Women’s Pro Team Sponsors Explained

Watching the Femmes at the Tour de France? Do you know what all the team sponsorsdo? If you’ve ever wondered if Suez has something to do with water, or what Laboral Kutxa or VolkerWessels are about, here are some answers.

Visma-Lease A Bike is obvious as it’s the sister team to the men’s World Tour squad, with Norwegian IT services and payroll software specialist company Visma sponsoring alongside Lease A Bike, a company that offers bike leasing services to other companies and their employees that belongs to PON, a Dutch conglomerate that has a big footprint in cycling owning brands like Cervelo, Cannondale and Schwinn.

FDJ United-Suez sees the French state lottery provider and now Europe’s second biggest gambling company alongside Suez which is a French company that has two main activities, waste management and water services, so think of fleets of garbage trucks and recycling plants, as well as reservoirs, piping and sewage. Beyond the two headline names the jersey is notable for more blue chip names like Gan insurance and CB which is France’s answer to Visa payments. Team manager Stéphane Delcourt could teach his French peers in the men’s World Tour some lessons.

Canyon-SRAM is a factory team with German bike brand Canyon alongside US component manufacturer SRAM. The team has just dropped Zondacrypto mid-season after the Polish company vanished taking some people’s savings and has just signed a German retail brokerage platform Scaleable Capital inviting the obvious question of if they’ll scale up investment.

UAE Team l’IMAD is the Gulf state we know from the men’s team. IMAD is the sovereign wealth fund that used to be called ADQ hence the mid-season name change for the team, the fund has been chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security adviser, pictured with his trademark shades above. As well as spy chief he’s behind many corporate activities and the women’s team shares some of the same backers and links as the men’s team for example Analog is an IT company owned by G42 which has also been chaired by TBZ.

Team SD Worx-Protime has Belgian corporate services company SD Worx which claims to be “Europe’s leading HR, pay and time partner”, so playing a similar role to Visma. Protime is a brand belonging to SD Worx, its a corporate HR service to track and time workers to measure when they are in the office and logging time spent on a workstation.

Movistar is the Spanish telecoms operate Telefonica and its mobile brand and not just with Marlen Reusser today but arguably a team with a consistently better women’s team than the men but because of international recruitment, having hired Annemiek van Vleuten in the past while seeing home talent Paula Blasi go abroad. She has been strongly linked to the Spanish squad but things seem increasingly open at the moment.

Lidl-Trek is the German discount supermarket alongside the US bike brand and a big budget outfit keen to be cited among the top tier teams for both the men and women. The team is owned by Lidl which is interesting because the retailer’s premise is low prices and no frills but here they are spending probably €60 million a year on sport, still small compared to €140 billion in annual revenues but a big frill.

AG Insurance-Soudal is the sister team of the men’s Soudal-Quickstep outfit but think of a step-sister because it has had its own independent history before joining up with the men’s team and while the kit is similar and they share a bike sponsor, it’s a Belgian entity while the men’s squad is run out of Luxembourg. AG does consumer insurance, like car, travel and accident cover while Soudal is adhesives and other chemicals for construction and DIY.

EF Education-Oatly sees Swedish-Swiss language education company EF Education alongside Oatly, an “oat drink” – don’t say milk – company that was also started in Sweden but has since floated on the New York Stock Exchange.

Fenix-PremierTech is led by Italian company Arpa with its Fenix brand, it’s a plastic surface product offering “interior solutions”, think wall or worktop coverings that offer colour and are easy to wipe. The Belgian squad is is the sister team of the Alpecin-PremierTech men’s team but notable because of the different title sponsor for each. They share PremierTech, the Canadian horticultural company that started out selling peat but now offers agriscience products and machinery to plant seedlings and package crops.

Human Powered Health is a US healthcare company that specialises helping to promote athletic health, offering nutritional advice and VO2 max testing for example and a subsidiary of Optum which is itself part of UnitedHealth group, the American health and insurance giant.

Liv Jayco Alula sees Giant’s women’s brand Liv in lights alongside Australian caravan and camping car maker Jayco and Saudi tourist project Al Ula. Like the men’s team, it’s been a pet project of Gerry Ryan who started out backing women’s cycling in the 1990s by personally funding individual athletes to train for the Olympics. His long run as a patron of the team, men and women, could be coming to an end.

Team Picnic-PostNL is a copy-paste of the men’s text, Picnic is a Dutch food retailer start-up that does home delivery, an online grocer and supermarket that is now expanding into France. PostNL is the Dutch postal service. Alas just like the men’s World Tour team it’s also struggling, no wins this season and overtaken by several second tier teams on the UCI rankings.

St Michel-Preference Home-Auber 93 is closing its men’s team to focus on the women. St Michel is an industrial bakery company making madeleines and biscuits which can be found for sale all over France, from supermarkets to railway vending machines. Preference Home is a house building company operating in the Paris area. Auber 93 is the town of Aubervilliers and Seine-Saint-Denis department, long a working class area just to the north-east of Paris where the team has its HQ. It has had a joint men’s team at Continental level but this is stopping to focus on the women’s project.

Cofidis is the French consumer credit company, it started out offering credit to people shopping from mail order catalogues and outgrew the parent business. Just like the men’s team, it has a roster of riders from other European markets it operates in, like Poland, Czechia and Italy. While several teams have men’s and women’s squads, Cofidis is notable as the only sponsor also funding a paracyling team too.

Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi is the sister team to the Euskatel-Euskadi men’s team only with Laboral Kuxta they have a credit union as a sponsor of the women’s team, kutxa is Basque for a caja in Spanish. Like other women’s teams, it only has a minority of local cyclists with only a few Basques on the books.

VolkerWessels is a Dutch construction company building everything from housing in the Netherlands to railway infrastructure projects in the UK and reportedly the country’s second largest builder. It’s part owned by the Wessels family with workers also having a share of equity. Construction is not an advanced business but the kit looks like it was designed twenty years ago.

Uno-X is the Norwegian retail company Reitan and its service station business, offering fuel and charging points across Norway and Denmark. While the men’s team is 100% Norwegian and Danish, the women’s team is more international.

Lotto Intermarché Ladies is the full name, the “ladies” suffix does feel like something out of a Bronte novel that could be revised. Lotto is the Belgian state lottery and so by extension the Belgian government with a mission to support women’s cycling in Flanders and Wallonia alike although the roster looks very Flemish. Meanwhile Intermarché is a French supermarket giant that operates across Europe from Portugal to Poland via franchise that buy centrally from the company which itself sources and produces a lot of goods, it has extensive agricultural holdings and Europe’s largest fishing fleet.

Ma Petite Entreprise is French for “My Small Business” and a crowd-funded team backed by small businesses. There are different membership tiers, from individual supporters paying €120 a year to sponsors ranging between “access” entry point of €750 a year to the “pro” tier of €15,000, and there are over 642 of these corporate sponsors. It’s a novel project as an alternative model to the title sponsor system that every other team relies on and interesting because of this.

Mayenne Monbana My Pie sees the Mayenne department of France as the lead choice. With local government in France under pressure to make cuts you can see this may not be an essential service but there’s a logic to it with local politicians wanting to reach people in France to sell their area as a dynamic and active place to relocate. Monbana is a chocolate company located in the Mayenne. My Pie is a French company selling pies, founded by two entrepreneurs who discovered the New Zealand and Australian staple of pies when on a trip “Down Under” and decided to import the idea to France. Getting the French to eat new food may not sound easy but meaty sauce inside a buttery pastry is an easy sell and the business seems to be growing well.

• Men’s Pro Team sponsors explained