The America's Cup is the oldest trophy in international sport, older than the modern Olympics, and for most of its life it has been run like a private club, not a business. Whoever won it decided when and where the next race would happen, and pocketed whatever commercial value could be squeezed from it. That is now changing, and the person charged with changing it comes not from sailing but from Wall Street. Marzio Perrelli, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has been named the first chief executive of the newly created America's Cup Partnership, Fortune reported.
From Goldman to the grand prix of sailing
Perrelli spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs from the early 1990s, working in New York and London and helping open its Milan office, before later running the Italian arm of the bank HSBC and moving into sports and media, according to Fortune. His hiring is itself a statement: the Cup's backers have decided their problem is less about boats than about capital, contracts and audiences, the stuff of a financier's career.
What changed in the governance
The structural shift behind the appointment is the real story. Rather than leave control in the hands of the current champion, a group of five founding teams has set up the America's Cup Partnership to run the event as an ongoing enterprise, and it was those teams, collectively, that appointed Perrelli. That ends, in principle, the old system in which the "defender" dictated terms and the whole show was rebuilt from scratch each cycle.
The commercial logic
The reason a permanent structure matters is money, and predictability. Because the Cup has historically been held only every three or four years, and in a different place each time, it has been almost impossible to sign the multi-year sponsorships, media-rights deals and host-city arrangements that modern sports rely on. Perrelli has spoken of building something closer to Formula One or golf's Ryder Cup, Fortune reported: a more regular calendar, packages that span several editions, and cities bidding to host, with the aim of turning a three-week race into a months-long spectacle.
Naples 2027 as the proving ground
The first big test is the 38th America's Cup, set for Naples, Italy, in 2027, the first time the event will be held in Italian waters, per the event's organizers. Backers have floated large economic-impact estimates for the host city, in the hundreds of millions of euros in the near term and more over the following decade, though such projections are notoriously optimistic and should be treated as forecasts, not results.
Why it matters
Beyond sailing, Perrelli's job is a case study in a wider trend: tradition-bound sports either modernize their commercial machinery or slide into irrelevance. The very things that made the America's Cup exclusive, control by the incumbent, an irregular calendar, an air of aristocratic amateurism, are exactly what make it hard to sell to broadcasters and sponsors who want reliability. The bet is that a financier can impose that reliability without draining the prestige that makes the trophy worth winning. Whether the Cup can be both a 175-year-old institution and a modern sports franchise is the question Perrelli has been hired to answer.
