At least one team looks likely to vanish next year, while some others might undergo big changes. Indeed because a lot of this is conditional it makes for an uncertain summer ahead.
There’s no news yet on Arkéa-B&B Hotels. Team management said earlier this year they’d announce if the team was going to continue by April but there’s nothing yet; now there’s talk they could make an announcement ahead of the Tour de France. Are they close to landing replacement sponsors? It seems Arkéa isn’t continuing, asked about this Cédric Malengreau a spokesman for the bank told Le Télégramme his company is getting ready to enjoy “high emotions at the Tour de France”, the implication being that they won’t be sponsoring any more.
It all points to the adventure coming to an end but it’s not necessarily all or nothing. The team rose up the ranks to break into the men’s World Tour but this sowed the seeds of their downfall, promotion without a plan beyond and some recruitments that flopped. But the women’s team is still promising – Valentina Cavallar’s contract is a valuable asset – a sponsor looking for exposure may wish to carve this out and continue.
Ineos the company has been pulling out of sports sponsorships from sailing to rugby as chronicled here and elsewhere already. The cycling team isn’t immune to this and one route to ensure continuity could be to poach oil major Total Energies as a co-sponsor. For now this deal is rumoured but the deal talk has put a question mark over things and so the story is worth tracking closely. Especially as the outcomes can range wide, at one end Jim Ratcliffe quitting another sport, to Total joining forces and adding tens of millions to the budget which would reshape and redefine the team that hasn’t looked so clever now that other teams have surpassed its budget.
If Ineos do land Total as a co-sponsor then its curtrains for the current Total Energies sponsorship of the team led by Jean-René Bernaudeau. He’s coming up for retirement and has picked a successor but losing this big sponsor would be hard for replacement leader to Benoît Genauzeau start with. There’s light chat of replacement sponsors and “they would say that” sense too. It’s a “moving parts” story, if Ineos can do a deal then it impacts this team.
Another second order effect could be Soudal-Quickstep. If they can secure extra sponsorship Ineos are said to be keen to buy Remco Evenepoel out of his contract. If – highly conditional – the Belgian team sell him to “Total Energies presented by Ineos Sport” then the rump of the team is a risk. Both because the squad has been built around him, but also because the sponsors have stayed on in large part because of him. So if one thing happens then another becomes possible. Again it’s conditional but look out for this angle, Evenepoel transfer talk has already happened in 2023 and 2024.
Was the Lotto commemorative jersey combining touches from all their past versions over 30 years tempting fate? The Belgian squad is an enduring institution but the cost of backing a team has risen well beyond price inflation in Europe. At the same time the squad has lost co-sponsor Dstny so can the state lottery afford to fund the team by itself? It’s a political question in Belgium as the sponsorship is public money.
The team has explored mergers, Arkéa was one option; Team Flanders was floated as an idea by José De Cauwer even if the squad has a political duty to nurture Flemish and Walloon talent alike. Relegation would be rough for the team as they’re faring so badly this year that they’d not get automatic invites next year.
The point of this blog post is to highlight issues for teams ahead and not shout “fire” in a crowded place and scare people with sensationalist doom. With this in mind Intermarché-Wanty get a mention as loyal readers will remember pieces exploring their annual accounts which highlighted budget over-runs, cost-cutting and pledges of getting back on a sustainable financial footing, all in their own words. Out on the road they’re having a tough season and the cost-cutting could be a part of this if they can’t fund training camps and other support functions. If this continues then they’re a relegation risk.
Picnic-PostNL are World Tour relegation candidates right now. Would both title sponsors be relaxed about this? Probably not but they need not flee either as the system could function if relegated. Again it’s another team with uncertainty and this will weigh on staff and riders alike.
Cofidis risk relegation too. They might well be able to manage this, they’ve got enough points this year to get automatic invites to the big races next year – for now, it’s tight – and being able to pick and chose might suit. But no team wants relegation, it’s better to have the option on World Tour continuity. So again a team to watch in the moment with a view to its future.
We know Alpecin-Deceuninck are losing Alpecin Deceuninck as title sponsors at the end of the year but we don’t know of a replacement. A team with Mathieu Van der Poel and Jasper Philpsen ought to have sponsors queuing up and it feels like we’ll get to a rest day at the Tour de France, the media will be invited and a replacement sponsor unveiled. Still it’s a story to look out for.
Similarly there’s talk that Ag2r might have decided they’ve had a good run in the sport since 1998 and will leave. This means questions for Decathlon, can the French retailer find extra millions, is there a willing co-sponsor or would it mean budget cuts? Maybe it’s all be planned for and will go smoothly but, again another story on the radar.
