Sponsorship has flooded in, team budgets expanded, rider pay soared and real gains have been made in safety, ethics and institutions. Today riders enjoy longer contracts while teams have become multi-decade franchises, some are even outlasting their founders. And yet…
Pro teams are brittle, what looks strong today could snap tomorrow. First EF the other day and now Visma-Lease A Bike are reportedly looking for new sponsors. Others are having doing the same in private.
Once upon a time
Cycling was a cheap sport. It offered big returns on investment, a sponsor could enjoy publicity that would otherwise cost much more to buy elsewhere, whether in other sports or in planned marketing campaigns.
It was a bargain because it was risky. “Investing” in cycling was cheap in the same way buying the debt of a developing country caught in a currency crisis is cheap. Plenty of brand managers opted for tennis or billboard campaigns instead.
Today
Pro cycling isn’t the darling of brand managers, in fact they’ve often been outbid by nation states and billionaires. The sport is no longer cheap. When he founded the Française des Jeux team Marc Madiot said when he was an épicier, a shopkeeper, and now he’s stepping down from a multinationale. Lidl-Trek has a staff of around 150 from coaches to content creators and it’s not exceptional, when the Arkéa-B&B team folded last year owner-manager Emmanuel Hubert said he had the grim task of informing 150 staff.
If you prefer data, the UCI collates all the team budgets and this leaked to La Gazzetta (€). The total for the 18 men’s World Tour teams went from €473 million in 2023 (average: €26m per team) to €663 million for 2026 but note this latter number is for 18 World Tour plus two more, presumably Tudor and Pinarello-Q36.5, (average: €33.1m per team). That’s 27% per team in four years, or 6.5% a year. 2023-2026 is not exceptional as high single digit and sometimes double-digit increases have been ordinary for the past 15 years.
In many ways this is great, more money flowing into the sport looks strong: if you want a crisis, imagine the opposite. A 27% rise is great if you’re a rider or an agent as the bulk of this uplift goes on athlete pay. But otherwise it’s just an increase in costs. The sport has not got 27% more exciting, the calendar is not 27% bigger, audiences haven’t grown by 27%, TV rights are not worth 27% more. It’s largely the same sport, only suddenly more expensive.
- Note: there are more hours of women’s racing on prime time but this is a separate spending category rather than more for existing money and if there are inflationary concerns too, there’s is big growth in audiences, calendar and more.
This where the problems stack up. Marc Madiot’s successor Thierry Cornec has to go to FDJ and Groupama and ask them to renew sponsorship for a team with a budget of about €25 million when it was €15 million not that long ago. If they pay more what extra do the backers get in return? It’s not clear, and maybe they’re still happy with the deal. Similar conversations are happening across other teams.
Other talks have reached a different stage, EF is now seeking a co-sponsor and while this is being spun as an opportunity to join the team, if no prospective partner emerges to share the costs then you can imagine EF being unwilling to fund the team if loses ground to others.
Now Visma-Lease A Bike is reported to be looking for a new title sponsor. The language is similar to EF’s appeal, with talk of taking “the next step” but what it really means is just being able to keep up with rising costs. More money is needed just to stand still. Although if there is a corporate, sovereign or billionaire who wants to go large then… it raises the bar for other teams to match.
This blog is due an updated version of last year’s Race For Survival post and rather than catalogue concerns team-by-team, the topic here the collective challenge of teams having to ask sponsors for more money only to deliver the same.
It’s this inflation rate that is destabilising. Imagine being the marketing manager or on the board of a potential team sponsor. You’re thinking of backing a team and if the entry price is €20 million today then it means you’re potentially going to have to pay 10-20% more soon just to stay still. Your €20 million ticket buys you mid-table status with a shot some glory in July included but what chance this sum funds relegation fodder in 2028? It is a hard sell to sponsors already worried about injury risk and other perils of sports sponsorship; and it can’t be easy for some nation state backed teams either; nor billionaires as we’ve seen with Ineos.
