Right after the final race in Bermuda, Emirates Team New Zealand’s CEO, Grant Dalton wasted no time in announcing at the press conference that, as expected, the Challenger of Record would be the Italian yacht club, Circolo della Vela Sicilia, represented by Patrizio Bertelli’s Luna Rossa. Dalton promised not to make potential challengers wait too long for the protocol. By the end of September we should see the details. We will soon see their vision for returning the competition to a more traditional format.

The devil in the details of the protocol depends so much on the objective and underlying vision. Are you trying to build the America’s Cup into a profitable sports entertainment business?  Should it be a battle of tycoons in the tradition of Lipton, Morgan, Vanderbilt and Sopwith? What value proposition do you offer to potential sponsors? How do you apply and limit the available technology?

We already know that the Match will be in Auckland in early 2021, during the New Zealand summer. Sailors, designers and team heads are holding their breath, waiting to see what class of yachts will be raced. Big monohulls with Dali foils and canting keels? Foiling multihulls? Wings or soft sails? How many crew? With what skills?

The size and type of yacht are tightly coupled with the event format.  When Alinghi introduced the “Acts” in the lead up to the 2007 match in Valencia,  a fleet of IACC yachts were available for that series of promotional friendlies. The AC45 one design cats of the America’s Cup World Series were relatively low cost and required no work from the design teams. The AC Class cats that raced in Bermuda could be disassembled and shipped in 40 foot containers, enabling the global circuit of preliminary races of the now discarded “Framework Agreement.”

The That Framework Agreement (or disagreement) had called for using the AC45’s for another year, to allow new teams time to build their AC Class cat. But now, with a new class of yacht to design for 2021, it will be interesting to see if there will be any preliminary events. This has implications for both the designers and for selling sponsorship. Other sports have pre-season games, exhibition matches and friendlies. If all racing takes place in New Zealand, the opportunities for sponsor activation are more limited.

Dalton told us to expect a tighter crew nationality rule, but making it too tight will make it hard for teams from countries which are not already in the game. The Deed of Gift speaks to the nationality of yacht clubs and where the yachts are built but it says nothing about the sailors. There were no nationality requirements for the crew. A residence requirement rather than nationality was written into the Interpretive Resolutions of the New York Yacht Club in 1980 – the so-called Andy Rose rule, named after the Californian match racer who joined the 1977 Australian challenge… and with som success.

This just added expense as team owners paid for sailors to live long enough in the team’s country to meet the residence requirement. Those rules were removed by Alinghi and Oracle after Alinghi’s win in 2003. Whatever the percentage of crew, for 2021 the requirement is likely to be like the Olympic nationality criteria and based on citizenship.

Past talk of cost saving measures had little effect. Team New Zealand has experience working on a limited budget while combining funding from wealthy patrons, commercial partners and government. The reality that design teams will spend as much money as they are given means that the protocol may not include false economies from ideas like small boats with large amounts of one design elements. Savings from those aspects of the last cycle were more than offset by building multiple test boats and by developing the control systems and foil shapes. In the name of cost savings the Framework Agreement would have severely limited on the water training time. In all likelihood that would have simply shifted the spending to simulator development.

Prospective challengers will search the rules particularly carefully for any scope to change them.What powers will the challenger committee have? Will the Challenger of Record hold a veto? A major change like the 2015 move from the AC62 to the much smaller AC Class based on a majority vote by the challengers will surely not be possible.

We’ll soon how the 36^th America’s Cup will unfold, and which teams step up to do the unfolding…