What Is Wrong With MotoGP?
Is MotoGP in decline? If so, is Dorna doing the right things to stop it?
Some sports are ingrained into the mainstream. They have little need to rely on growing a ‘regular’ committed audience, as they get plenty of coverage from mainstream sports (and other) media. They keep a sustained ‘casual’ audience dipping in out out regularly throughout a season. Which keeps the viewership high and the money rolling in. Think golf, tennis, or even F1.
These sports will always have the ‘regular’ fan who’s viewership you can count on just by holding the event. They don’t need fancy marketing or an over-dramatic docuseries to convince them to watch. They are passionate about their sport and they will be watching every week no matter what. But these sports also get the ‘casual’. The fan who will tune in just for a Major, a Grand Slam, or their local Grand Prix. Maybe they saw said over-dramatic docuseries and thought ‘hey I’ll watch that next time its on’, or they might just have a passing interest in the sport so they keep up with the results, watch the highlights on YouTube and get tickets to an event every few years.
Unfortunately not every sport gets this kind of traction with the ‘casual’. They rely far more heavily on the ‘regular’. Motogp has always been in that camp, and so it should be. Motorcycle racing, by nature, doesn’t lend itself to being something to watch casually. It has a grassroots feel even at the highest level, its an edge of your seat, balls to the wall, fly off the handlebars, blink and you’ll miss it kind of sport that attracts the obsessive, ultra passionate, and sometimes downright crazy among us. (So, you know, bike people).
So where does this leave Motogp? With attendance numbers lower than expected at many events last season and general viewership and interest supposedly down, Motogp show runners Dorna, have decided that there isn’t enough spectacle, we need more racing. Sprint races on a Saturday. And they could be right, but I’m not so sure its that simple, in my opinion there are three major factors that are affecting this downward trend.
Factor 1 - The Product
This is obviously what Dorna is seeing as a major factor in the trend, hence their solution to add Saturday sprint races to every Grand Prix this season. And while this solution isn’t personally my cup of tea there is no doubt I’ll probably sit there and enjoy the sprints when they’re on, but I am a traditional sports fan at heart and I like there to be as little gimmick as possible when it comes to the sports I love. But is there anything actually wrong with the product? A lot of the fanbase has been critical of the quality of the racing over the past couple of seasons, with a lot of the blame going to the introduction of aerodynamic winglets and ride height devices making it harder for the riders to pass one another. And while I somewhat agree and would like to see these accessories be removed from the bikes, I’m not sure I agree that the racing is necessarily bad at the moment. I still sit there every Sunday and mostly enjoy the racing that’s on offer. I’ve been watching Motogp for over 20 years and I wouldn’t necessarily say the actual racing is worse. But I do agree there is something missing, and this is where we get to the elephant in the room, and that elephants name is Valentino Rossi.
Yes yes I am a boyhood ‘Tino’ fan and I know that he had a poor last couple of seasons but there is no doubt his exit has had a major affect on attendances. I know I said Motogp is for the regular fan, but Rossi was the guy who brought in the casual. Even when his results started to drop off, there became an urgency to just see him one more time in the flesh before he’s gone for good. And this begs the question, do we actually want a sport that’s even, close fought, and competitive where anyone can win, like Motogp is now? Or do we want a hero, an untouchable, an alien? As much as we say we want competition, deep down we all want to be able to say we got to see the best. Imagine Nadal and Djokovic retire tomorrow, are you more or less likely to watch Wimbledon?
For me there is no understating the significance of Valentino Rossi’s absence in the decline of Motogp’s popularity. The only thing that could have combatted this was if Marc Marquez stayed healthy and was to go on and win a tenth title making him more successful than Rossi. This may have been the only way to get the more casual interest. Come and see the guy they are now calling ‘the best’, make sure you see him at least once before he’s gone for good.
Factor 2 - Promotion
When I say Promotion I don’t mean ads on the tele or billboards in your local town telling there’s a Grand Prix on next week. These sorts of things are usually run by the local broadcaster or event runners. I’m talking about the stuff Motogp and Dorna have control of, namely its social media platforms, mostly YouTube.
Go on YouTube right now and look for any race highlights for Motogp in 2022, pick a race and check when the video was published compared to when the event was held. For most, if not all, of the races in the first half of the season, the highlights weren’t posted until the mid season break in July and for most of the races in the second half of the season, the highlights have only been uploaded since the conclusion of the season. How hard is it to get that posted the same day? Or even the same week? For the Indonesian Grand Prix held on the 20th March, the highlights weren’t posted to the Motogp official channel until the 7th July. Meanwhile BT Sport, the broadcast rights holder in the UK, had the highlights uploaded the on the 20th March.
This is something that the likes of Formula 1 do really well, if I miss a race, quali, or even a practice session, I can watch the highlights within hours on their YouTube channel. Now this might be down to the broadcast rights in Motogp but I doubt it.
Its little things like this that can haver a huge effect. Imagine you love sitting down on a Sunday afternoon watching Motogp, but now your kid has started playing football, or athletics, or badminton on a Sunday afternoon. Or you have a job in hospitality or retail and you work Sundays, you get home and you don’t have time to watch a full race replay, life gets busy, and now you don’t have any highlights to watch, so all you do now is keep up with the results. How likely are yo to attend a local grand prix when you’ve barely seem a lick of racing all year?
