F1 hits Vegas but late start not ideal
Bulls-of-the-Week
Women’s hockey continues to trend in the right direction, with the new PWHL regular season facing off this weekend. There is lots to like here, but I still believe they should have branded themselves as the WNHL (a la NBA/WNBA naming protocols).
General Motors made headlines this week with their announcement that Cadillac would be the 11th team in Formula 1 auto racing in 2026, which goes into 2025 with all 10 manufacturers teams valued at $1 billion US or more. Mario Andretti at the helm is a masterstroke for the American automobile company.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Dodgers are only strengthening their odds to win another World Series by signing Blake Snell to a five-year, $182-million US contract and giving themselves what is emerging as one of the all-time deepest pitching rotations to help them defend. The real question is what does this do to the rest of Major League Baseball (as per our Bears below)?
By far the biggest bull market this week — and year-round — is the NFL. They already dominate the six months between Labour Day weekend and Super Bowl in February, and as evidenced this week, they literally own American Thanksgiving. The four-day weekend kickoff to the holiday season is becoming as culturally engrained as Super Bowl itself, with aggregate U.S. television audiences of more than 100 million, putting it right up there with the 110 million-plus viewership of Super Bowl Sunday and the 75 million to 90 million of the conference championship Sunday in January.
Bears-of-the-Week
We get the original intent of Formula 1 to play to the Las Vegas landscape by going late night Saturday with the third U.S. race on the calendar, but a 1 a.m. ET start doesn’t do much to expand F1’s North American footprint.
After more than 15 years of back and forth, stop and go, and on and off negotiations in pursuit of a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball — and what appeared to be a breakthrough agreement with the City of St. Petersburg, Florida, this summer — the ownership group headed by Stuart Sternberg looks like they’re headed back to square one. First came the devastation of Hurricane Milton and the damage done to the roof of Tropicana Field. A commitment to fund the repairs, to the tune of $55.7 million US, evaporated in the aftermath of big wins by Donald Trump and the Republicans in November, as did political support for the $1.3-billion plan signed in July to build a new home for the Rays in St. Petersburg. All that’s for sure, with yet another “deadline” looming on Sunday, is that the Rays will be forced to begin the 2025 season playing their home games at 11,000-seat George Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the New York Yankees.
Yet the biggest issue facing MLB is how they retain fan engagement in markets not named Los Angeles and New York, with no salary cap driving parity and competitive balance the way the spending mechanism does in the other major North American sports leagues. MLBPA is still the strongest players’ union on the continent, if not the world, making evolution on this front highly unlikely, at least anytime soon.