The Black Foils have a new owner. New Zealand’s SailGP sailing team has been bought by the American private equity firm MSP Sports Capital, a deal that hands the country’s most successful foiling outfit a deep-pocketed backer and completes a sweeping change in how the global league is run.
MSP has taken a majority stake in the team, with Olympic gold medallists Peter Burling and Blair Tuke staying on as co-chief executives. The pair will keep running the operation day to day, both on the water and off it, and the announcement made clear that the sailors who built the team are not being pushed aside. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The purchase marks MSP’s first move into SailGP and, just as importantly, it finishes a long-planned shift for the league as a whole. SailGP was set up by Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts as a centrally owned competition, with the organisation itself holding the teams while it found long-term investors. With the Black Foils now in private hands, all 13 franchises across the circuit are owned independently. The league has spent the past few seasons selling teams to a mix of celebrities, sports investors and entrepreneurs, and New Zealand was one of the last pieces of that puzzle.
For Burling and Tuke, the deal is the reward for years of work turning a national sailing brand into something that can stand on its own commercially. “Today’s an incredibly important milestone for the Black Foils – and the start of an exciting new chapter for us in SailGP as we represent New Zealand on the world stage,” Burling said. Tuke said the two of them had set out from the very beginning to “make the Black Foils a world-class team and sporting brand in all areas” and welcomed the chance to partner with MSP, a firm with a track record across football, motorsport and other leagues around the world.
MSP Sports Capital has built a reputation for buying into fast-growing sports properties. Its chairman, Jahm Najafi, described SailGP as “one of the fastest-growing sports leagues in the world”, while chief executive Jeff Moorad set out a simple set of goals for the team. The aim, he said, was to “win championships, represent New Zealand at the highest level, and build on the country’s unmatched sailing culture”. Those are not small promises for a team that has spent the back half of this season at the bottom of the standings.
That low position has nothing to do with a lack of talent and everything to do with one violent moment in February. During the Auckland event on home waters, the Black Foils were involved in a high-speed collision with Team France that destroyed their F50 catamaran and left crew member Louis Sinclair with serious leg fractures. Both teams were forced out of the rest of that regatta, and the New Zealanders then missed four straight rounds while a replacement boat was built. The crash robbed them of momentum at exactly the point in the season when they needed it most.
The team has since returned to the water with a new boat named Manawatītī, a name that refers to the heart of the tītī, or sooty shearwater, a seabird known for covering enormous distances across the Pacific. The boat was built at SailGP’s technology base in Southampton and represents months of work by the league’s engineering and construction crews. Burling called it “special to be back sailing as the Black Foils and to take Manawatītī out for the first time”, while Tuke described the launch as “the culmination of a huge amount of work by a massive group of people”.
With Sinclair still recovering, Stewart Dodson has stepped in and made his debut for the team as it prepared for racing in Canada. The return to competition came at the Canada Sail Grand Prix in Halifax, the team’s first event back on the circuit since the Auckland disaster. Despite sitting last in the table after missing so much of the season, the Black Foils remain mathematically alive in the race for the season grand final, which carries a large cash prize for the winner.
The timing of the sale is striking. A team that was wiped out in front of its home crowd a few months ago now has a new boat, a returning crew and a major American investor, all within the same season. For Burling and Tuke, who already share Olympic, America’s Cup and round-the-world racing pedigree, the challenge now is less about proving they can sail fast and more about proving they can build a lasting business around the sport.
SailGP itself continues to grow, with grand prix events spread across the globe and the F50 catamarans capable of speeds that put the boats among the fastest in any form of sailing. New Zealand has long punched above its weight on the water, from the America’s Cup to Olympic dinghy racing, and the Black Foils are the latest expression of that. Whether private ownership can turn a season wrecked by one crash into a championship run remains to be seen, but the team now has the resources to find out.
What do you make of the Black Foils being sold to an overseas investment firm? Is private ownership good for New Zealand sailing, or does it risk loosening the local grip on the team? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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