SailGP, the international sailing league, has extended its U.S. television agreement with CBS Sports for two more seasons, a deal that adds momentum to Pensacola’s newly secured role as a future training base for the league's teams at the city-owned port.
SailGP and CBS Sports announced last week a two-year extension covering the 2026 and 2027 seasons. The agreement, the league’s first multi-year U.S. television deal in the United States, includes more than 50 hours of coverage each season across CBS platforms, with select weekend broadcasts on CBS and live racing on CBS Sports Network.
SailGP co-founder and CEO Sir Russell Coutts said the extension reflects the league’s growth in the U.S. and its push toward a broader audience.
“This landmark multi-year extension with CBS Sports is a powerful endorsement of SailGP’s continued growth in the U.S.,” Coutts said in a statement. “With record audiences to back it up … this agreement ensures SailGP will continue to reach mainstream sports audiences.”
A national TV deal with local implications
For Pensacola, the timing is significant. The CBS announcement follows the opening earlier this month of a new American Magic High Performance Center at the Port of Pensacola, a facility city leaders say is intended to anchor elite sailing, training and advanced marine manufacturing on the waterfront.
American Magic, the U.S. challenger for the America’s Cup, partnered with the city to establish the center as part of a broader agreement that includes plans for SailGP teams to use Pensacola as a North American training base beginning in September 2026.
SailGP, co-founded in 2018 by Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Coutts, operates a global championship in which national teams race identical 50-foot foiling catamarans at speeds approaching 60 mph. The league was built with television in mind, featuring short-format races held close to shore in major cities.
CBS has carried SailGP coverage in the U.S. since 2019. In announcing the extension, SailGP said a November broadcast of its “Race to Abu Dhabi” drew 3.469 million U.S. viewers, citing Nielsen — a figure the league described as the largest U.S. audience in its history.
City officials argue that national exposure strengthens the rationale for investing in high-performance sailing and related maritime activity at the port — not as an end in itself, but as a signal that Pensacola can compete in specialized maritime industries that value visibility, innovation and technical expertise.
Debate over a working port and a growing downtown
That argument comes amid a long-running local debate over how the downtown waterfront should be used, with critics questioning whether industrial port activity can coexist with residential, commercial and tourism development.
Mayor D.C. Reeves has pushed back against the idea that a working port is incompatible with a thriving downtown.
“It’s not condos or cargo ships,” he said. “We can have both.”
City officials say the real question is how to make that coexistence work on a waterfront with limited room — and how to prioritize uses that generate jobs and activity without tying up the port’s scarce acreage with long-dwell storage.
The Port of Pensacola occupies a relatively small footprint near downtown, which city officials say limits its ability to function like a large cargo hub. Rather than competing with large container ports, the city and regional economic development partners have emphasized a different strategy: concentrating on water transportation, research and development, and advanced manufacturing that can operate at a smaller scale but generate higher economic value.
Under that framework, the city has pursued an inland port concept to shift long-term storage and lower-value logistics activity away from the bayfront, freeing up limited waterfront acreage for specialized maritime uses. City officials have described American Magic’s investment — and the related agreement to host SailGP teams for training — as an early, high-profile example of that approach, helping position Pensacola at the leading edge of performance sailing and marine technology.
Building a specialized maritime economy
Other initiatives are intended to build out that foundation. The University of West Florida and American Magic have launched Watercraft and Vessel Engineering, known as WAVE, a program designed to connect UWF faculty and engineering students with American Magic engineers on vessel design, composites and related research — and to build a workforce pipeline for regional watercraft and maritime manufacturing.
City leaders have also pointed to Project Maeve, a proposed shipbuilding and fabrication project described in a Triumph Gulf Coast pre-application as a $250 million advanced ship-manufacturing complex at the Port of Pensacola that could add roughly 400,000 square feet of industrial space and support about 2,000 jobs over five years.
Supporters of the strategy say facilities like the American Magic center can support workforce training, attract private investment and help establish Pensacola as a hub for marine composites, engineering and performance sailing. Skeptics have questioned whether elite sports facilities can deliver broad economic benefits or justify public investment at a working port.
The CBS television deal does not bring direct funding to Pensacola, but it reinforces the broader bet behind the city’s sailing-focused investments: that SailGP is gaining traction with U.S. audiences, and that national visibility can help a mid-sized Gulf Coast city compete for talent, partners and maritime industry growth.
