Maffei's Two-Year Sale Claim Puts F1's Liberty Model Under the Microscope

Greg Maffei, the former Liberty Media chief executive who led the American company’s takeover of Formula 1, has suggested the championship could be sold within the next two years, according to Crash.net. Maffei stepped down as Liberty’s chief executive at the end of 2024, so he speaks as an informed outsider rather than for the company. His view still deserves attention. Few people understand better how Liberty values the sport, or when a company like Liberty decides its work is done.

Why Maffei’s view carries weight

Liberty is a holding company. Its habit over two decades has been to buy assets, reshape them and then realise their value, whether through a sale, a spin-off or a restructuring. The Atlanta Braves were split off into their own listed company in 2023. Maffei was at the centre of that approach for most of his time in charge. When he says F1 could be sold within two years, he is describing the normal life cycle of a Liberty asset rather than making a wild prediction.

That is also the limit of his claim. He no longer sits in the room where the decision would be made. Liberty has said nothing to confirm an imminent sale, and a remark about what could happen is not a statement of what will. It should be read as an expert’s judgement on timing, and the timing argument is a strong one.

Liberty completed its purchase of F1 from CVC Capital Partners in January 2017, in a deal widely reported to value the business at around $8bn including debt. Nearly a decade later, the business it would be selling looks very different. Since then Liberty has also bought Dorna, the commercial rights holder of MotoGP. That deal could make F1 the centrepiece of a wider motorsport portfolio Liberty wants to keep. It could equally make a bundled sale more attractive to a buyer with deep pockets. Maffei’s comment does not settle which, and nobody else can yet.

What Liberty would actually be selling

The F1 that CVC sold was a business run largely on race-hosting fees and television rights, with a long-serving chief executive in Bernie Ecclestone who saw little value in social media or younger audiences. The F1 a new owner would inherit is built differently.

Under Chase Carey and then Stefano Domenicali, Liberty opened the sport up to digital media and to Netflix’s Drive to Survive. It leaned hard into the United States, which now hosts three Grands Prix. It also changed the commercial model in a less obvious way. In Las Vegas, which hosts Round 21 on 22 November, Formula One Group is the promoter. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars on land and a permanent pit and paddock building, carrying the risk of the event in return for the upside. That is a structural break from the old model, in which F1 collected a fee and left local organisers to worry about ticket sales.

For a buyer, that mix of businesses is the attraction and the risk at once. Media rights and sponsorship are recurring, contracted and relatively predictable. Promoting your own races is exposed to ticket demand, hotel prices and local politics. A private equity buyer might want a leaner, fee-based model. A sovereign wealth fund or a strategic media owner might want more of the Las Vegas approach, because it allows the rights holder to keep the hospitality and ticket revenue as well.

The sporting picture also matters to price, because a buyer pays for audience engagement. This season has produced a dominant champion in waiting. Andrea Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers’ standings on 390 points, 111 clear of Max Verstappen with three rounds to run. That gap is already beyond the reach of anyone behind him. Mercedes lead the constructors’ table on 652 points, 142 ahead of Ferrari. Brazil showed the other side of the product. Lando Norris won from pole, Verstappen climbed from 21st on the grid to second, and Lewis Hamilton recovered from 20th to score. Owners sell the races, not the standings, and races like Brazil are what make the asset valuable.

The calendar a new owner would inherit

This season runs to 23 rounds, close to the ceiling the teams have accepted under the commercial agreements. Liberty’s expansion has not simply meant adding races. It has meant swapping in venues that pay more, or that F1 controls itself, while asking long-standing European events to justify their place with rotation deals and higher fees.

A new owner would face a question Liberty has partly answered and partly deferred: whether growth now comes from more races or from more money per race. The first route is close to exhausted. Team personnel already cover a gruelling schedule, and an 11-team grid adds logistical weight. The second route points towards higher hosting fees, more events promoted directly by F1, and continued interest from regions with state-backed money to spend on major sport.

That is where ownership matters most to fans of the traditional venues. A buyer who has paid a full price for F1 will want to grow revenue quickly to justify it. The easiest lever is the calendar. Circuits with heritage but limited budgets would be most exposed, unless the new owner judged that history itself is part of what makes the brand valuable. Liberty has broadly accepted that argument. Monaco, Silverstone, Monza and Spa all remain, even if some have had to accept new terms. There is no guarantee a successor would see it the same way.

Team values and the Concorde safety net

The most direct effect would fall on the teams. Their values have risen sharply under Liberty for three linked reasons: the budget cap, the revenue-sharing terms of the Concorde Agreement, and the anti-dilution protection that requires new entrants to compensate existing teams. Together, these turned F1 teams from cash-burning sporting projects into something close to franchises in a closed league.

The grid shows the effect. Audi have taken over the former Sauber operation, and Cadillac have entered as an 11th team, both in 2026. Neither has found the going easy on track. Audi have 28 points, Cadillac none, and Sergio Pérez finished 18th in Brazil. Their presence still shows how much manufacturers and investors will pay to get in. When Dorilton bought Williams in 2020, the team was a distressed asset. Today, buying an established team would require a far larger cheque, because the owner would be buying a permanent share of a growing league.

A sale of F1 itself would test that model in two ways. The positive case is that a high sale price confirms the value of the whole championship, which supports the value of every team’s stake in it. The risk is that a new owner, keen to recover its investment, would push harder on the split of revenue when the commercial agreements next come up for renewal.

The timing here is decisive. The current Concorde Agreement runs from 2026 to 2030. Anyone buying F1 within Maffei’s two-year window would inherit those terms and could not rewrite them quickly. The teams’ share of revenue, the governance structure and the anti-dilution arrangements are locked in until the end of the decade. That is reassuring for team owners in the short term. It also means the real fight would come in negotiating the next agreement, with a new rights holder that has paid a premium and needs a return.

Why the 2031 agreement will decide the sale

Maffei’s timeline makes commercial sense. Liberty has rebuilt F1’s audience, signed the teams up to 2030 and turned Las Vegas into a showcase of its new model. Selling before the next round of Concorde talks would let Liberty take the gains without having to fight the next battle over revenue. Equally, a buyer would want to own the sport in time to shape that negotiation.

The sport should judge any sale by what the buyer intends to do with the 2031 agreement, not by the size of the price. If the next owner protects the budget cap, keeps the revenue-sharing framework broadly intact and treats heritage circuits as part of the asset, the teams and the fans have little to fear. If it treats the calendar and the revenue split as the quickest route to a return, the closed league that made team values soar under Liberty will face its first serious test.