Having looked at the financial fortunes and prospects for teams last year, the topic keeps coming up already in 2026 so here’s a fresh review of pitfalls ahead.
Like last year’s post, the point here is not to shout “fire” in a crowded place and spread doom. It’s just a look at the issues ahead and how some teams have challenges to solve.
We’ll start with Picnic-PostNL as the team only got a one year licence from the UCI. This decision wasn’t helpful but practically one or three years, there’s always an annual review in October so it’s less admin and more a way of saying out loud the team must resolve financial issues. The team has a side-hustle in selling off riders which reached a new level with the sale of Oscar Onley to Ineos, generating millions in revenue. But this probably backfills previous losses. Fabio Jakobsen is on the last year of big contract while still struggling for results so the outlook could ease but right now the team hasn’t had a win this year and sits on 25th place on the UCI rankings, all early but a tough start. Some good news is that Dutch postal service PostNL is keen to back the project.
Bahrain-Victorious is code for Bahrain-Your Name Here and the team has been open about wanting a co-sponsor but so far nobody. It’s not an obvious match to have a co-sponsor named alongside a repressive state and this juxtaposition limits the scope. But the team’s ambitions are restrained by the lack of another sponsor.
EF Education First-Easypost has gone public to find a co-sponsor. It’s not clear if Easypost is stopping but the the point is EF is willing to become the junior partner in naming rights if the team can find a new backer. A lot hinges on this because if they can land one then the team can get the financial firepower it needs, right now it can sustain a grand tour GC challenge with the likes of Richard Carapaz and in Ben Healy it has as solid chance of a Tour de France stage win too, short of hiring Jonathan Milan or Tadej Pogačar. If no sponsor is found then the troubles could begin because while EF wants to stay, can it shoulder all the costs?
As said here a few times last year you could see a few dark clouds for Visma-Lease a Bike. The jersey is getting crowded with logos as the team seeks as much revenue as possible, costs have been cut with riders unloaded. Visma’s stockmarket float was also cited as a possible threat as the Norwegian IT company could change its marketing; now it’s doing this ahead of the float where saving tens of millions a year can make the business hundreds of millions more valuable. Which leaves the team searching for a big backer. For all the relaxed briefing from the team there’s still an alarm bell as it needs to find someone soon, there’s no cushion of capital to spend while waiting for a new backer. It ought to be an easy sell but that makes it a bellwether case.
Groupama-FDJ have a joint sponsorship agreement that runs until the end of 2027. That sounds like a long time away but now is the time to review this and here comes the problem. The costs of backing the team go up and up but the results have gone in the other direction, especially after Thibaut Pinot has left. They haven’t won a Tour stage since 2018. The development team is a calling card as it can unearth talent but it’s also a cost to run it.
Lotto-Intermarché is newly formed from the merger and so for now there’s no worry. But is it a sustainable project? Time will tell but Lotto brings a political angle as the Belgian state lottery funding means the team’s funding is a national affair and comes with scrutiny from politicians. Like other teams can the costs of backing the project can keep rising but will politicians support this? It places more burden on Intermarché and the French sponsor needs to be aligned with the Belgian backers, you can imagine Intermarché wanting more French riders but Lotto insisting on an even balance of Flemish and Walloon Belgians.
Soudal-Quickstep is in an interesting season. It’s built the team around Remco Evenepoel only he has left and so it is trying to revert to the wolfpack of old and pivot back to classics and one day races, stages included. Only this turn might take time. The nervous part is the Soudal sponsorship. Remember the sponsor and its founder Vic Swerts almost dropped the team to “merge” with Visma in the wake of the Jumbo supermarket quitting the Dutch team. But Swerts stayed, in part keen to support Evenepoel. Now that’s changed it’s a story to watch.
NSN? In a sport driven by naming rights, being called Never Say Never is bold. There is a concept of having a cycling team that is not a textile billboard. Instead the strength comes from establishing a visual identity so strong that you don’t have to read “Soudal” on the shorts or “Tudor” on a jersey because you’ve already thought it. However this squad appears to be more like “Never Say Israel” and a rebrand to keep protestors away. It is backed by some wealthy companies and individuals but what they’re getting back isn’t clear. So look to see if the project evolves during the year and what it does once the thrill of the Tour de France start is over.
Jayco-Al Ula had a wobble on the final approach to World Tour registration for last year but in the end Jerry Ryan came good and backed the team for three more years. But it came close to stopping, this was not an admin bungle. Ryan is another backer confronted with rising costs but diminishing returns and also the tricky path of promoting Australian sport and giving their riders a path to the top. The team needs Australian talent but has to bid alongside other squads for it which creates an asymmetry, they really want Aussies more than others and so risk paying a premium for them. They may not have to outbid every team to lure Aussies “home” but they have to be close.
