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MotoGP legend Marc Márquez says leaving Repsol Honda — where he has won six premier class world titles over the last decade — was the biggest and most difficult decision of his career.

Márquez will leave his current team at the end of this season of Grand Prix motorcycle racing (MotoGP). He joined Honda in 2012, before becoming the youngest ever MotoGP world champion in his rookie year in 2013, at the age of 20. He defended that title in 2014 and went on to win four more accolades in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Since then, a series of serious injuries and a drop-off in performance of the Honda bike relative to rival manufacturers, particularly the currently dominant Ducati, have prevented him from tilting at a record-equalling seventh premier class world championship.

With two race weekends left of this season and the Honda continuing to struggle, Márquez sits 14th in the riders’ championship standings, while his teammate and 2020 world champion Joan Mir is down in 22nd position.

The 30-year-old Spaniard, widely considered one of the most gifted motorcycle racers of all-time, will join Gresini Ducati next season, where he will switch to the bike currently ridden by the top three riders in this season’s championship.

“It was the most difficult decision and biggest decision of my career, especially because you are leaving from your comfort zone, from your team, from your family, from the team that gave to you many things and where the relationship is super good,” Márquez told CNBC via videolink from Malaysia, where he was preparing for the Malaysian motorcycle Grand Prix.

While he believes household name Honda will eventually return to the top even in his absence, Márquez said he did not have time to wait for the brand to raise the bike’s performance, if he wants to capitalize on the remaining years of his physical prime. He vowed to give his all in the final three races of this season to thank Honda for what the team has given him over the past decade.

At Gresini Ducati, a satellite team of the flagship Ducati Lenovo factory team, Márquez will be riding what is currently the most dominant bike on the grid. He is well aware of the weight of expectations.

“First, second and third in the championship are riding that bike so this means no excuse for the bike — it is everything about you, but I need my time,” he said, noting the difficulty of adapting to a new bike after 11 years on the Honda.

“Of course, if I work, then we’ll have a chance in the future, but my work right now is to go out from that expectation and just focus on myself.”

‘Respect your body’

Although he enjoyed a glittering career up until 2020, Márquez has suffered several terrifying crashes and serious injuries down the years, resulting in a number of surgeries and spells on the sidelines.

“Maybe the biggest lesson or the most important one was: respect your body. Because in the end, as you know, all athletes try to push your body in the limits when you are injured, try to be faster in your recovery, try to come back as soon as possible,” Márquez said, emphasizing the importance of respecting recovery timelines.

“Because your body is one. If you take care about your body, you will have more races or more years, but if you don’t take care about your body, about your physical condition, then your career will be shorter.”

Some have attributed the spectacular nature of Márquez’s crashes to the distinctive riding style — involving uniquely aggressive cornering and braking techniques — that propelled him to the pinnacle of the sport. The style has captivated fans, but forced the rider to endure some difficult spells, both physically and mentally.

The PGA Tour said Tuesday it will begin to offer professional players direct equity ownership in the new company that will be formed after it reaches a deal with investors, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.

The tour is currently in negotiations working toward an investment agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns LIV Golf, and the DP World Tour. The talks with PIF and the DP World Tour remain the tour’s “top priority,” PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said in Tuesday’s memo.

The sides reached a framework agreement earlier this year to combine the business interests of the golf leagues. The development triggered anger and criticism, including from players such as Rory McIlroy. The Senate held hearings to investigate claims that the deal was meant to increase Saudi Arabia’s influence in the U.S. through sports investments.

The new program outlined in Tuesday’s memo is the latest move to align the interests of PGA Tour players with the business itself.

“At the point we secure outside investment, this would be a unique offering in professional sports, as no other league grants its players/members direct equity ownership in the league’s business,” wrote. “We recognize – as do all of the prospective minority investors who are in dialogue with us – that the PGA TOUR will be stronger with our players more closely aligned with the commercial success of the business.”

Monahan also wrote that the Tour’s agreement with PIF and DP World Tour has generated interest from other investors. The board is currently reviewing private investors’ bids and will keep negotiating to select finalists, he added.

Last week, Fenway Sports Group Chairman Tom Werner acknowledged that the company has held talks with the PGA Tour, but declined to comment with any further details. There’s been speculation that Fenway could come up with an offer that tops the Saudis’ bid.

A Wisconsin teenager pleaded guilty Wednesday in New York federal court to conspiracy in connection with a scheme to hack user accounts at the DraftKings fantasy sports betting website and with others steal about $600,000 from its customers.

