Force Majeure and the Sequel Nobody Asked For - When two Grands Prix disappear overnight, the legal questions go well beyond checking your force majeure clause
[This article was originally published by LawInSport.com on April 8, 2026. Reprinted with permission.]
The recent announcement that Formula 1 has cancelled both the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix - reducing the 2026 season to 22 races and leaving a five-week gap in the calendar between Japan and Miami - was not, in truth, a surprise. Both countries are among the Gulf states struck by Iran in retaliation for US-Israeli air strikes, and the writing had been on the wall for weeks. What was striking was the speed and scale of the commercial fallout. While fans of the sport may view this as a mere disruption to the racing calendar, the legal and commercial ripple effects are seen behind the scenes, far beyond the track. A Guggenheim Partners analyst note estimated the cancellations will cost the sport approximately $190 to $200 million in revenue and $80 million in EBITDA, with over $100m of that in lost hosting fees.
Many lawyers in the region will now be sending bulletins telling clients to check their force majeure clauses. This is not that bulletin. Yes, your force majeure clause needs to contemplate war. That has been true since well before Covid. If your precedents still don’t say it clearly, that is a separate and urgent conversation. But the more interesting legal questions, the ones that will generate the actual disputes, predominantly lie elsewhere.
This article examines the principal contractual and commercial law issues arising for rights holders, sponsors, broadcasters and event operators with exposure to sports contracts in the GCC. While the analysis focuses on Formula 1, the legal issues discussed are broadly applicable across sports-related agreements in the region, including boxing, football, tennis and the expanding portfolio of global sporting events that have established the Middle East as a premier international sports hub.
Article Overview:
- Closed Airspace: The Problem Nobody Drafted For
- Hosting Agreements: The Long Game Gets Complicated
- Sponsorship: The Exposure Black Hole
- Broadcasters: Does Force Majeure Flow Downstream?
- Activation Partners: the Forgotten Parties
- Driver Agreements: A Detail Worth Noting
- Insurance: Where Your Coverage May Fall Short
- The Broader Point: Adopting A Risk Management Mindset
Closed Airspace: The Problem Nobody Drafted For
Let’s start with something that is genuinely underappreciated: airspace closures as a standalone commercial event. Popular transit hubs in the Gulf, including Dubai and Doha, have already experienced closures, resulting in the rerouting of team personnel and freight for previous races. An event does not have to be in a warzone to be commercially impacted by one. Teams, drivers, freight, broadcasters and hospitality guests cannot access required locations if the skies above it or en route are closed.
The question is whether your agreement treats an airspace closure as a force majeure event in its own right, or whether it is expected to be swallowed, silently and optimistically, by a generic “circumstances beyond reasonable control” catch-all that a well-resourced counterparty may immediately contest. In many commercial agreements we have reviewed in this region, the answer is the latter. Airspace closures tend to appear, if at all, as a sub-clause of travel disruption provisions that were drafted with volcanic ash and industrial action in mind, not military conflict across a neighbouring jurisdiction. The distinction matters enormously when one party argues the clause is engaged and the other argues it is not.
Hosting Agreements: The Long Game Gets Complicated
F1 has secured long-term commitments in the region, with the Bahrain Grand Prix contracted to run through 2036, and the Saudi Arabian race agreement until 2030. Promoter fees for the racing series have significantly climbed since Liberty Media bought F1 in 2017, with Bahrain and Saudi Arabia collectively estimated to pay around $107 million annually. These are not ordinary commercial contracts. They are what can be termed “sovereign-adjacent” arrangements, i.e. an agreement between Formula One Management (FOM) and state-backed promoters, typically negotiated over years and structured to provide FOM with a highly predictable, long-term revenue stream and the promoters with stability and incentives for investment in event and experience enhancements, amongst other considerations.
The legal architecture of those agreements will now be stress-tested in ways their drafters in most cases did not anticipate. Who bears the cost of a cancellation that is nobody’s conventional fault? What do the force majeure provisions say about the promoter’s obligation to pay hosting fees for an event that cannot be held, and does non-payment for a year of genuine conflict trigger a default, or is it suspended? Are there renegotiation rights embedded in the deal, or is the expectation that the parties simply revert to the original terms once hostilities cease? F1’s CEO Stefano Domenicali stated that he looks forward to returning to both circuits “as soon as the circumstances allow”. The statement, while diplomatically sensible, is contractually imprecise. “As soon as circumstances allow” is not a legal standard.
In the event of any such contractual imprecision or ambiguity, the question of governing law becomes an issue of major importance. The Gulf states for example (mostly) follow the Civil Law tradition where the principle of binding legal precedent does not apply and codified law interpreted by the courts would decide on issues such as determining the difference between “hardship” and “impossibility of performance”, mitigation efforts by the parties and similar Force Majeure Civil Law doctrines.
When assessing Force Majeure and its invocation, GCC civil courts, including those in the UAE, generally require the existence of an unforeseeable event beyond the control of the invoking party that is impossible to prevent or overcome. They assess these requirements strictly in relation to the specific contractual obligation concerned and not at a broad or abstract level such as general regional or political instability. This paves the way for classifying a situation as a mere hardship that can be overcome through alternative measures, thereby undermining a Force Majeure clause.
