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ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR THE BRIEFING The Alpari World Match Racing Tour (right) comprised seven events in 2014, with executive director James Pleasance (below) looking to expand that number for 2015.
Officially sanctioned by ISAF, the Alpari World Match Racing Tour is the annual world championship of match racing. The tour operates a franchise system with a series of independently-organised regattas collected under the AWMRT umbrella. With over 200 commercial partners across the Tour, such a business model offers challenges as well as opportunities for the tour, its teams and its events. James Pleasance, executive director of the tour, is plotting expansion for 2015, taking his cue from the wider world of sport.
Since 2000, the World Match Racing Tour has drawn together the top match racing events in the world to create one of sailing’s most sought after world championship titles. Now known as the Alpari World Match Racing Tour (AWMRT), in deference to the global forex broker which became title sponsor in February 2012, the circuit is a well-established and growing part of the complex world of professional sailing, not least because it is officially sanctioned by sailing’s world governing body, ISAF. There are eight tour cards awarded each year to compete on the Tour, with skippers selected largely from their ISAF match racing world ranking. Each of
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the events on the annual schedule – there were seven in 2014 – has 12 team slots, with the remaining four positions assigned by the local event promoter, a system which allows for local qualifier and wildcard entries to race and reflects the most important element of the AWMRT business model. “We run the Tour principally as a franchise model,” explains James Pleasance who, since 2012, has been executive director of the tour. “Each of the Tour events are managed independently and we bring them all together under a world championship brand, whereby points are awarded from each event to the annual World Championship ranking, the highest scoring team being crowned the ISAF World Match Racing Champion at the end of the season.” The 2014 season ran from June to the end of November, beginning at Langenargen in Germany and due to conclude with November’s Monsoon Cup in Malaysia, supported by the Malaysian Ministry of Youth and Sports. In between, the tour has stopped at the Stena Match Race in the Swedish town of Marstrand, an event considered one of the jewels in the crown, Chicago and Bermuda. There were two new events, the Sopot Match Cup in Poland and the Dutch Match Cup in Lelystad, Holland. “We’re still a growing tour but in the last year or so our number of events has varied and that’s mainly
because of our business model,” Pleasance explains. “However, we are growing the Tour with new events and that is building our audience at the same time. Sopot was tremendously successful as a new event this year and introduced a whole new audience to the tour.” “There are new markets we would still add to the Tour,” Pleasance continues, “for example, the west coast of the USA, South America and the Middle East – and a return to Australian or New Zealand. That’s something we’re working on. In the past we’ve talked about 15 or 20 events, which I think we need to be
EVENTS / 2 realistic about. We’re at seven now and our goal is to be around the ten event mark, which would also be manageable around the international sailing calendar.” Not having 100 per cent control of events – the popular Korea regatta was not part of the 2014 season for governmental and funding reasons – poses as many opportunities as challenges, according to Pleasance. “The Tour represnets the world championship and it is important to maintain a consistency across all the tour events, both shoreside and on the water, and also from a visual standpoint. As much as we support
the events in every where we can, we also rely on them to maintain their own standards including raising their own sponsorship funds, particularly to fund the prize money awarded to teams at each event.” The AWMRT is currently the only global sailing series which offers prize money to teams, something which Pleasance acknowledges as “unique” in professional sailing, and to the tour. In 2014, the AWMRT total prize purse across events was US$1.5 million, including a US$500,000 Tour bonus split between the top eight tour card skippers - the world champion received US$100,000.
“Teams compete on the Tour to win the world championship, but they are also professional sailors and need to earn a living. They are also investing in themselves - the better they do, the more they earn. So there is risk but also reward, and that is why we put so much emphasis on raising the prize money across the Tour.” The knock-on effect of the prize money model to teams is that they can be limited in the amount of team branding they have at events, such as having fully branded team boats and sails. But this also has its advantages, as Pleasance explains: “The difference on the Tour is that the boats are provided
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by the events and sponsored by event sponsors in order for the event to raise the funding to pay the prize money. The advantage to teams is they don’t have to fund the supply, maintenance or transport of the boats thereby reducing the cost of competing on the Tour considerably.” The model works, at least based on the fleet assembled for the 2014 AWMRT. The eight tour card holders include the likes of the Ian Williamsskippered GAC Pindar team, Bjorn Hansen’s Hansen Sailing Team, Francesco Bruni of Luna Rossa and Keith Swinton’s Team Alpari FX, the outfit sponsored by the series title sponsor. As the umbrella brand, Pleasance and the AWMRT team provide all events and teams with marketing materials and post-event sponsorship evaluation measurements,
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produced by Repucom. “It’s important that we support them in terms of helping to find sponsors,” Pleasance says, “because the more teams that are sponsored, the more sponsors come to events through hospitality, the more sponsors that activate partnerships through PR, media and advertising channels – the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. You’ve got the tour with its marketing arm and our own media channels; you’ve then got seven to ten events, all with their own media channels and different marketing budgets; you’ve then got all of the teams and even within the teams, the individuals who all have their own Facebook and Twitter pages.” Combined, Pleasance argues, a greater audience can be attracted and engaged, a key component of growing the property.
