Longtime local sports entrepreneur Jeff Moorad believes the business model used by the Formula One team he owns can be replicated by another sports venture he owns, the X Games.
One of the first tests ended this weekend when X Games featured skateboarders putting on their own shows during the Lexus US Open of Surfing.
“We are creating a year-round calendar and introducing new commercial opportunities to accelerate the overall growth of X Games,” Moorad, executive chairman of X Games, said in a statement.
“We’ve used Formula One as a model for this new X Games League.”
Executive Chairman
X Games
X Games, which is owned by Moorad’s MSP Sports Capital, brought several pro and amateur skateboarders to put on competitions at the nine-day long US Open of Surfing that was scheduled to end Aug. 11. Stars like 12-time X Games medalist Jimmy Wilkins, 16-time medalist Elliot Sloan and Tony Hawk’s protege, 12-year-old Reese Nelson, skated on a 14-foot vertical ramp on the edge of the surfing festival on the south side of the Huntington Beach pier.
The annual surfing event, which began in 1959, typically attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors during its nine-day run. Making a stop in Surf City is one of the ways X Games can bring more eyes to the industry of action sports, according to Chief Revenue Officer Eric Johnson, who secured the partnership with the event’s operator World Surf League (WSL).
“We’re opening the aperture so athletes can see themselves on a path to joining the X Games in the future,” Johnson told the Business Journal.
“To expect to have over 400,000 fans who show up over the course of the US Open and having this be a part of that is definitely beneficial. It’s hopefully something we can continue to do for a long time coming.”
More Dollars for Athletes
X Games, which was founded by ESPN in 1995, often highlights sports that aren’t mainstream, like skateboarding, and turns the games into festivals that include concerts and fan experiences.
Moorad, a former sports agent at Steinberg & Moorad and Newport Beach resident, led MSP’s acquisition of a majority stake in X Games in 2022 along with partner Jahm Najafi.
Their sports portfolio includes soccer clubs in Spain, Germany, Belgium and other leagues, as well as the McLaren Racing team.
The surfing event is one part of the competition group’s plans to create a more sustainable business model for its current and next generation of athletes.
X Games aims to reorganize itself into an action sports league in 2026. It plans to introduce both Winter and Summer Leagues, each featuring about six to eight teams to start and will be sold to individual owners next year when pricing becomes clear.
Each team will include an equal number of male and female athletes, about 10 to 12 per team.
While the athletes will compete for individual points and money, teams will compete in the team standings in the same way Formula 1 teams compete in the F1 Constructor’s standings.
The schedules will include X Games signature events as well as strategic collaborations with existing competitions.
The main idea is to enable athletes to earn compensation beyond the $2.4 million already awarded through existing prize purses.
“These opportunities will provide a secure and sustainable future for our most important stakeholders – the athletes,” Moorad said. “By leveraging the incredibly valuable X Games brand, we will create a durable, global business that will be good for athletes, fans, investors and sponsors.”
Already, X Games said it’s seeing “significant audience growth” in the past year, including 113% increase in streaming audiences and 1.6 million new social followers since the MSP acquisition.
Making X Games Dynamic
Johnson said he recognized the alignment between skate culture and the surfing community that Huntington Beach’s US Open would bring.
“The synergies between what their athletes do in the water versus what ours do on a ramp makes perfect sense,” he said. “The ethos of X Games is celebrating riders on any board or bike. [Surfing’s] another board that you’re riding, and we want to be a part of that too.”
The first weekend was dedicated to the initial round of women and men skaters competing to make it to the skateboard final the following Saturday. Sunday featured professional demos by X Games’ top athletes.
“It goes along with the plans [and] our ability to have our brand show up in different destinations.” The action sports communities all “have great reverence for one another and what we do,” Johnson added.
Hosting more competitions like Lexus X Games Vert Pro for skaters is key to the model in development at X Games, he said. A year-round events calendar allows the athletes to have a reliable career path and security within whichever sport they choose.
“Any event is a great opportunity for the athletes to show up and show out,” Johnson said.
X Games is also forming teams of riders from multiple disciplines that will have investors behind them as they compete for both individual and team points. This structure should lead to better stability and additional revenue streams for competitors, as well as sustainable salaries, medical benefits and travel costs compensated.
Johnson noted that the 2025 calendar will be a preview of X Games’ plans to show up in different types of places like the US Open. The competition aims to expand all over the globe and is in talks with several locations across multiple continents.
“Since the acquisition from MSP Sports Capital, who we work very hand in hand with, this has been the idea of creating a business where we take some elements of what has been wildly successful in all of professional sports and apply some of the rigors and discipline and structural output,” Johnson said.
“The intent has always been to [make] the X Games [brand] to be more dynamic with the brand and bring it and our athletes to more locations and more fans in the U.S. and around the world.”