Sponsorship: The Exposure Black Hole
Sponsors have paid substantial sums for a defined package of commercial exposure: trackside signage, broadcast mentions, hospitality entitlements, digital rights and the halo of association with a specific event. Two of those events no longer exist. What next?
The answer depends almost entirely on how the “make-good” or equivalent exposure provisions in those agreements are drafted. In many sponsorship deals we have advised on in this region, make-good provisions were designed to address schedule changes and rescheduling - a race moved by a week, or a session cancelled due to weather. They were not designed for permanent cancellation driven by military conflict. The practical distinction is significant: a rescheduled event can usually provide equivalent commercial value; a cancelled one cannot.
There is a further dimension that is specific to Gulf sponsorship agreements. Where the sponsor is a state entity - and several of F1's most significant sponsors in this region are precisely that - the question of what a “make-good” obligation looks like becomes unusual. Does the conflict that caused the cancellation affect the sponsor’s own ability to receive and exploit that exposure?
Broadcasters: Does Force Majeure Flow Downstream?
Broadcast agreements applicable during the Covid pandemic in 2020 in many cases saw organisers work to reach a contractual minimum for the season, and the same dynamic will play out now. Rights holders have purchased specific windows. Advertisers have bought slots against those windows. Sub-licensees have built their own obligations around the same.
The critical drafting question is whether a force majeure invocation at the FOM level, excusing FOM’s obligation to stage the event, automatically flows down through the broadcast rights chain and excuses each downstream party from their own obligations. The answer is frequently no. Sub-licence agreements are often drafted as freestanding commercial arrangements with their own force majeure provisions, which may be drafted differently, triggered by different thresholds, or subject to different governing law. The result is that a single cancellation can produce multiple, inconsistent contractual outcomes across the same commercial ecosystem.
Activation Partners: The Forgotten Parties
Beyond the usual suspects, the most practically vulnerable parties are those furthest down the commercial chain: the hospitality operators, experiential agencies, logistics providers and on-ground activation partners who have made prepaid commitments for paddock club experiences, branded fan zones and trackside hospitality that will simply not happen.
The pattern is consistent here: these are the parties least likely to have negotiated robust force majeure or cancellation refund provisions, and most likely to find that their agreements are silent on the specific scenario they are now facing. They often rely on the broader contractual framework of the rights holder or promoter above them to determine their position, rather than having independent protection.
Driver Agreements: A Detail Worth Noting
On the question of whether drivers are paid less for fewer races, we expect they generally are, probably not on their base retainer, which at the top level is structured as an annual fee rather than a per-race calculation. Where the financial impact may be felt is on performance-related bonuses: fewer races mean fewer opportunities to accumulate the points and results that trigger enhanced payments.
What is more interesting, and less discussed, is the post-Covid generation of driver services agreements. In our experience advising on driver agreements, in the period following the 2020 season, several teams introduced mechanisms such as race-threshold provisions, by which remuneration would adjust if the season fell below a specified number of races. Have those provisions survived into current-generation contracts? The leverage dynamic has shifted considerably since 2020 and the top drivers, as genuine global commercial properties, would have pushed back hard against them on renewal or team move. The irony is that protections quietly negotiated away on the assumption that Covid was “unprecedented”, and a one-off concept may now be looking rather more attractive.
Insurance: Where Your Coverage May Fall Short
Event cancellation insurance exists and is much more widely used post-Covid. The problem is that most standard policies contain explicit war exclusions, with political risk coverage available only as a separate and expensive rider. Coverage that few clients were actively seeking at the time their long-term deals were negotiated may now be conspicuously absent.
The practical advice on renewal is straightforward: obtain a proper review of your current event cancellation and business interruption coverage against the specific risks present in your portfolio. The question is not whether war exclusions exist (they certainly do), but whether a bespoke political risk rider is now proportionate and whether the premium has become commercially justifiable.
Beyond the Paddock: A Lesson For All Sports
The disruption to the front end of the F1 race calendar in the GCC is not an isolated event affecting only motorsport. The current unrest also resulted in disrupted fixtures to Fujairah’s ATP Challenger Tour and Qatar’s MotoGP. The GCC has increasingly become a region considered as a premier destination for many sporting disciplines. Global sporting events such as the ATP Tour, the DP World Tour and UFC events amongst others have found themselves with long-term arrangements in the region similar to those in motorsports, often backed by state entities and possessing almost similar hosting, sponsorship and broadcasting models. One cancelled event in the region forces these sports to reassess their own Force Majeure and termination triggers, insurance coverages and media rights, given how the underlying contractual and commercial architecture features practical similarities.
The Broader Point: Adopting A Risk Management Mindset
The GCC region has, over the past decade, built one of the most ambitious and commercially sophisticated sports economies in the world. The hosting agreements, sponsorship deals, broadcast arrangements and activation contracts that underpin it represent billions of dollars of long-term investment and reflect a genuine and enduring commitment to sport as a pillar of economic and cultural development. Those agreements were structured for a stable, high-growth environment, because that is precisely the environment that the region had worked hard to create. But they may not have contemplated the situation currently playing out.
This is how commercial risk allocation tends to work: parties draft for the risks they think are realistic at the time. The task now for rights holders, sponsors, broadcasters, operators and their advisers is to conduct a sober audit of what their agreements actually say, identify where the gaps are, and decide what to do about them. The best time to do that was at the start of March. The second-best time is now!