| What exactly is Red Bull GmbH? Is it an Austrian energy drink company, headquartered in a small village near Salzburg, that uses athletes as marketing tools? Or has it become a sports empire obsessed with winning, driven by a revenue stream of drinkable merchandise? You can’t ask Red Bull. Co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz never wanted his spokespeople to win PR awards, preferring to let the athletes do the talking rather than Red Bull business executives, according to a biography. "Our media philosophy is as simple as it is correct: the onus is on the media to create content, not on us to provide it,” said Mateschitz in a rare interview in 2011. “If our results, achievements and activities are worth reporting, you will read about them.” Well, lots of people read about Red Bull’s F1 team yesterday, after it sacked Christian Horner – arguably the man behind its most successful sporting asset, Red Bull Racing. The decision came from the top. The person overseeing Red Bull’s sports empire is Oliver Mintzlaff, who was appointed by Mark Mateschitz soon after his father’s death in 2022. It was Mintzlaff’s name on the statement announcing they had moved on from Horner. The move shows that Red Bull is now a ruthless sports team owner, more than an extreme sports drink – and teams have to win to be good marketing tools. The first athlete Red Bull ever sponsored was F1 driver Gerhard Berger in 1989. But the company became better known for sponsoring extreme sports personalities; the sort of people who want to spend the day holding onto a balloon until they reach space, or base jumping off the Petronas Towers. All the while, Red Bull was building out its team project. It bought EC Salzburg, an ice hockey team, in 2000, but the first major team deal was for F1’s Jaguar Racing in late 2004, after sponsoring the Sauber team for almost a decade. The next year, it bought middling Austrian first-division football club SV Salzburg and rebranded it Red Bull Salzburg. The Red Bull playbook for buying teams is pretty simple. Buy ones that aren't that good and turn them into winners. It means your investment goes further, and it’s easier to start winning. Horner created a F1 victory machine. He hired the best car designers, the best drivers, and won eight World Drivers' Championships and six World Constructors' Championships. The problem with Horner was he stopped winning. This wasn’t new, per se. Horner had blips before, sometimes lasting a few years. But over the past 18 months he had suffered scandals, lost key allies, and accumulated baggage. Red Bull’s owners didn’t want to wait any longer to start winning again. Sure, if any professional sports team starts losing, the owners might sack its manager. But outside the elite, most teams are never destined to win titles and trophies, and they know it. They may never admit it publicly – to do so would be sporting blasphemy – but in truth, both fans and owners are just happy to be part of something, perhaps with the odd season of glory thrown in every decade or so. But that’s a rubbish marketing tool. Red Bull: It’s just fun to be here. That works for extreme sports personalities. It doesn’t work if you’re a corporate entity spending billions of dollars on sports teams. Or if you hire people like ex-Liverpool FC manager Jurgen Klopp to run your football teams. Or pay £50 million-a-year to keep elite F1 driver Max Verstappen. There has to be a point to it all. And that’s to sell cans of drink by winning sports leagues. Red Bull is now one of the world’s biggest sports empires. It has stake in — or owns outright — about a dozen teams, and they all have to win for the marketing to make sense. From 2005, Red Bull Salzburg has won 14 league titles, with a 10 year streak from 2013. Since 2023 it’s come second twice, and sacked three managers. In 2009 it founded its own football team near Leipzig. Starting in the fifth tier of German football, RB Leipzig achieved four promotions in seven years, making it to the Bundesliga by 2016. It won the German cup twice in a row. In March it sacked its manager after coming 7th in the league, its worst position in the top tier. Luckily, Red Bull is selling a lot of drinks. It sold 12.7 billion cans of its caffeinated beverage in 2024, up 4.4% from 2023. And with record profit, there’s room to spend more on sports. Sponsorship payments to sport stars exceeded €1 billion for the first time in 2022, and has continued to grow. In its annual report, Red Bull fully consolidates some teams it owns, including both F1 stables and an ice hockey team in Munich. It also doesn't provide a break-down of sponsorships, so it's hard to see how much its sport project really costs. It’s clear that making winning sports teams is expensive (its F1 teams currently make a small profit, but it’s hard to see them being in profit over their lifetime). Which means it has to sell more fizzy drinks to fund better drivers or football players. And with more and more money piling into sports from billionaires and petro-states, the costs are only ever going to increase. Perhaps the tail is now wagging the dog, or rather, the teams are now in charge of the Red Bull. --- Giles Turner and Marton Eder | 
