're going to smash it home for all the beliefs that you have on this, which are genuinely different to anything I've heard. So I cannot wait. I cannot wait for you to make me look silly. Right. So this season... I could never do that, Charles. Oh, no. You can do it yourself. Very good. Very good. So the National League, the top football league outside of the EFL, which is Championship League One, League Two, has just had the most incredible season.

1:09:09York City and Rochdale have both had the most incredible run, getting over 100 points apiece. And this was neck and neck throughout the whole season. It was teed up perfectly because what was the final game of the season? The final game was Rochdale versus York at Rochdale. and my God, it didn't disappoint. So going into the game, York were on 107 points, Rochdale were on 105. Rochdale win and they're up. York draw or win and they're up. Rochdale scored a 95th minute goal and the stadium goes mental. Pitch invasion. Pitch invasion. The whole thing, even though there's still time in the game left, pitch invasion.

1:09:46I think they're up, of course they do. Now, there's only one team that goes up automatically, which is what's going to be grounded in this conversation. One team goes up automatically. And then there's a playoff underneath. So, Rochdale scored 105th. Pitch invasion. Finally, they get the fans off, etc. Everyone calms down a bit. Game restarts. 103rd minute. So, 13 minutes into stoppage time. York City score. And York City go up. And actually, the most amazing thing about this, go and watch the game, guys. Literally go and take a look. Because I'm... The linesman, the referee, to give this goal is brilliant.

1:10:23because it's a line, it doesn't hit the net. It's cleared just behind the line. No goal line technology. No goal line technology. It would be so easy for that to have been missed. And it wasn't in the most high-pressure environment. Anyway, York City score to equalize 1-1. York City end on 108 points. Rochdale end on 106. Now, I'm looking at that going, that is incredible. I'm also looking at it going, that is ridiculous. How can a team get 106 points and not get promoted? What a joke. National League sorted out two automatic places. Well, how can the National League sorted out? Sorry. What are you actually saying?

1:11:05National League, EFL, like whoever, football governance, just sort that out two teams up automatically. That can't happen. You're asking for my opinion? Yeah. You're actually looking like you've got a slightly thick look on your face as if you're actually waiting to be slapped. I want you to slap. Okay, right. So Charlie is jumping on board a bandwagon, which has been created by the National League, and it's called 3Up. Yeah. Okay, so... Jeff Stelling's bandwagon. So, well, it's the National League as a whole, but Jeff Stelling's a very prominent pusher of this because his club, Hartlepool, is a National League club.

1:11:38Okay, so the National League, just to reiterate what Charlie says, is the fifth tier of English football. So it sits just outside the top four divisions and is the top tier of what we call the non-league game, right? The non-league pyramid. And the non-league pyramid starts at very, very low levels, almost at kind of village football level. And you can get promoted all the way up to the National League. And if you come either in first place in the National League or win the next six-team playoff, as Charlie said, those two teams then progress to the bottom division of the Football League and two teams from the Football League get relegated back into the National League.

1:12:18And they become what is called a non-league club. So the National League is the top of non-league. And then you get the Football League, which is the three-division pyramid running up of the Premier League. Okay. So the National League, earlier this year, under the leadership of their chief executive, Phil Alexander, who is a long-standing friend of mine, the former chief executive of Crystal Palace, and a great man who I have nothing but respect for. But genuinely, genuinely. And I totally respect Phil's campaign on behalf of his clubs to get three promotion places to go up to the Football League and therefore three relegation places from the Football League to the National League.

1:12:58Sorry, can I just be clear? When you say three places, you mean so one more automatic place plus the playoff place? Exactly that. So two automatic positions plus the playoff places. Now let me explain why I think this isn't a very good idea. And to understand this, we have to go back into history. So the National League was formed in 1979. Back in those days, it was called the Conference. And those of my generation grew up knowing it was sponsored by Vauxhall, so it was known as the Vauxhall Conference. And the two leagues it was formed from were the Northern League and the Southern League. And that part of the game was regionalised, effectively, as you can imagine, the Northern League and the Southern League.

1:13:40and the Northern League and the Southern League then have various divisions that ran below them which were also regionalised that fed into them. And at this point there was no automatic promotion of any kind between the non-league and the league. Now I've got sort of personal knowledge of this, albeit before I was born, but I grew up with the history of it, which is that the dominant Southern League team, the dominant non-league team in fact of the 1950s, was a team called Headington United. Heddington United were captained by a man who went on to become very famous called Ron Atkinson. And their leading goal scorer was his brother, Graham Atkinson.