Uno-X have the same issue as Jayco when it comes to recruiting home talent and only compounded since they only hire Norwegian and Danish riders. It does make for a coherent project whether on the team bus or in business given the sponsor only has business in these markets but again they have to bid big to secure home talent. The real concern is how long can a relatively small business sustain a World Tour team? Uno-X is a brand within the Reitan conglomerate whose name also appears on the kit, itself and also the Rema 100 stores it owns and the wider business has interests across the Baltic so there’s probably cover to recruit here too. But for now how long does Uno-X want to stay in the sport? But there’s good news this morning as the team has picked up a sponsor outside of Reitan’s portfolio in Faxe Kondi, a soft drink brand.
Ineo Grenadiers has TotalEnergies as a co-sponsor, the template for many teams looking to retain ownership but expand with a co-sponsor so it’s ahead of others. So safe? The parent company Ineos has financial strains and has cut back on its sports sponsorship. Since then things have not got easier, its bonds have taken a dive which signals corporate distress and specifically the Grenadier car project has had some headwinds too. But the saving grace is personal as Jim Ratcliffe really enjoys having a cycling team. The only remaining question is the burden-sharing between the two sponsors for the future.
XDS-Astana seem to be thriving as a team. But can this sustain the sponsorship? XDS is the Cinese bike company with eyes on mimicking the growth story of Giant, selling everything from kids bikes to World Tour team issue bikes and keen to do this in its own name rather than as an OEM manufacturer. But funding a World Tour team is an expensive way to do this, it can easily cost ten times more. Canyon and Specialized find it more efficient to supply two teams each; there’s only Trek left and now it’s junior partner; Decathlon is a sponsor but to promote wider retail sales. Plus there’s Kazakh political risk, the team can promote the nation and its sovereign wealth fund but is down to three Kazakhs now.
Conclusion
As established in the previous blog post, there’s more money than ever coming into the sport. It’s boom time. So this post feels like pointing out the lone cloud in the sky on a summer’s day.
However it’s not poking around for the sake of finding negatives, indeed one team has been put on notice by the UCI and others have gone public about needing to find extra funding. Some of these questions can be existential, but in many cases it’s not binary and more about where teams want to get to in the coming years. So while you watch their riders on the road, keep an eye on the moves management make this season too.
Jayco gave at least started the year in style but it remains to be seen if they can keep it up.
The queen stage of the PVSL Tasmanian tour was won by a 17 year old who is going into their development team .. mountain bike emohasis for the moment but the potential is obvious.
The tone of the piece suggests we’re in a bit of a bubble situation. A boom time indeed, so is there a bust ahead? We also see sporadic hints of the AI investment bubble bursting, if that came to pass would this affect wider financial systems, and if so how did teams fair after the wider 2008 financial crash?
(I can’t say I was as invested in the minutiae of sponsorship etc as I am now, thanks to Inrng!)
If you weren’t interested in the minutiæ of sponsorship before now, we can be fairly sure you are not /that/ JV. 😉
Maybe I’m just here looking for tips. Now where did I put my Garmin…
(I’m def not *that* JV)
The decline of the ProTeam division would suggest that not all is well.
I think the Pro-teams are declining for two reasons:
More races have world tour teams in them. And the Grand Tours are now limited to the top 30 teams in the rankings, and only two true wildcard invitations. This means a Pro-Team with a domestic sponsor in France/Italy/Belgium/Spain can not race all the big races on their domestic circiut, which would keep their sponsor happy. Without access to the biggest races on their domestic circiut these teams are no longer viable.
World Tour teams now have development squads. This means Pro-Teams can not concentrate on young riders not yet ready for the world tour, and get results with these young riders. This reduces the interest in having these smaller teams in races, and hence reduces interest from sponsors.
Personally, I agree with DaveRides, and think the hollowing out of the Pro-Tour ranks is a very serious issue. But I don’t think it is necessarily the same issue as the struggle that some world tour teams have in raising money.
The sport wasn’t too dependent on banks and it was also on the up at the time, this was when Sky, Greenedge and others were buying into the sport. But at a much lower price of course. €20 million was superteam status then, today that is relegation candidate.
Re: Bahrain and what you later comment on bike sponsorship. It’s a curious case as Bianchi entered as a bike provider and could maybe be interested in placing their name on the shirt as Merida did for long (before stepping down in 2020 while still providing bikes). Bahrain has a strong Italian component and a star rider in Lenny Martinez, which means that it could have a had a key impact in the two top markets for Bianchi. But the magnitude of the investment has changed so much that it doesn’t make sense anymore for companies in the range of tens or hundreds of millions of revenue, when most big sponsors now think in billions.
The above is meaningful because it shows clearly that cycling’s situation is actually very dynamic, irrespective of the general frame of the sport which didn’t change much if at all.
