Should Premiership Rugby’s club owners reject the purchase offer from private equity firm CVC on Tuesday, as is expected, they might consider this a hospital pass rightly declined. The owners and rugby fans should be under no illusion about what to expect if the experience of Formula One’s ownership by the company is anything to go by. CVC expect a return from investment and they pursued that ruthlessly in F1.

CVC owned F1 between 2006 and 2017, when it was taken over by Liberty Media. The then deputy team principal of Force India, Bob Fernley, accused CVC during that time of “raping the sport”. In 2016 he summed up everything abut the firm’s relationship with F1 in a single sentence. “All their actions have been taken to extract as much money from the sport as possible and put as little in as possible,” he said.

Among the teams Fernley was usually a lone voice of dissent but he was spot on about the lack of investment. CVC paid approximately £1.4bn for its majority stake. Over the next decade estimates suggest that it made up to £3.5bn. In 2014 it is reported they took in £347m from a turnover of £1.25bn, at that point representing a return on investment of more than 350%. Little wonder they held on to F1 for more than twice as long as their usual investments: it was the fruit machine that kept paying out.

When they did sell, F1 was valued at £8bn but the sport was poorer. CVC had employed Bernie Ecclestone to run the business for them, concerned mainly that the returns remained high. Ecclestone delivered with pitiless efficiency.

The hosting fees for race promoters rose exponentially as state-backed venues willing to pay a fortune for the PR value of hosting F1 left the classic European tracks repeatedly making a loss and, in cases such as Silverstone and Monza, in danger of bankruptcy.

At the same time Ecclestone oversaw a major departure from free-to-air TV to pay-to-view. From 2019 F1 will be exclusive in the UK to Sky for six years in a deal reportedly worth £600m. Good numbers for CVC but not so the dwindling worldwide audience that has fallen by 137m since 2010. A falling audience and exposure has its effect on sponsors, thus more had to be squeezed from TV and promoters and consequently the teams became more reliant on payments from these funds delivered by F1. There was nary a peep of disapproval from the teams after the Sky deal, taking jam today, over the sport’s future.

CVC appeared to have no interest in that future. They appear to have spent very little on promotion, investment or attempting to engage with a younger audience. Ecclestone was utterly dismissive of social media.

The pursuit of profit may also have led to failure of governance, so profound that in 2016 the drivers took the unprecedented step of openly criticising the way the sport was run in a statement describing the decision-making process as “obsolete and ill-structured”.

It was management that had left payments between teams wildly inequitable and was responsible for the two-division haves and have-nots that now occupy the grid. Worse still in a sport awash with money, teams were still going bankrupt, though CVC denied responsibility for cash problems.

There was pursuit of profit at every possible level but with apparently little interest in making the experience better or more popular. It was a distasteful, cynical process that left F1 tarnished.