1:14:16And Heddington United was in the suburbs of Oxford. But it's where Oxford Brookes University is right now. And they were basically winning the Southern League every year during the 1950s. But there was no way of getting promoted to the Football League unless you got elected. and fundamentally you got elected when the football league clubs decided that one of their member clubs was no longer fit to be in the football league and that was normally a function of bankruptcy when the football league clubs would go bankrupt they would get chucked out of the football league they lose their shareholding in the football league and then the football league clubs would elect a non-league club to take their place and that election would not necessarily just be who's currently the top performing non-league team it would be who is the current top performing non-league team who would actually make a good football league club one of our partners one of our business partners one of our co-shareholders so what happened was um that headington united applied for election when acrington stanley went bust in 1961 and uh their directors had to go on a tour of the whole of the country trying to persuade the directors of football league clubs to elect them.

1:15:28And eventually, by a narrow margin, they did elect Heddington United, but they made a condition. They said, you have to change your name to Oxford United. You can't be a shareholder and member of the Football League whilst fundamentally being a village team. You've got to make yourself into a proper city team. You are now going to be a member of the Football League. That comes with responsibilities. That comes with, you know, you have to be fully professional, previously semi-professional. You have to be named after your city, not after your suburb and so on and so forth. Now, hold that thought that there were conditions attached.

1:16:02You had to be a certain type of club. You had to be ready for it. You had to be a responsible future shareholder of the EFL. Similar to what Prem Rugby's just done now. Exactly that. Right. Now, automatic promotion first got introduced in 1987. That was when the first team got automatically promoted from what was then the conference, now the National League, into the Football League. And it was Scarborough who got promoted and Lincoln were the team who finished bottom of the whole Football League who got relegated. Funny enough, just being promoted to the championship. Okay? So the idea was in those days, if you finish bottom of the pile, 90 second out of 90 second, you've kind of stunk the place out.

1:16:44You kind of need to go and put a cold towel around your head, sort yourself out, because we don't really want to have teams stinking the place out in the Football League. So let's make it automatic. Let's not make it about an election. Let's make sure that our worst member, our worst shareholder, the one who stinks the whole place out, knows we're actually going automatically. We can't hang on just because we happen not to have gone bankrupt. And it also then gave a pathway, as it were, to non-league clubs to say, it's now automatic. We don't have to seek election. If we are the top non-league club, we will get the privilege and the right to become a shareholder in the football league, which is what it is.

1:17:21It's not just being promoted into a competition. You become a shareholder in the Football League when you get promoted. Go to 2003, and they say, this is the Football League, saying, right, we think that the National League is stronger now, it's better now, and we want to see a bit. We're going to offer a second place. Okay? Now, the National League decided that they wanted that second place to be determined through a playoff. Now, this is a commercial move on behalf of the National League. Okay? Because what it means is it means that more teams that are in the National League think that they've got a chance.

1:17:56Makes sense. Right? As it does in other divisions. Okay? Now, if we're talking strictly about what your challenge is, which is, well, it's absolutely disgraceful that a team that gets 106 points shouldn't get promoted. The only reason why Rochdale were not promoted this season was because of the National League, not the Football League. Because the Football League says you've got two spaces. and if the National League decided that actually first and second should go up, then they would go up. It's the National League that decided first of all to have a four-team playoff and then, even more controversially, to extend it to a six-team playoff.

1:18:33So actually the jeopardy we're looking at here, which is that Rochdale, who've got 106 points, might not get promoted and a team who only got 80, 85 points might get promoted is entirely because the National League have decided that that's how they want to operate things. So what they're now saying is, nice bit of cake that. I really enjoy that cake and I'm going to eat it. But I want to take some cake as well. Three to four up in some going through the leagues above. That's correct. There's four up going from League Two to League One. That's consistent across those leagues. So if you're saying, okay, because it's two down from League Two, two up from National League, really are we saying here that there would be a concern that the teams that could come up if it was three up, three down, wouldn't be able to sustain a football league set of requirements?

1:19:23Fundamentally, yes, that is my argument. But I'm going to explain what I mean, which is that the jump from League 2 to League 1 within one sporting competition, which is the football league, is a very small jump, right? So the requirements, the structural requirements for a League 2 club are the same as the structural requirements for a League 1 club. You don't need to do anything different. You need the same type of pitch. You need to have the same type of safety standards around your stadium. You need to have a community trust. That's a club charity. You're very likely to have a proper women's team.

1:19:56You're very likely within the academy system to have a proper academy that brings all the young people from your area through. These are fundamentally requirements, or if not requirements, very close to being requirements of league clubs. The National League, not so. The National League doesn't have any of these requirements. There are clubs in the National League. There are competitive clubs in the National League. There are clubs in the top half of the National League that are semi-pro, whose players are not full-time. This is a totally different environment. Club charities, well, if you want, go for it.