The defendant, Joseph Garrison, had boasted “fraud is fun” in a message that he had sent to his co-conspirators before he was nabbed by authorities, according to a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

“im addicted to see money in my account,” wrote the now 19-year-old Garrison. ″im like obsessed with bypassing s—.”

The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office said Garrison on Nov. 18 last year launched a so-called “credential stuffing attack” on the website. Hackers in such attacks use stolen user credentials obtained from past data breaches to gain authorized access to user accounts.

“Garrison and others successfully accessed approximately 60,000 accounts at the Betting Website,” the office said.

In some instances, the hackers were able to add a new payment method to the accounts, and after depositing $5 through the new method to verify it was authentic, were able to drain the accounts of “all the existing funds in the Victim Account,” prosecutors said.

About 1,600 DraftKings accounts were drained in the hack.

When federal authorities raided Garrison’s home in Madison in February, “they located programs typically used for credential stuffing attacks,” as well as “files containing nearly 40 million username and password pairs on” his computer, prosecutors said.

Garrison, who has been free on $100,000 bond since his arrest in May, is scheduled to be sentenced in Manhattan federal court on Jan. 16.

He faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison on the charge of conspiring to commit computer intrusion.

Red Bull Racing’s dominance in Formula 1 this year is translating directly to higher sales of its namesake energy drink, the team’s principal and CEO, Christian Horner, told CNBC.

“There’s an old adage of, ‘Win on Sunday and sell on Monday.’ Well, what we do for the Red Bull brand, for the energy drink in advertising the product globally for 23 race weekends a year, we’re the biggest marketing impact that the beverage company has,” Horner told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in the documentary “The Inside Track: The Business of Formula 1.”

The Red Bull team, which also counts tech giant Oracle as a title sponsor, has trounced the grid this season, winning 19 of the 20 Grand Prix weekends so far. Its world champion driver, Max Verstappen, has taken the checkered flag on 17 of those wins, with his teammate Sergio Perez collecting wins in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan.

Verstappen already clinched the 2023 drivers title — his third world championship — in early October during the 17th Grand Prix weekend of the season, in Qatar. The Red Bull team secured the constructors championship the weekend prior, in Japan.

The drivers will take to the track again on Sunday in Las Vegas before the season wraps at the end of this month in Abu Dhabi.

Red Bull declined to share specific sales metrics, but a company spokesperson reiterated the F1 “uplift” and said it’s particularly noticeable in corresponding race markets.

“They see it, they can measure it. It’s incredible the amount of consumption of Red Bull that is happening,” Horner told CNBC.

Red Bull is the second-most popular energy drink brand in the world, with 13% market share, according to Euromonitor International data. It trails only Monster Beverage’s namesake brand, which holds 16.4% of the global market share.

But the market for energy drinks has grown more crowded, putting pressure on Red Bull. The company’s market share has slipped from 13.5% in 2021 to 13% this year as newer players, such as PepsiCo, enter the category.

In recent years, beverage giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi have both set their sights on the fast-growing energy drink category — with varying degrees of success. Soda consumption has decreased over the last two decades, but sugary energy drinks have bucked the trend because of their caffeine content and related effects.

Coke launched its own energy drink in the United Kingdom in 2019. But Coke Energy failed to gain a foothold with U.S. consumers; the company discontinued the drink in North America in 2021, roughly a year after it launched.

Coke rival Pepsi has found more success through deal-making. It bought Rockstar Energy for $3.85 billion in 2020, gaining ownership of both the company’s namesake energy drink and fast-growing Sting Energy.

Last year, Pepsi took a $550 million stake in Celsius, which markets itself as a healthier energy drink that boosts workouts. Those deals are on top of efforts such as shifting Mountain Dew into the energy drink category and adding caffeine to Gatorade.

Find replay times of “The Inside Track: The Business of Formula 1″ on CNBC.

Take an elite field of world-class racing experts. Ask them to spend fewer dollars toward beating their bitter rivals. The result, it turns out, is a slate of newly investable assets.

That’s how the heads of Formula 1 racing see it, crediting a league-wide budget cap with making the team businesses more sustainable and boosting valuations.

“When we got involved, literally, the bottom teams were being traded for zero. Today I don’t think you could buy a team for less than $750 million, and the top teams are valued [around] $3 billion,” Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in the documentary “The Inside Track: The Business of Formula 1.”

The budget cap — set at $135 million per team in 2023 — limits how much teams can spend on developing and building their race cars. Before it was introduced in 2021, the top teams in the league could spend multiples of that in a given year.