Conclusion
All pro teams are brittle, what might look strong today could snap tomorrow. Remember how Jumbo-Visma almost vanished down the plughole just after they’d won all three grand tours in 2023? Now several teams have uncertain futures, for good or bad, and add to this the end of the three year promotion-relegation cycle and it could be a lively rider transfer market away from the star riders, more so if Evenepoel moves because sponsors move.
The list of cases above isn’t exhaustive and certainly not conclusive. It does look like Arkéa-B&B is coming to an end; while for most other teams there are stories to look out for that could at least impact management and recruitment decisions. Several of these stories are hardly front page news but they’re felt by the riders thinking of contracts, and their agents too. Ineos could potentially go either way. No wonder their riders look lively this season.
Thanks for an interesting update on the current state of things.
Will we see some more money from the Gulf? All assuming that the OneCycling circus does not happen in one form or another.
The pressure to perform at the Tour will be heightened and the Vuelta will be the Last Chance Saloon for guys to make a name for themselves. The racing will be, no doubt, even more fast and furious then normal.
Not sure about the Gulf effect. Jayco for example have Al Ula and convincing them to just stay on might have been part of Matt White’s departure, the need for results.
For now we have Tudor and Uno-X waiting to move up, possibly Q36.5 too.
The sponsor Alula was definitely a factor in White’s dismissal.
As someone who came to cycling in the post-Lance era, I’m curious if this uncertainty has always been a part of the sport. The strange business model of cycling certainly doesn’t encourage stability. On the other hand, it seems surprising that sponsors like AG2R and Alpecin, both of whom have seen a lot of success and visibility, would be exiting the sport. My guess is that the money folks have crunched the numbers and found that the visibility isn’t worth the investment, which is too bad if true. If all of this leads to more unsavory entities being involved, that doesn’t bode well for the future, although football is full of terrible owners and is by far the biggest sport worldwide.
Ag2r has done well out of the sport, it has gone from an anonymous company in France to a brand that’s well known. They might well stay but all sponsors tend to find it pays to stay for a while but then drop out.
It’s the kind of sport you sponsor, really…
Good to make you widely known and trusted, not great to build up a “winning image”, i.e., to boost your company’s identity/profile.
It’s fine when you need to establish yourself, not as much in differentiating terms.
Sometimes useful for specific values (trust, stability, effort, green etc.)
My feeling as a fan that has been paying close attention since just before the ‘Armstrong Era’ is that cycling is as stable has it has been in all that time – but this is just the armchair view.
We have teams with enormous longevity; Movistar and Visma, for example, have roots back as far as the eighties. Although 2023 seemed a perilous time for Visma, that history and track record (which has survived Rasmussen and multiple financial crashes) must have counted for something. Even ‘new’ teams like UAE, are a continuation of old teams (Lampre). And in this period budgets have soared, squads are bigger, more riders get paid great wages. Yes, cycling’s business model is unconventional, but it endures.
One question lingers though – is this a bubble that’s about to burst? I don’t mean that the big teams are at risk (despite the Visma point above), but that the cost to compete is now too large, minor teams fold and the bottom falls away. This would mean the current WT/PRT promotion/relegation structure needs to be remodelled, but the fundamental racing calendar will continue.
A bit of a boom and bust cycle. We see this often in Le Mans racing, topical for this week. Currently in a boom period as new rules incentivise teams to take part. But costs will surely rise, not everyone will be a winner so sponsor interest will wane, and inevitably the number of entrants will fall again.
Le Mans (which is part of the FiA WEC) has a similar problem to the Tour; both events overshadow the rest of the season, and attracts the annual ‘once a year fan/ media’ who don’t bother with the other weeks of the season.
But, as you correctly say, Sportscar racing is known for it’s ‘boom & bust’ cycles – we’re in a current boom, but its up to the FIA/ ACO/IMSA to ensure there is longevity for the series.
Sponsorship costs in order to have a meaningful impact have been growing and growing at a crazy pace in recent years, which means that investors found the sport interesting to put their money in (or wasn’t it some wild speculation, too…?), but of course it also means that it’s now harder to find new sponsors… as it’s become much more expensive than before!
As I showed before, in comparative terms cycling environment isn’t especially stable… but not especially unstable, either! Of course you can’t compare it with wholly different models like privately owned closed franchises whose relation to the market is completely different and internally less competitive.
Team Sky used to have the budget record and their £17m for 2011 (£23m adjust for inflation, €27m) would see them ranked near the bottom in the World Tour today.
Yes, it’s shocking, same when one tracks, say, the Movistar deals (committed sponsor and all).
IF, and it’s a big IF, Brailsford is returning to the INEOS cycling team in an as yet unknown role, it suggests the team will continue in some form or other. I tend to favour the Total Energy merger rumours for several reasons. 1. Radcliff knows and lives in Monaco as does the MD of Total Energy. 2. The two companies have similar business interests. 3. The Total Energy team are having limited success.