1:20:27If you don't want, don't worry about it. And a football league club has to have a foundation. Yeah, exactly. Academy, if you want one, great. If you don't want one, not a problem, right? So this is really fundamentally different. So what the challenge is here is, when a National League club gets promoted to the Football League, it's going to have to quite fundamentally change itself in a number of different ways okay so if you look at bromley for instance who recently got promoted from league two to league one going back 10 years bromley is a semi-pro club operating with an all-weather pitch in a community club kind of way they then start to do better on a consistent basis and they start to gear themselves up for we might get promoted to the football league what does that mean that means we'd have to dig our pitch up, get a grass pitch, because you don't have all weather pitches in the football league.

1:21:15What does that mean? What that means is we can't rent out that pitch during the week. And that's a massive part of our revenues. Okay. Okay. So we're going to have to start thinking about our revenue base. If we don't have the revenues from the plastic pitch, then we've got potential revenue problems. Okay. Are we eventually going to have an academy? Okay. We have to start having a look at that. Are we going to need to institute a Bromley Charitable Trust? Okay. We have to start looking at that. So that by the time that they actually get into the football league, they are ready to be a football league club.

1:21:44Because the last thing you want is what I would call yo-yo clubs in this particular area. A club that gets on a nice little run in the National League, gets promoted to League Two, is in no sense ready to be in League Two, doesn't have an academy, has a plastic pitch, doesn't have the right safety requirements around the ground and so on and so forth, and then struggles in League Two and comes straight back down but then has dug up its plastic pitch no longer has the revenues that concern and so on and so forth so my point is is i think that two up is adequate and correct i think it is generous of the football league to allow this overall historically it wasn't the case historically it was a closed shop it's now no longer a closed shop and they've in fact even doubled the entry during my lifetime they've doubled the number of clubs that can come in but i don't see why if the National League is genuinely concerned from a sporting perspective about the problem that you posed which I do have sympathy with which is a team could have an outstanding season and only just miss out fine get rid of your playoff get rid of your playoffs and just put two up now of course what Phil Alexander would say to me is but those playoffs are crucial because they give hope to the mid table and they're also good from a TV perspective I go okay Phil that's great right totally get it but you're not talking about sporting integrity there are you you're asking the EFL to pay for you to have the luxury of having a playoff system when you don't need to have one that and the yo-yo club points you've you've got me there okay I get that and I completely agree and it's easy to look at this just from the how can that happen but then also you had a team you know the poor old Liverpool you know give us a trophy for finishing second you had a team that got like 97 98 points and didn't win the Premier League and someone's just like yeah that can happen so look i like this sorry can i say i really like this with you putting that across because you know the point that is continually drilled into everyone is this is wrong and we need to have more places we need to have that extra place so to hear that side of it is great because that's grounded in rationale and that's grounded in the broader conversations we have in football which is sustainable product improvement you know developing the right structures in the system that actually supports all of the participants in it.

1:23:56That sounds like a very sensible explanation of why this is actually in place. It's a big jump Charlie. There are fundamental differences and changes that come from moving from a semi-professional league into a professional league and those need to be recognised and if at the end of it it's decided structurally do you know what actually there are three spaces here because the depth in the National League is now so deep of the clubs who could automatically translate there so we're not talking about four or five clubs we're talking about eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve clubs who are league ready properly league ready with their foundations with their academies with all this type of stuff okay have a proper look at it okay but do make sure that's the case because what I'm seeing at the moment is in the upper mid table of the National League you've got semi-pro teams Wheelstone Tamworth you've got semi-pro teams and great for them by the way but that's an awful long way away from league football Charlie excellent as ever thank you that was fascinating thanks Chaz thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the breakdown as always we'd love to hear your thoughts on what was discussed on the show today plenty in there to get stuck into and please keep your votes coming in for the greatest sporting business failures to grace this industry we'll be taking a look at what you've put forward next week in the light of even more news coming out of live golf thank you again and we'll see you next week much to my relief football's financial regulations are tightening.

1:25:21Profitability and sustainability rules, spending caps, closer scrutiny of wage structures. Clubs are under more and more pressure than ever to know exactly where their money is going. But performance-linked costs are, by definition, uncertain. Is your squad on promotion bonuses that could trigger a seven-figure payout if the season goes well? Are your coaching staff on incentives tied to lead position? Do you have a manager a buyout clause sitting exposed on your balance sheet with no cover in place. These aren't hypothetical risks, they're sitting in contracts at our clubs across every division right now.

1:26:00Obelisk Sports works with clubs to map that exposure and ensure it, so that you can budget with genuine certainty while still offering the incentives that drive performance. Obelisk Sports, helping sports organization build insured performance structures that stabilize budgets, reduce risk and unlock greater upside. Visit obelisksports.com. Obelisk Sports Limited acts as a consultant to Gamepoint Capital, which is authorised and regulated for insurance businesses in its respective jurisdictions.