The Liberty Media Effect: What Does the Public Think of MotoGP's Turning Point?

Liberty Media, the American giant that first bought Formula 1 and then MotoGP, brought with it three key words: commercialization, business, spectacle. These are the coordinates of a new era in motorsport, and like all new eras it brings clear opportunities along with some legitimate questions. The main one is also the simplest: are we sure these are the right steps to take?

Riders are taking on a profile increasingly close to that of celebrities. Visibility grows, the audience widens, sponsors arrive: all effects that are good for the sport. The risk, however, is that in the process the distance between those who race and those who watch lengthens, and that the protagonists end up looking more like Hollywood stars than the down-to-earth athletes the paddock has always known.

The same goes for the Grands Prix, which look more and more like a big show every year: side events, concerts, influencers. It’s not bad in itself — combining sport and entertainment is a formula that works — but it must be said that ticket prices have reached significant figures, even for just a single day of the race weekend.

Liberty Media was born as a U.S. mass media company and deals in entertainment: it’s their job, and they do it well. However, there’s a detail that perhaps is being taken for granted: motorsport was already highly entertaining even before. Entertainment doesn’t arise only from glitz, fame, the presence of famous figures: that’s a deeply American model, built on the grammar of Hollywood and cinema.

Sporting entertainment, in every single discipline, is first and foremost a matter of adrenaline and passion: watching athletes who fight, who give their all, who battle tooth and nail against their opponents. That is entertainment. And it’s precisely this aspect that, in both MotoGP and Formula 1, seems less central today than in the past.

At the Misano GP I was able to speak with some MotoGP fans and asked them what they thought about Liberty Media’s arrival. It must be said, the enthusiasm wasn’t very high.

Do we really need to make MotoGP — or any other sporting competition — a copy-and-paste of one another? Personally I don’t think so: the world championship has very specific strengths, and the main one is precisely the riders’ character. They’re very normal people, and you can feel it. What’s the need to build a bubble around them?

What draws spectators to a MotoGP GP over an F1 event is the passion, the energy that a MotoGP race manages to generate. It’s a very pure sport, and it begs the question of how necessary it really is to intervene in the race weekend format.

It must be said, of course, that everything has room to improve and evolve. Both MotoGP and F1, before being acquired by Liberty, had weaknesses that it was right to address: it’s normal to resort to change and proceed by trial and error. And some results are hard to dispute — Formula 1 under Liberty has vastly expanded its audience, reaching young viewers and a female component that previously struggled to approach this world. If MotoGP managed to do the same without losing its identity, that would be an achievement.

The issue, if anything, is balance: at the moment it seems that Liberty isn’t doing enough to enhance the pillars on which this sport rests, treating it above all like a show, like a festival that takes the stage every weekend in a different part of the world.

What is the direction they want to take? The feeling is that change has arrived faster than the dialogue with those who live this sport from the inside. Even the riders are being consulted less and less on decisions that concern them. Just think of the Sprint races: there’s talk of introducing dedicated qualifying, as in F1. Quartararo himself, on the sidelines of the Austrian GP, commented:

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