Another viewpoint to see how expensive sponsorship has become is the pipeline of teams and sponsors wanting to take part.
As we’ve seen recently it’s already not obvious who to invite the Tour de France, there’s no surplus of competitive teams in the second tier. Indeed there are only 16 ProTeams in the second tier of the men’s sport compared to 18 at the top, just seven in the women’s Tour compared to 14. Normally a pyramid-shape would be healthier as teams compete to reach the top.
Today Tudor and Pinarello-Q36.5 are waiting to take the place of any World Tour teams that fold. But beyond this? It looks barren. See Alpecin’s search for replacement for Deceuninck and despite the allure of Van der Poel it “only” got PremierTech, and presumably in part because of internal ructions in another team; likewise Ineos’s search for a sponsor brought them TotalEnergies. Cannibalism is rarely the sign of a feast.
What to do?
The UCI is launching a consultation. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it is the start of a process and the scope could be radical. The screengrab below from the UCI’s letters to teams and organisers yesterday frames some of the issues:
Each points is potentially substantial, and a minefield. Remember talks on team budget caps broke down last year and surprisingly it wasn’t just the big teams that cratered them.
Rather than waiting for the UCI, teams confronted with this need a coherent project more than ever, and they know this. As proof it’s not all doom and gloom, see how Decathlon has bought the team off Ag2r and the prospect has enticed CMA CGM to come aboard.
Conclusion
There have long been big differences among the teams, a decade ago BMC and Team Sky had more resources than IAM or Dimension Data; a decade before that CSC and Phonak outspent Crédit Agricole and Lampre. The gap between the top teams and the rest has been persistent issue but it is widening. And over time budgets and costs have risen. Much of this is to be welcomed, riders enjoy better pay and longer contracts in part because scandal and the memory of it has faded, while teams are responsible for coaching their own riders while logistics to public relations have been modernised.
But the rising costs have been inexorable. Budget inflation is putting pressure on teams and their sponsors in all directions. Rivals are dominating in a winner-takes-all domain, yet the losers in this scenario are expected to pay more to continue. It’s this that makes pro cycling a more expensive proposition and is starting to put the squeeze on.
Teams are now going public about seeking extra sponsors which implies discreet approaches so far haven’t worked; their peers are probably knocking on the same doors. We’re starting to see some cracks appear.
Last offseason there were several discussions of whether Pogi was “good for cycling” or not. At the beginning of 2026, I would ask the same question about UAE as a whole. If one team is in a hegemonic position, it doesn’t look like a great proposition for new sponsors to jump in the fray. I’ve enjoyed seeing the way Lidl, Decathlon and Red Bull have beefed up their respective teams, but it feels like everyone except the very few are fighting for scraps.
The list IR shared in this article is a good sign that the UCI understands the peril, but we’ve heard all the talk before. Ultimately, it’s still ASO’s game and it will be difficult to try to wrest economic power from their grasp. I hope some kind of change can happen, because we all want to see a competitive peloton and potentially having interesting teams like EF and Visma fold would be a huge loss.
“Cycling … offered big returns on investment, a sponsor could enjoy publicity that would otherwise cost much more to buy elsewhere.”
The cost of sponsoring the team should rise until the return is the same as the return invested elsewhere: publicity should not be sold ‘on the cheap’. We are now getting to the efficient market price of sponsorship, with teams (and riders) earning more money. This is a good thing. Part of the way this is achieved is that old teams which don’t pull in the money are replaced by new teams with more sponsorship money behind them. This is tough luck for Plugge and Vaughters, but their whinging should be ignored.
The key fact to understand about cycling is that the teams are replaceable, but the races are not.
Aside: The key problem, in my view (touched on by Inner Ring) is that the domination of the world tour means there are fewer 2nd tier teams concentrating on their regional races, and bringing a lot to the sport of cycling. For example, the last Belgian Division 2 team is likely to discontinue at the end of the year.