It’s a model similar to U.S. sports leagues, several of which limit what teams can spend on player salaries (though F1 driver salaries are excluded) — and it’s the work of F1-owner Liberty Media, which bought the league in 2017.

“We understood that some of the things that, for example the NFL, has done about creating more revenue parity, creating a cost cap, those allow for a way more competitive and more compelling sport,” Maffei said.

F1′s 10 teams each get a share of league revenue, brought in through sponsorships and media deals. They also collect individual revenue through team-specific partnerships, hospitality and engineering efforts.

Better performance on the track makes it easier to earn money, but it takes significant spending to get there.

“Before, someone investing in a race team didn’t know if you would spend $200 million a year or half a billion a year. There was everything in between,” said Guenther Steiner, team principal at Haas F1 Team.

Haas has seen a particularly aggressive revolving door of investors in recent years, plagued by poor performance on the grid and some poor luck: In March 2021, the team announced a title partnership with Russian fertilizer company Uralkali only to drop the investment a year later after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Haas now counts MoneyGram and Chipotle among its sponsors. The budget cap, Steiner said, has made the team’s balance sheet more predictable and made it easier to bring new partners on board.

F1 teams expend huge amounts of capital throughout the race season to troubleshoot, repair and improve the cars. Major upgrades mid-season can be costly, but critical to a team’s success.

“It’s an R&D game,” Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing, told CNBC in June from the sidelines of the Canadian Grand Prix weekend in Montreal. “We’re in the prototype business. We have new stuff on our car this weekend, we’ll have new stuff on our car next weekend, and depending on what your challenges are with the car is where you’re choosing where to invest your money.”

Before Brown took over the helm at McLaren in 2018, the team was losing money on an annual basis — as much as “nine figures,” he told CNBC.

“Now we’re a profitable sports team,” he said. “A lot of that is performance-based, and a lot of credit to Liberty that when they came in they established a cost cap.”

Find replay times of “The Inside Track: The Business of Formula 1″ on CNBC.

Disclosure: CNBC is a sponsor of McLaren Racing.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff offered an impassioned defence of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, which is the first event that the owners of F1 commercial rights, Liberty Media, has organised and promoted itself.

Wolff reacted angrily to being asked whether the event had been “a black eye” for F1.

He said: “That is not a black eye, this is nothing. We are Thursday night, we have a free practice session one that we’re not doing.

“They’re going to seal the drain covers, and nobody’s going to talk about that tomorrow morning anymore.

“It’s completely ridiculous, completely ridiculous. FP1 – how can you even dare trying to talk bad about the event that sets the new standards, new standards to everything.

“And then you’re speaking about a drain cover that’s been undone. That has happened before, that’s nothing. It’s FP1.

“Give credit to the people that have set up this Grand Prix, that have made this sport much bigger than it ever was.

“Have you ever spoken good about someone and written a good word? You should about all these people that have been out here. Liberty has done an awesome job and just because in FP1 a drain cover has become undone, we shouldn’t be moaning.

“The car is broken. That’s really a shame for Carlos. It could have been dangerous. So between the FIA and the track, everybody needs to analyse how we can make sure that this is not happening again.

“But talking here about the black eye for the sport on a Thursday evening, nobody watches that in European time anyway.”

Formula 1′s return to Las Vegas was thrown into chaos as the opening practice session was cancelled after just eight minutes of action due to a broken drain cover damaging Carlos Sainz’s car.

With F1 returning to Las Vegas for the first time since 1982 on an all-new circuit, a red flag was thrown by the race director Sainz’s Ferrari suffered significant damage having run over the damaged part of the track on the main straight.

Ocon’s Alpine then suffered damage under the red flag when it hit the scattered debris left by the Sainz incident.

A further 11 minutes passed before a decision taken to cancel the session, with second practice subsequently pushed back two hours from its scheduled start time to 10am. It has also been extended by a third to run to 90 minutes.

An FIA statement had earlier said: “Following inspection, it was the concrete frame around a manhole cover that has failed.

“We now need to check all of the other manhole covers which will take some time – we will be discussing with the local circuit engineering team about the length of time it will take to resolve and will update with any resultant changes to the schedule.”

Speaking in the team principal’s press conference immediately after the session, Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur described the incident as “unacceptable” while confirming damage to Sainz’s monocoque, engine, and battery.

Alpine, meanwhile, confirmed that the chassis would need to be changed on Ocon’s car.

The other Ferrari of Charles Leclerc was top of the timesheet when the session was halted, but the extremely limited running offered next to no clue as to what the running order will be for the remainder of the weekend.