Although INEOS are performing a little better than last year, they still lack creditable three week tour or classic winners. Budget seemingly the limiting factor. Ratcliff and his companies have been hard hit by the craze for ‘net zero’ policies, which appear here to stay for at least the next couple of years.
I wonder how much of an effect on sponsors, (and potential new ones), the reduction in visibility to the TV audience has had? I’m referring to the loss of free-to-air broadcasts, due to the deals made for exclusive rights, which have then become more and more restricted in terms of availability to viewers.
It’s likely small, the only change seems to be in the UK from ITV’s subsidiary channel ITV4 to TNT. The mass audiences remain in the same place in France, Spain, Italy etc. But this matters, losing this audience in the UK doesn’t help, the sport’s reach is greyed out here.
It’s not small, because cycling isn’t organised or sold as a whole, so while the effect on the TDF or Dauphiné can be appreciated but it’s modest against their past overall, yet the Giro lost up to 1M average viewers in France and nearly the same in Spain, which is notable given that the home audience, while being the most relevant, sits at 1.7-2M.
Of course if you consider that having audience in other countries is a plus, that hurts even more, while it’s the other way around if you care little about foreign mass spectators and are only interested in the niche type.
Same for the Ronde which similarly lost big chunks of their total viewership cutting Spain and Italy out from the national broadcasting. Figures were lower in absolute terms, of course, but dare I say probably even more impacting as a share of their global public, as in Italy they collected some 800K while their home broadcast hit its record 1.3-1.4M (admittedly Spain was quite much lower).
However, the net loss is minor as far as Classics are concerned, due to the public already being much more motivated and specialised, so to say: hence Eurosport could multiply their figures for the Ronde in Italy up to 270K, which means that they actually lost “only” 600K or so (in Italy only). Still a big fraction of their total, but GT are absolutely tragic from that POV, especially the Giro which had a proven track of high foreign audiences while the Vuelta has been traditionally much weaker (not selling their rights to Italy, to start with).
If you also consider Sanremo (which also had good foreign viewing figures, in the number range of Classics), the impact for RCS has been huge… in terms of viewing figures. But maybe they’re opting for a different model, as I’ve been saying.
The impact is very high for Flanders Classics, too, because Italy was a decent TV market for Gand and Amstel, too. But I guess that in their case they hope that ES figures won’t be very different from the generalist broadcaster, anyway not a different magnitude at least!
I’m not aware at all of the situation in France and I’d be curious to know, as it’s a solid market for cycling TV. Were the Belgian and Dutch Classics ever on a free national broadcast? Are they still there? What were/are their figures like? How do they do on ES, if they jumped to exclusive?
The figures for this year will be interesting as the UK viewer numbers will no doubt drop substantially after Eurosport was closed here and the TNT subscription was set at £31 a month (to help cover the huge cost of the football rights they bought). It will be even worse next year when the Tour is no longer on free TV (ITV pulls out of cycling broadcasting after this year’s race).
I thought it was Deceuninck who weren’t carrying on their title sponsorship, but would be continuing as a ‘lesser’ sponsor?
Quite right, I was going off memory and should have checked. Will update the piece above.
One team to cross of the question mark list? The “Ag2r are leaving” paragraph is now resolved as this departure is being reported elsewhere… and in comes L’Oréal as the new co-sponsor according to Le Télégramme so this is a boost to the team… but L’Equipe say it is not happening yet, the team says no and so does the cosmetics company. So still one to watch?
My personal take on the sponsorship issue is that a big part of it is much more about sociology than about economy (of course both are intertwined).
My point (which I’ve defended in the past, so I’ll keep it short) is that one factor we often underestimate is the importance of the strictly personal, social, cultural background of team managers in a system which has them as the main sponsorship seekers.
A given team manager can speak the “right language” to get the money from the owner of a local manufacturing family company, another one can be at ease convincing the marketing department of a transnational corporation.
And, sometimes, “language” might not even include the inverted commas! While on this website we might assume that English is the everywhere-spoken koiné, it still isn’t even in some WT teams… imagine that.
We’re going from a model where you’d better talk well a range of local “dialetti” each with proper accent to English being the key to most sponsorship doors.
Then… do all team managers have the right mobile phone numbers to call? Do they now how to achieve them? Do they know when is it better to write and when to call? Do they know what the right (as in, more convincing) manners are once in person? A powerpoint or some male bonding with beer and frites? Dress code?
Then again, you start with the big big subject of personal networking and how to build it up.
This is of course an extreme picture and wild generalisation, but I hope you get my point. Even among big or relatively big companies the language you must speak with Groupama and Ag2R is different from what you must say to Decathlon or Lidl which on turn might differ from INEOS or Red Bull, and again what about Bahrain, UAE or Astana (or FDJ and Lotto…), just as the sort of issues you must ready to face are wildly different.