AWMRT licenses the rights to run the world championship of match racing from ISAF, a long-term arrangement. Unlike most ISAFsanctioned championships, however, the champion is crowned on the tour, across a full season of events, rather than during a single regatta. “It certainly does make it one of the toughest world championships to win,” says Pleasance. Through the ISAF relationship, AMWRT also has a mandate to help grow the sport of sailing and, in particular, the match racing part of it. As Pleasance explains, the organisation believes it may have hit upon a way to do that by adopting a model similar to that employed by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) in tennis. “One of our key objectives is to also help grow the sport of sailing at
a participant level, something that is often missed by major commercial sailing events. We’ve drawn a number of parallels with the way the ATP run their own tour,” Pleasance says. “They have Grand Slam events at the top, then ATP 1000, 500 and 250 tournaments – various levels, but all part of the ATP Tour itself. We’ve looked at trying to adopt a similar model in match racing because match racing is a much greater sport than just the seven events on the AWMRT. “There are a host of events around the world, which are currently graded by ISAF. We’ve identified around 20 of the lower graded match racing events to include them in the Alpari World Match Racing Tour from 2015, and which would give those events points into the annual tour championship. This will expand the Tour’s footprint
in new markets, giving opportunity for other events to work their way up to aspire to be world championship events but also opens the door for other sailors to compete and earn points on the AWMRT.” Pleasance believes such a system will create a “much more accessible pathway” for young match racers. “Although the America’s Cup has switched from monohulls to multihulls, it remains, certainly for the foreseeable future, a match racing event,” he says. “For an aspiring match racer competing at the grassroots level of match racing, we are now creating a better pathway for them to promote themselves from a local level to a national, international and world championship stage. And even to the America’s Cup.” Until the 32nd America’s Cup in Valencia, staged in 2007, the AWMRT was routinely described as the pathway to sailing’s most prestigious event, a place to gain match racing experience or, for the established Cup sailors, an opportunity to keep their hand in during the long periods between Cups. While the Cup remains a match race, though, the switch to multihulls is likely to have implications for the AWMRT, which remains, for the moment at least, a monohull championship. “The transition of the America’s Cup to foiling multihulls has certainly caused a stir in professional sailing in the
last 12 months. Teams are having to adapt to a whole new type of sailing, essentially learning to match race in fast multihulls. As a championship match racing tour, we are looking at ways to support this transition by creating some - we won’t change the whole tour multihull tour events in the future.” That will necessitate the construction of a new fleet of boats, a costly exercise but one for which AWMRT “has a business model which will apply”. Talks are ongoing on that front. “As a pathway for match racing sailors to become the next America’s Cup champion, it goes without saying the tour should really look at incorporating some kind of multihull events,” Pleasance adds. “We’re talking to try and make that a reality for 2015.” Amongst his priorities for the next 12 months, Pleasance is keen to “maintain the consistency and quality of events for the teams and continue to grow the tour’s fanbase and media exposure to attract new events and partners. A partnership with IMG, which saw the sports marketing giant become a minor shareholder in the business, has already proved fruitful in that regard by growing the television footprint of the tour to one of the biggest in the sport. “Above all, we want to maintain the Alpari World Match Racing Tour as one of most sought-after world championships to compete in.”
Alpari World Match Racing Tour events (left) are independently-run and offer prizemoney to the world’s top match-racers, who rely largely on media coverage (below) to garner exposure for sponsors.
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ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR
ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR THE ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR COMPRISED SEVEN EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD IN 2014, AS THE BEST MATCH RACERS ON THE PLANET DID BATTLE FROM JUNE TO NOVEMBER IN THE ISAF-SANCTIONED WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. AWMRT executive director James Pleasance with Moet & Chandon guests in Sopot
Local hero Bjorn Hansen heads for victory in front of 100,000 spectators during the finals of Stena Match Cup Sweden
Sopot Match Cup chief Artur Mantisa with James Pleasance
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GAC Pindar’s Ian Williams celebrates victory in Germany
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STYLE
Mixing sport with leisure: the Hennessy Yachting Banquet held at the Sheraton Hotel during the Sopot Match Race in Poland
The King Edward VII Gold Cup alongside the World Match Racing Tour Championship trophy
Taylor Canfield of the USA wins the 2013 Chicago Match Cup
It’s this close: Waka Racing’s Phil Robertson and GAC Pindar’s Ian Williams do battle
Lelystad deputy mayor Jop Fackeldey
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