CrossFit: now or never

Posted on: 5 March 2026

Don Faul stepped down on Tuesday. His last day is 6 March, in the middle of the Open, with the company still unsold after a year of negotiations that have produced nothing conclusive. No confirmed buyer, no CEO, no roadmap. If you own a box and you're reading this, you already know how it feels: like waiting for a train at a station where nobody can tell you when — or whether — it's coming.

You paid £4,500 this year to keep your affiliation. The year before, it was £3,000. For over a decade before that, the fee hadn't moved. Then, without consultation, without so much as a phone call, it went up 50% in an email. A done deal. Take it or leave it.

Here is the thing nobody seems willing to say plainly: CrossFit's problem was never the methodology. The methodology works. The problem has always been governance — who decides what, on what basis, and with what legitimacy. For years, HQ made decisions that directly affected your gym, your members and your livelihood without giving you any meaningful voice in the process. Not out of malice. Because the structure made it possible: private ownership, unilateral decisions, communication flowing downward. You listen, we decide.

That model held up while CrossFit was growing and every decision felt like it was adding something. It stopped working the moment trust began to erode — after the 2024 Games, after the silence that followed, after the sale announcement arrived the same way everything else did: as a fait accompli. When trust erodes in an organisation held together by voluntary participation, the numbers tell the story plainly enough: over 1,400 de-affiliations in a matter of months, Open participation at its lowest level since 2014, gyms that had been part of the community for years quietly letting their membership lapse.

What Berkshire never grasped, and what the next owner needs to understand before anything else, is that CrossFit is not a product. It cannot be managed like a subscription service or a franchise chain. CrossFit is a network of local communities held together by shared values and a methodology that delivers results. The affiliates are not customers. They are the root system. When the roots dry out, the tree dies — regardless of how healthy the canopy looks in the investor deck.

The next owner inherits an organisation that needs something very specific. Not a better marketing strategy, not a new app, not another ambitious slide about reaching 30 million members by 2030. What it needs is to rebuild the fundamental agreement with the people who keep the system running every day — which is you.

That agreement has a precise shape. It is not a vague commitment to "listening more." It is a structural mechanism through which affiliates participate in decisions that affect them. It means that when fees are reviewed, that review happens through a genuine consultation process, not after one. It means that when the competitive season changes format, the gyms hosting the Open and Semifinals have a real voice in shaping those changes. It means an affiliate representative body with actual standing to negotiate with HQ — not an advisory panel that meets twice a year and changes nothing.

Some concrete questions for whoever buys this company. Are you willing to publish aggregated financial data about the affiliate network — not because you are legally obliged to, but because transparency is how you rebuild trust? Are you willing to convene an affiliate assembly within the first ninety days of closing, with an open agenda, and make the state of the network the starting point for any strategic plan? Are you willing to establish a formal process by which changes to affiliation terms are discussed with affiliate representatives before they become policy?

If the answer to those questions is no, or even "we'll see," the outcome will be the same as it has been. The roots will keep drying out and the tree will keep losing ground.

There is still a window. It is narrow and it will not stay open long. CrossFit retains something that very few fitness brands can honestly claim: a community of people who did not leave because they stopped believing in the method, but because they grew tired of being treated as passive recipients of decisions made without them. Those people could come back. Not all of them, and not immediately, but the direction would change the moment they saw not another announcement, but a mechanism — a concrete structure demonstrating that their input actually shapes outcomes.

The organisations that endure are not those with the cleverest centre telling everyone what to do. They are those in which the people carrying the daily weight have a genuine say in the rules of the game. You know this better than anyone because you live it every morning in your box: the difference between an athlete who trains because someone tells them to, and one who trains because they understand why. The second is unstoppable. The first stops the moment the external pressure lifts.

The model that brought CrossFit to where it stands today was built on the first type. The next chapter — if there genuinely is one worth having — needs to be built on the second.

This is not about finding a charismatic new founder. It is not about recreating Glassman. It is about building a different structure: transparent, consultative, with real mechanisms for participation. A governance model that treats affiliates as co-owners of the system, not as subscribers whose terms of service can be updated unilaterally.

Whoever arrives in the coming months with a plan that includes this dimension has a genuine chance. Whoever arrives with a three-year growth plan, a deck full of synergies and no structural proposal for how decisions get made will produce the same result. And we will be back here in a few years, talking about another sale.

You deserve better. The methodology deserves better. The work you have built in your communities deserves better.