A lot of sports make quite a bit of money. The problem is the facilities costs. You're spending a lot of money on a specialized building with specialized equipm

A lot of sports make quite a bit of money. The problem is the facilities costs. You're spending a lot of money on a specialized building with specialized equipment. Larger markets with more money raise costs even further by raising both athlete and audience expectations with ever more luxurious features, meaning the smaller markets with smaller audiences are compared to them. The facilities operators thus get the majority of sponsorship money as they force themselves into having the largest costs, leaving less money for other aspects like athlete pay and feeder leagues. Some sports overcome this by forcing the team operators to also be the facilities operators, such as the NFL, but for many others like SailGP the athletes and teams are directly competing with the venues for some of the sponsorship money. And on top of that the different sports are competing with eachother for who gets what sponsorship, as some sports or sponsors have forced exclusivity contracts, such as Pepsi had with Hendrick Motorsports in NASCAR or Mastercard had with FIFA. And sometimes the sanctioning body responsible for the sport itself is just taking in the majority of the money and leaving the actual individual costs to the venues, teams, and athletes without ever supporting them centrally. F1, FIFA, and the NCAA did that for years. There's plenty of money, it's just that it's not being spread around appropriately. The worst part is that it doesn't even have to be evenly for the sport and athletes to thrive, just appropriately.