Just as when speaking of total audience figures of a GT we might expect that a balanced race might work better than one-man domination, then it turns out that it changes little while it matters much more if you have 4 or 6 sprint stages, or if many of those sprint stages end up with a totally flat last hour… equally, we spend time and energy thinking how the calendar or some other mechanism might bring more sponsors in, while probably the actual key questions are much more “local” and “specific”, set in a layer of the social process which we don’t even think about.
I´m utterly amazed or at least a little bit surprised that at this (m€) level there aren´t agents/intermediaries/matchmakers/whatever whose area of specialty is precisely to find sponsors for teams (and to assist in negotiations etc).
It is naturally one of the main responsibilities of a team manager (with or without the title of GM) to make sure that there is enough money in the till to run the show, but trusting on his personal network and charm to reach and acquire sponsors smacks of amateurism that no longer has a place in this world.
There are some people who do this. And it is very well paid. The Al Ula deal at Jayco for example.
The agency that delivered Citroën to Ag2r brokered a deal that saw the car company pay €6.1m a year for three years and the agency got 7% of this each year or €1.3 million in total.
And, let me add, L’Oréal adds up to the list of sponsors which might appreciate if “their” team had some more *mass* visibility as a form of raw marketing bombing across the main European or ex-European consumer countries, say Italy, UK, Spain, the Netherlands (do they have the RCS races on free national broadcast?), instead of throwing millions of viewers to the bin -___-
Same for Decathlon, Lidl, and of course Red Bull, Alpecin, Cofidis, EF…
L’Oréal! If confirmed there will be a lot of teams struggling on modest budgets looking on enviously. Several tens of millions will be a drop in the ocean for the sponsor.
I’m rather surprised that L’Oreal are apparently going to start sponsoring a men’s cycling team. I would have thought a cosmetic company would be more likely to sponsor a women’s team. Or have they recently launched some products for men that they want to promote? (Being female, I have minimal knowledge of men’s toiletries.)
L’Oreal do have a mens line (looking at their website) and I seem to remember that on TV Geraint Thomas was shown putting on the sun cream at a race, so some “carefully placed” products at the start and finsh might well pop up. Glad to hear that a sponsor has been found.
It’s a big growth area, starting from a low base. I seem to remember L’Oréal men’s ads on the Tour de France coverage last summer.
Sephora were interested in the old B&B team or so the manager Pineau claimed before the team folded at the last minute.
Back in 2000, Michael Schumacher could be seen in ads for a men´s shampoo and I could – if I thought the readers would appreciate it – link to a pic of Lewis Hamilton taking a shower as a “global spokesperson” for L’Oreal’s Men Expert line of products.
So, it´s nothing new – and actually I´m a bit surprised that the only brand of men´s toiletries we´ve seen in cycling so far has been Alpecin.
(Or is my memory yet again full of holes large enough to let a much reduced peloton through?)
Ah, right, a possible sponsorship of a men’s team makes more sense then.
You may want to look in what the mega company L’Oreal is all about. It’s way more than some concealer in the drugstore shelf wit the name L’Oreal on it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Or%C3%A9al#Brand_portfolio
And for those who are criticizing UAE for political reasons under every post, may take a look under”Controversies” on the same site. There is no nice company in capitalism.
So we learn that L´Oreal owns 9% of a pharmaceutical company and has acquired a company manufacturing sustainable showerheads (for use in hair salons, among other places).
I still would not want to try and advance an argument that L´Oreal is not sponsoring a pro cycling team in order to sell personal care products.
PS It may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but I don´t think there are nice companies in a socialist (or whatever), either 🙂
If you weren’t out to deliver snarky comments, you could learn that they make a lot of men’s fragrances,, and it’s not about showerheads.
FDK!
Snarky?! Not my intention at all.
But how would you define the tone of your comment in the first place? Were you motivated by a simple wish to impart relevant, but hitherto completely missing information to the readers?
Where I come from fragrances come under the heading of personal care products.
I´m too old to know what “FDK” stands for and not interested enough to look it up.
Have a nice day and a wonderful life and do not let me spoil syour enjoyment of pro cycling!
Anna Gilmore doesn’t much agree with your PS, and she knows a thing or two on the subject ^__^
Is there a world that if Remco leaves, Quickstep merges with Alpecin to go back to its roots as a classics team?
As long as it can deliver at the Tour de France too. For all the publicity and business to business “VIP” opportunities in Flanders, this is a small market but Philipsen and Van der Poel offer plenty of assurance here.
But team mergers are last ditch things, you can put 30 riders and 30 riders together without firing half and upsetting a share of the remaining ones.