Peter Kenyon has a track record of overseeing sponsorship growth for some of the biggest teams in soccer. Now, the former Manchester United and Chelsea chief executive is helping to transform the commercial fortunes of the Williams Formula One team.
Williams were in disarray when Kenyon arrived as an advisor in 2022. US private investment firm Dorilton Capital had purchased the Grove-based outfit for approximately €152 million (US$179.5 million) in 2020, yet the team still didn’t have a defined commercial and marketing strategy two years later.
The new ownership group also wanted the team to return to title contention despite scoring just eight points across 69 races between 2018 and 2021. Kenyon’s job was to ensure the commercial model matched Dorilton’s lofty on-track expectations, but the path to achieving that has been far from straightforward.
“We had 17 partners generating no money because most of the deals were value in kind,” says Kenyon, recalling when he joined the team. “So we cleared that out. We worked on the basis that if it’s not worth anything, it’s not worth anything.”
“We almost built a full agency”
Kenyon says that Williams “set a floor” for their sponsorship valuations and rebuilt their commercial operation to make the team more attractive to potential partners.
The first change was operational. While the team’s headquarters in Grove is well positioned for attracting engineering talent on the peripheries of Motorsport Valley, it’s not the best place for a commercial and marketing division.
“Grove’s a great place if you’re an engineer, it’s pretty awful if you’re a marketeer,” says Kenyon, speaking on-stage at SportsPro London. “So we said, ‘where will we get the talent that we need to build a world-class commercial marketing group?’ That was London and New York. In this period of time, we built almost a full agency.”
Indeed, Williams beefed out their commercial department, hiring senior commercial executives who Kenyon says could “speak that language” of marketing departments with the budget to spend over US$15 million on a sponsorship.
As a result, Williams set an ambition of being “the most data-led team in Formula One” so that they could deliver insights to potential partners the demonstrated the value of sponsoring the team.
Another strategic shift saw Williams stop chasing volume and instead focus on scarcity, mirroring Kenyon’s approach at Manchester United, where he oversaw a reduction in the number of partners at the club from 110 to 10.
That is perhaps more unique in Formula One, a sport where it is increasingly common to see cars covered in logos, making it difficult for sponsors to stand out.
“Scarcity is valuable,” Kenyon explains. “One of our other strategies was only having 24 partners on our car, and there’s two reasons for that. One is if you’re really going to activate these things, it takes time, it takes money. There’s a limit to what you can do.
“The other KPI we have at Williams [which] is big measure of success of our partnerships is signing them again – upselling and keeping them.
“What that means is we’re doing for them what we promised because they want to stay and they’re prepared to pay us more money. And they’re doing for us what they said they would do.”
The car during Kenyon’s first season with Williams was decidedly more bare than the sponsor-laden teams in Formula One today (Image credit: Getty Images)
Resetting the benchmark
All told, Williams now have more than 20 partners in their portfolio. Crucially, over the last three years, Kenyon says Williams have renewed up to six of their partnerships and only failed to extend their deal with Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev).
But that relationship, which saw Williams promote the Michelob Ultra brand for two years, has become the benchmark for Williams’ approach to sponsorships.
“I kid you not, that one deal was worth more than the 17 other deals that we’d had the previous year – and it wasn’t a big deal,” says Kenyon.
According to Kenyon, part of the reason that deal was successful wasn’t simply because of the fee AB InBev were paying, but also because of how the beer giant activated the partnership, helping to amplify the Williams brand.
While AB InBev are no longer part of Williams’ portfolio, the team is now in a position where it can be more selective about partnerships. Kenyon has had to say no to partnerships more than once, with a focus on ensuring sponsors are the right cultural fit. Williams have also been strengthening relationships with their partners through initiatives like an exclusive event for sponsors at the recent Miami Grand Prix, which Kenyon believes is good for business.
“Your partner should be your biggest reference to doing things well,” he adds. “So I think getting the fit, getting the value fit, getting the proposition fit [is key].”
‘We’re over-indexing against teams in similar positions’
Williams’ title sponsorship deal with Atlassian has been arguably the biggest validation yet of their new commercial approach. When the partnership was announced in February 2025, team principal James Vowles told BlackBook Motorsport that it was “one of the biggest deals” across sports.
Title partnerships in Formula One are the most valuable – and visible – real estate a team can sell, making them highly attractive to brands. However, they are also competitive to secure because of the scale of the investment required from the sponsor over what is typically a multi-year commitment.
Prior to that, Williams hadn’t had a title sponsor for five years, making the deal with Atlassian key to their resurgence.
“If you look at our revenue now, we’re over-indexing against teams in a similar position,” notes Kenyon. “Landing a title sponsor was, I think, an external validation that Williams was going in the right direction and worthy of achieving the revenue streams that a title sponsor gives you.”
Another sign of the team’s commercial momentum was the capture of Anthropic as official thinking partner. Kenyon claims the team beat off competition from much bigger Formula One teams to secure a partnership with the company, which is one of the trendiest businesses in the artificial intelligence (AI) space and is best known for developing AI assistant Claude.
Claude will have an active role in supporting how Williams thinks, plans and performs across race strategy, car development and operations (Image credit: Getty Images)
“We were up against Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren, and here we are in seventh place,” Kenyon says. “So, we had to be creative, we had to dig deep.
“You’ve got to have plenty of touch points, you’ve got to keep in contact, and this is a business that, when we started talking to them, was US$80 billion market cap. By the time we’re getting close to doing a deal with them, they were US$800 billion. Their strategy is three months, not three years.
“You’ve just got to work at that level. And what became obvious was that they wanted to be inside our business and be very much part of the journey.”
The key to this is that Williams are not selling the promise of short-term success. Partners know that this is a team in recovery from the moment conversations start. In this instance, that journey back to the top created strong alignment with a company like Anthropic which is undergoing its own rapid expansion.
According to Kenyon, the path back to the top of the sport will mean winning races in 2028 and challenging for the championship by 2030. Williams might be beating teams above them on the grid to sponsors, but the question now is whether that commercial success can contribute to them catching their rivals on the track too.
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