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O P I N I O N
The idea of the EBI Extreme Polo League
(XPL) came as a visceral reaction to my
exposure to F1. This is circa 2012, when
I was working for a private equity group
who purchased an F1 team a few years before
I joined. Hired to work for them in
an investment banking capacity on their
large industrial projects, I had no plans
to do anything in F1 but as the story goes,
the team hit some challenging times as
a result of its main sponsor seeking
bankruptcy protection and the uneven
competitive field that F1 operates in.
As one of the independent teams in
F1, one is slapped around on a daily basis
with money from the leading teams who
have unlimited budgets in order to compete
in the same championship as you. We
ended up living and dying with each team
performance – points meant happy sponsors,
better prospects and more money from F1,
and no points meant less of everything
and, worse, fewer prospects for the next
year, so you can actually see the current
and the projected budget holes widening
in front of you.
In hindsight, the obsession with how
this portfolio asset performed, ended up
being counter-productive for the entire
organisation: if the team does well, we will
be OK, if it doesn’t, we are doomed! As the
team’s funding needs increased, I took
a closer and closer look at the economic
framework of the verticals (the teams)
within the tentacular horizontal, which
defines Formula One Management, and
worked to help on various ad-hoc initiatives,
usually involving fire drills and last-minute
cash flow juggling.
But what turned out to be the most
interesting aspect of my F1 experience was
the legal and economic set up of the business.
F1 triggered my curiosity to study as many
leagues (successful and unsuccessful) as
I could get my hands on. The first thing
you learn is that the business is not intuitive
and that it does take some processing power
to fully grasp how professional sports leagues
operate and make money. People talk about
them with understanding, but they are
a beast on their own and not what you
would expect. To synchronise all the
parts that need to be in place is not an
easy task, particularly when starting from
zero with a sport like polo that does not
have, shall we say, ‘attractive’ metrics to
entice broadcasters to jump in and
invest in production.
I also realised that all successful leagues,
when digging into their history, had their
share of growing pains and up and down
cycles; we just see the success stories today
and are in awe of their size and numbers, but
we forget that they all started somewhere.
In any event, it was not until many years
later, when I found myself with some free
time on my hands, that I started putting pen
to paper on what the XPL could eventually
look like. A year earlier, in July 2017, I had
been introduced to the president of the
AAP, Eduardo Novillo Astrada, through
a mutual friend at an event at Les Lions
and I pitched him my yet-undocumented
and very green idea.
I told him I wanted to put together
an all-professional league that is built
bottom-up and is institutional quality.
I also told him that I wanted to get the
endorsement of the AAP before initiating
any conversations with teams and players.
We saw eye to eye and then nothing
happened. We met again the following year
in September and I presented a format for
the XPL and a structure where the teams
and players become true stakeholders
in the league and therefore share in the
upside, with a centralised decision-making
organisation controlling and ensuring
that all decisions add value to the league
as a whole and not just benefit any one
team or individual.
Things moved quickly from there, with
an official presentation to the AAP in
ILLUSTRATION: ORIANA FENWICK
Juan Zavalia explains how his experience working with F1 teams led him
to establish an all-professional polo league
In the extreme