Formula 1 also markets itself well with the likes of its Drive To Survive series. Love it or hate it, its popular with both regular and casual fans, and while the over-dramatic production isn’t quite to my tastes, I can definitely see the appeal. With the drivers’ character being put on show along with a big promo push from both Netflix and F1, even leading to some of the more charismatic drivers being interviewed on US talk shows and big celebrity podcasts. Its easy to see why this has been a big win for F1.
Enter MotoGP Unlimited. This may be an unfair comparison considering F1 already being a bigger sport commercially and having a more mainstream appeal to begin with but you can’t help but see the differences. The success of Drive To survive clearly peaked the interest of Dorna, but I’m not sure they got what they were hoping for. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed MotoGP Unlimited more than Drive To Survive as a documentary, it wasn’t over the top it just told some real stories about some real world class athletes, and I think it was really well made. But my god what a botch of a launch. For starters I barely even knew when it was coming out, and when it did come out it had a worse dub than a 70’s kung fu film, with no option for subtitles. As well as that the amazon ‘global’ launch failed to see the series released in several important regions for Motogp on the release date.
This directly leads us into the final and most important factor..
Factor 3 - Accessibility
Let me start this point by telling you how I became such a big fan of Motogp. You see my dad was what you could consider one of the casuals, every now and then he would tune in on a Sunday to see Mick Doohan absolutely brain everyone on his way to another world title, since us Aussies like to get behind our compatriots when they’re doing well on the big stage. My dad, of proud Italian heritage, also liked watching the young Italian riders getting about in the 125 and 250 categories, and I loved sitting and watching them with him. And we liked one green hired, lanky young Italian more than the rest. Valentino Rossi. And through watching a young Valentino entertain on my TV every week I became obsessed with not just Motogp but all motorsport. And the only reason I was able to watch those races was because the races were shown live and free to air on Network 10 in Australia. If they were only on Foxtel, Sky, BT Sport, or motogp.com video pass, I would never have seen those races.
Having easy and free access to the product is the single greatest way of attracting both new and old eyes to it. And access, it seems, is what most of us no longer have. For the 2022 season only 12 countries on earth had access to watch Motogp races live and free to air, in every other country the broadcast rights are held by pay TV companies, such as DAZN or BT Sport. I will add that in some of these countries free to air networks get access to a few races a year that they broadcast free to air, for example here in the UK, ITV was able to show the British Grand Prix and the German Grand Prix free to air. So hey they’ve thrown us a bone.
Because I live in the UK lets break down what it would cost me to watch every Motogp race. BT sport can be had for a regular price of £17/month on a 24 month contract, but that’s not the whole cost since to get BT Sport you have to sign up to BT home broadband which comes in at £30/month on said 24 month contract, (Which only gets you a modest 50mb download) and to top it off if you want to watch in HD that’s an extra £6/month. Your other option is a £30/month app only rolling contract which doesn’t require you to sign up for home broadband, which is what I’d probably do. So to get every Motogp race on my telly this season would cost me £636/year, or through the app £280 for a March to November run. Alternatively I could buy the Motogp season video pass which would set me back €149, so around £131 total or £11/month, which compared to things like Netflix doesn’t seem so bad but with Netflix you get access to a vast array of films from all genres. £11/month just for Motogp is like paying Netflix 11 quid just to watch crime thrillers and nothing else, and quite frankly its a price that it seems less and less of us are willing to pay. The cost of living as we’re all aware is putting a bit of a squeeze on all of us at the moment so the thought of throwing 600 quid at BT so you can watch Motogp on a Sunday seems like a ridiculous and unnecessary expense.
This then carries over to race days and I know this isn’t entirely up to Dorna but ticket prices for a few events are getting out of hand, exhibit A being the poor turnout at Silverstone in 2022. Though it is nice to see it looks like Assen TT tickets will be capped at €99 for a 3 day pass in 2023.
Now I know how these things work, these networks have the broadcast rights because they bid the most money to get them, so why should Dorna accept anything less than top dollar for their product? Well because I believe it to be short term thinking to simply take the highest offer knowing it will mean less eyeballs on race days. And it doesn’t have to be in every market but at least in a few of your potentially big ones to get the wheels turning again. Is it not worth a short term hit to ensure the next generation actually get to be Quartararo or Acosta fans in the same way I got to be a Rossi fan?
So no doubt over the coming months and years Motogp will find many new and exiting ways to change race formats and regulations to try to draw more eyes to it, and I’m sure they’ve done their research and thought carefully before making these changes, and they may turn out to be right. We consume everything differently today to what we did when I was a kid, and maybe this is what the next generation will need to keep them interested.
For me though I think these things go in and out like the tide, and with Valentino Rossi leaving us and Marc Marquez unable to get on track we’re seeing the tide drift out and people are naturally going to be more hesitant to hand over their hard earned for athletes that are less inspiring to them. Maybe soon another hero will come along to inspire us and we’ll once again be happy to pay to see them. But until then no amount of sprint races or Amazon docuseries will ever be able overcome Motogp’s greatest weakness. There is no free and easy access to the product.