It’s a bit like when we were talking of some races, say, Milano-Sanremo, which looked in extreme need of some course change, then…it suddenly is the most exciting competition precisely thanks to its course! Which doesn’t mean, of course, that some route adjusting isn’t needed again in a handful of seasons.
I also find it interesting that the longlist above displays a very broad variety of situations with different issues among them, which suggests that the problems aren’t structural, unless, of course, we bring our analysis to a point of higher abstraction.
If anything, one very unspecific common point shared by most teams above is their extremely strong bind with a nation State, currently or in their very recent history; EF and Quickstep being probably the main exceptions (QS has a strong Belgian identity, but they weren’t funded as a national project and have been having mixed international owners for a while). Visma is also a peculiar case because they’ve been actually trying hard to move away from their “Dutch national team” identity, and partly succeeded, but I believe they’re partly still in that process.
It’s not something which I consider negatively, and there are exceptions as UAE or, to a certain point, Movistar, but it’s a symptom of a significant transition in how the sport is perceived or self-perceived.
I think there is a structural part to it, that for commercial sponsors with marketing criteria for returns, rather than nation states or billionaires, find the sport can be expensive and we’re seeing sponsors backing off. Visma and EF both seem to be saying “enough, we like the sport but can’t spend more”.
Or it’s forcing mergers, see Lotto and Intermarché and we might see more of these being explored but they’re complicated even trying to merge two Belgian teams and done largely for rescue purposes. The idea for these two teams was to have a “superteam” by combining their budgets but it turns out the funding didn’t increase notably.
If the financial side doesn’t improve it wouldn’t be a surprise if PostNL sell Poole and Hamilton to Ineos then fold or merge with another team. Hopefully not though as the team structure seems good.
Also Rabobank, I was assuming them sponsoring VLB from last year was a prelude to becoming title sponsor at some point
Team Rabobank-PostNL anyone?
Two other aspects, partly related to what DaveRides underlines above (and rightly so), besides the interesting observations by John.
What follows is quite secundary issues, but they’ve got an impact, especially speaking of sponsorship, which relies on image and identity.
In a sense, money calls money. Some sponsors will invest in a rich sport because it’s a sport for the rich. It must look expensive, sophisticated, technological. No matter if it was (?) much more sophisticated and technically challenging when the subtleties were, say, tactical ones. Just throw in some small talk about figures, be it percentages of marginal gains, w/kg, coefficients and somebody in need of pretending to have an access to that complex world of control over chaos will pay. Then others of the same kind will pay for the same. Of course, never ask why all that control over performance (how was that crypto claim?, “trust proven by performance” ROTFL) won’t prevent a top science team to have its notable ups and downs in performance in a few seasons time.
Which brings us to the second point: some of the above have an ability to sense when performance can be someway bought by money, be it through marginal gains or other technological aspects, and enter the sport in order to win, and win big. The problem is that when many agents pretending to win, win and win come into a sport where just a tiny percentage of athletes ever wins much, and structurally so, it’s complicated to satisfy everyone. We can see how intelligent team managers have been able to sell a different concept, starting precisely with *the real* 😉 JV, but you can feel the tension in his project, too, probably both from the inside and the outside. Cofidis, Movistar, Astana, FDJ etc., or Bardiani, Unibet have been trying with more or less success to build on different narratives, but it sure isn’t easy. The paradox is that as big, big sponsors come in, it’s more and more the sort of companies which have a mentality of victory only. It’s an issue with some nations, too, of course. This creates even higher pressure to get wins even in secundary contexts, gone is now that idea once so characteristical of cycling that an athlete, even a top one, could race just to get into form hence knowing he or she wasn’t going to have much chances of a win, or at least not through mere physical superiority. Such a situation leaves less shades of gray for races where you could have big names but not on top form – now it feels like that what’s worth being won is *only* where the top dogs are, but if they’re there, no occasion to shine is left for the rest.
A provisional positive reaction of the sport to these two challenges has been rotation. Top teams have gone through 3-4 years cycles (will it happen to UAE too? I suspect they wouldn’t be as willing to slow down a little), the new narrative of versatile talents suggesting an interest of the big names in “winning everything” has had them tackling a broader range of races. Rotation also means that you receive limelight then you must endure and manage some time in the shades. Plus, obviously, as in a breakaway, it works if it works and while it works… skip a turn or two and the whole dynamic equilibrium falls into a standstill.
Groupama-FDJ had a development squad before the others and had the pick of promising riders to recruit. This worked initially with Geniets, Scaroni, Stewart, Askey, Penhoët, Pithie, Grégoire, Martinez, Watson, Pickering, Hobbs… all going on to WT teams. The problem was that not many stayed, and now attracting talent is so much harder with development teams two a penny.