The incident does not mark the first time in recent history that an F1 session has been halted by such an issue.

First practice at the 2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix was cancelled when George Russell’s Williams hit a drain cover and was damaged.

The opening session at this season’s Canadian Grand Prix was also called off after just four minutes due to issues with the circuit’s CCTV.

Everton have been deducted 10 points by the Premier League for a breach of profit and sustainability rules.

Everton say they are “shocked and disappointed” by the ruling and have vowed to appeal.

“Both the harshness and severity of the sanction imposed are neither a fair nor a reasonable reflection of the evidence submitted,” said the club.

The deduction, which was meted out by an Independent Commission and will be imposed with immediate effect, is the largest in the history of the Premier League and plunges Sean Dyche’s team into the relegation zone.

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According to the Premier League, Everton admitted during a five-day hearing it was in breach of the league’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules with the Commission “determining Everton FC’s PSR Calculation for the relevant period resulted in a loss of £124.5m, as contended by the Premier League, which exceeded the threshold of £105m permitted under the PSRs.”

After narrowly avoiding relegation to the Championship last season, Everton were, prior to their points loss, 14th in the league table, eight points above the bottom three.

Only two clubs have previously been docked points in Premier League history – Middlesbrough, who were deducted three for failing to fulfill a fixture against Blackburn in 1996/97 and Portsmouth, who were stripped of nine after entering administration in March 2010.

Extensive damage at a Florida dome venue is potentially a big blow to the Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy-backed tech-infused golf league two months out from its launch.

Photos surfaced earlier this week showing that the air-supported SoFi Center dome, located in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, had collapsed due to a power outage.

“We are still assessing the damage and determining the impact on our timelines,” the league, TGL, told CNBC.

The indoor golf league, which counts the PGA Tour as a partner, is slated to launch on Jan. 9, featuring about two dozen tour golfers. ESPN and ESPN+ are set to show the matches.

The venue was custom built for the league.

The league addressed the collapse earlier this week. “An overnight failure to the temporary power system used during the construction phase caused partial deflation and limited damage to the air-supported dome section of the site,” it said. “The dome section has been further deflated by our crew and will remain down while they work to remedy the situation.”

The roof collapse is yet another headache for the nascent league. Earlier this month, Jon Rahm, the 2023 Masters winner, abruptly pulled out of TGL.

“While I still think it’s a great opportunity, right now it would require a level of commitment that I can’t offer,” Rahm said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The TGL developments also come as the PGA Tour pursues a controversial business partnership with Saudi-funded rival LIV Golf.

–CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.

Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s indoor golf league, TGL, has postponed its inaugural season by a year until the start of 2025, the organization said Monday.

The decision comes after the roof of the new arena slated to host TGL matches collapsed last week. The league said the power system used during construction of the SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida failed, causing a dome structure to deflate.

The accident did not cause injuries or damage the league’s golf simulators and other technology, TGL said. But TGL delayed the season, which was expected to start in January, after speaking to key partners.

“This decision came after reviewing short-term solutions, potential construction timelines, player schedules, and the primetime sports television calendar,” the league said in a statement. “We are confident that the extension will only improve our delivery.”

TGL, which counts the PGA Tour as a partner, was founded by McIlroy, Woods and former NBC executive Mike McCarthy. The trio wants to create a primetime indoor golf league to attract new fans to the sport at as the emergence of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, and then its proposed merger with the PGA Tour, left golf at a crossroads.

Woods was optimistic about the league’s future despite the delayed launch.

“Although the events of last week will force us to make adjustments to our timelines, I’m fully confident that this concept will be brought to life by our great committed players,” Woods said in a statement Monday.

TGL has drawn some of the best golfers in the world as part of its lineup. It’s unclear how the new timeline could affect player participation.

The league has also attracted a number of high-profile team owners and investors including hedge funder Steve Cohen, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, Fenway Sports Group, tech founder Alexis Ohanian and tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams. Other investors in the league include basketball great Stephen Curry, race car driver Lewis Hamilton, women’s soccer player Alex Morgan, singer Justin Timberlake and pro football’s Tony Romo and Josh Allen.

TGL signed a multi-year media rights deal with ESPN in October to broadcast its events.

ESPN said it fully supports the decision to postpone the 2024 season.

“We have believed in them and their vision from the beginning, and that has not changed. The additional time to plan, test and rehearse will only make it better, said Rosalyn Durant, executive vice president, programming and acquisitions at ESPN.