Content Dies. Stories Compound.

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball was never about on-base percentage.

That was just the answer the Oakland A’s happened to find. The book is about competitive advantage — finding the thing nobody else is looking at, levering it for everything it’s worth, and knowing that the moment you publish your edge, the window starts closing. Humans, for all the talk of disruption and innovation, are essentially sheep. We seek comfort in familiarity. So the minute the smart contrarian move gets written up in Sports Illustrated, every GM in baseball starts pricing OBP. The arbitrage disappears.

I think about that a lot when investors ask me about Drive to Survive.

Because the numbers are starting to look exactly like you’d expect them to look once the herd has arrived.

Season 7 landed in March 2025 with 10.4 million views in the first half of the year — still Netflix’s most-watched sports doc, but a 10.3% drop in views and a 16% drop in consumed hours versus the equivalent window in 2024. Season 6 had already dropped 23% year-on-year. By July 2025, Parrot Analytics had US demand for the show down 37% in a single month. Liberty’s biggest American customer acquisition engine is gently — but unmistakably — running out of fuel.

It’s the same story across the docu-sports slate. Netflix’s Full Swing opened with 53 million hours watched in 2023, halved to 28.5 million for season 2, and slipped again to 22.2 million for season 3. Break Point — the tennis equivalent — went from 30 million hours to 13 million and was quietly killed after two seasons. Amazon’s All or Nothing, which ran for fourteen separate club and national-team productions across eight years, simply stopped after the 2023 German national team series in Qatar. No press release. No final season. Just gone.

This isn’t a Netflix problem. It’s not a golf problem. It’s a thesis problem.

And it’s where most of the conversations I’m having with Executives, family offices and PE firms go sideways. They look at Drive to Survive’s decline and conclude that long-form sports docu was a fad. Or they look at Wrexham and conclude they need a Hollywood owner. Both readings miss what’s actually going on.

Drive to Survive was never about the series

The series was the artefact. What Liberty actually did — and what almost nobody has copied properly, despite trying — was understand that storytelling wins, content doesn’t.

This is the bit worth slowing down on, because it’s where the investment thesis lives or dies.

Disney is the obvious comparison, and it’s worth saying out loud. Disney isn’t a film company that happens to own theme parks. It’s a storytelling company that uses film and parks as load-bearing pillars of the same narrative architecture. When a child walks into Galaxy’s Edge, they’re not consuming new content — they’re stepping inside a story they already know. The park reinforces the film; the film makes the park meaningful; the merchandise sells because both exist; the next film has built-in demand because the world has already been inhabited. Each format feeds the others. Take any one piece out and the rest weakens.

When I took my family and got to fly the Millennium Falcon with my son…and then build a lightsaber with him whilst we were ordained into the Jedi Order by Yoda… that’s a story moment i tell and retell and will take with me to my grave.

Welcome to Wrexham is the closest anyone in sport has come to that flywheel, and it isn’t an accident.

Watch the first episode again. In the opening minutes, Rob McElhenney talks about being from Philadelphia — a working-class town with a working-class football culture, fans who suffer and stay loyal anyway. The Wrexham/Philly parallel isn’t decoration. It’s the hook. It tells you, before you’ve seen a single match, what kind of story this is going to be. Working-class roots. Striving. Setback. Maybe, eventually, redemption.

Once that frame is set, everything that happens to the club becomes part of the same story. Promotion to the National League is part of the story. Promotion to League Two is part of the story. Failing to get promoted to the EPL is part of the story. That’s the genius of it. The narrative doesn’t depend on linear success. The narrative depends on a question — can these people, from this place, make it? — that every episode advances or complicates. And because the story is set up to absorb failure, the show doesn’t collapse the first time the team loses ten in a row. They’ve now been renewed through Season 5 and committed for three further seasons beyond that, with roughly five million viewers per episode. The club, meanwhile, has stacked three consecutive promotions and arrived in the Championship. But even this series will end, in the meantime it’s a flywheel for everything else they do.

That’s not content. That’s a narrative engine.

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Most attempts at copying it fail because they confuse the two

They commission a glossy production, hire a respectable doc-maker, give them all-areas access, and assume the magic will appear in the edit suite. It doesn’t. What you get is content — eight episodes of beautifully shot interviews and slow-motion celebrations that nobody is hooked into emotionally, because nobody has been told what story they’re watching.

All or Nothing is a case study. Fourteen series across NFL, EPL, rugby, NHL, international football — and almost none of them generated a flywheel. - though individually all were interesting and fun. They were season-by-season productions, each one a self-contained portrait of this team, this year. When the year ended, the story ended. There was nothing to come back to. Compare that to Wrexham, where the cliff-hanger between seasons is the actual football season. Amazon shot beautiful content. Hollywood built a narrative. One franchise quietly disappeared. The other got a multi-season renewal commitment before its current season had even finished airing.

The format almost doesn’t matter. Long-form doc, short-form vertical video, written serialisation, podcast — it’s all just delivery. What matters is whether the audience is being invited into an ongoing story they have a stake in, or being served content they consume and forget.

A non-sport example, because the principle is universal: Brexit. The Leave campaign didn’t win because the economics were on its side — they very obviously weren’t. They won because they had a story. Take back control. Three words, a clear protagonist (the people), a clear antagonist (Brussels), a defined desired end-state. The Remain campaign turned up with facts, charts, and Treasury projections. Storytelling beat data, the way it almost always does when the two collide.

Investors, ironically, are some of the worst offenders at this. We will spend three months underwriting a deal on DCF and comparables, then walk into the marketing committee with a deck that has no story in it whatsoever, and wonder why the sponsorship category hasn’t moved. The fan doesn’t buy the kit because of CRM segmentation. The fan buys the kit because they’ve been written into a story where wearing the kit is what someone like them does. It’s why I built my Fan Flywheel. The segmentation is helpful but its not the answer… the storytelling that builds the community is what drives success.

So what’s the read-across?

Three things, for the people I work with.

First, Drive to Survive was always going to peak and decline. Any single piece of content does. It cannot, on its own, be the investment thesis. If you’re buying into a rights holder, an OTT platform, or a club partly on the strength of “their Netflix show,” you are underwriting a depreciating asset and you should be valuing it accordingly. The window has already started closing. Look at the demand curves. So if you are looking at a sports property ask the rightsholder about the next story they want to tell, not the one they are telling.

Second, the rights holders who genuinely understand this are still rare, and that’s where the edge sits. F1, for all the wobble in the Netflix numbers, has a movie that did real theatrical business in 2025, a calendar that itself functions as a story (twenty-four chapters per year, recurring characters, evolving rivalries), and an in-venue product that — done well — reinforces the on-screen one. Wrexham has a club, a town, a documentary, a women’s team, and now Championship football to populate the next chapter. These are storytelling estates, not content libraries. They are worth quite different multiples.

Third, and this is the bit family offices keep missing: if you want this to be repeatable, you have to underwrite the story architecture before the cameras turn on. Who’s the protagonist? What does success look like, and — much more importantly — what does failure look like, and does the narrative survive it? If the answer is “we’ll figure that out in post,” you’re commissioning content. You’re not building anything that compounds.

Drive to Survive was always going to end. That part was never in question. But if Liberty — or F1, or anyone else in their position — has actually been paying attention to what worked rather than what trended, they’ll find a different way to keep telling the story. Different format, different platform, different protagonist if needed.

The show ends. The story doesn’t have to.