The Total Energies team is saved. The new sponsor for 2027 is XEFI, a French IT services company. It’s a rescue in need of a rebuild.
XEFI (pronounce it “zeffy”) is a French firm that offers IT services to small and medium-sized businesses led by a charismatic founder Sacha Rosenthal who is often front and centre in their coverage, including at today’s press conference. Companies can rent hardware like PCs and XEFI will maintain and service them as well as setting up workplace networking and IT security. It’s one brand but the business model involves 150 local franchises across France and also in Belgium, Switzerland, Spain too. All these franchises are contributing to the group marketing budget to fund the three year sponsorship deal. And with this part of the sponsorship is working already as bloggers and readers alike have now heard of it.
Rosenthal comes from the Lyon area and he also behind Yotta Sports which organises triathlon and has in the past run trail running events like “Mauritius by UTMB”.
It’s a notable change from previous sponsors that have wanted to appeal directly to a mass market audience from Bonjour to Total. Look closely at the Tour de France crowds and many sport TotalEnergies t-shirts because the sponsor bought a place in the publicity caravan to give away tens of thousands of t-shirts and other goodies each day. Total certainly continue the caravan, and probably as a Netcompany-Ineos backer too.
But Xefi’s sponsorship is probably less about reaching everyone but reaching business owners and also giving local franchises some shared communications and also VIP days. If your chain of six bakeries and cafes signs up Xefi to install wifi networks; or your logistics firm leases a rack of servers for cloud computing, maybe you get to ride in a team car one day when the Tour de France comes near and so on.
This is an 11th hour rescue, perhaps not quite 59th minute as the UCI registration process could be postponed for a few weeks more but close to the deadline. The late rescue meant many of the team’s best riders have signed elsewhere, the team was not able to offer them any visibility for 2027. Even for those staying it’s not been easy, Rayan Boulahoite told DirectVelo he and others have been training not knowing if they’d be racing in 2027. We get the press conference today and there’s the UCI licence to validate next.
It’s not the first big save, the team was due to fold after 2010 but Europcar came in late and with hindsight surely got one of the best value cycling sponorships going.
The team is an institution that has been run out of a manor house in the Vendée countryside. The Manoir des Essarts is surrounded by a six hectares of land, sufficiently big that it’s not called the garden but le parc. It’s one difference to most teams that are run out of a warehouse on a logistics park; or just a mailbox in a tax shelter. Riders, pros and development riders alike, can stay in the house with its creaking stairs and dormitories although obviously salaried pros tend to want to live in their own place.
Team co-founder and figurehead today Jean-René Bernaudeau likes to make the point that he wants to develop his riders not just as cyclists but as humans. For the anecdote, team had a British U-23 who stuck an adhesive race number on some old furniture; he told to remove it but did it again and soon got asked to leave. If riders and staff have a shared BBQ outdoors its on them to tidy up afterwards too particularly the riders given staff spend time cleaning their bikes and carrying their luggage. It might seem very French – the 2026 roster is 100% français – but this is the team that gave the likes of Yukiya Arashiro, Rafaâ Chtioui and Natnael Berhane a go. Bernaudeau also recruited the likes of Rony Martias, Yohann Gène and Kévin Reza. If Benneton did the ads, Bernaudeau hired.
So far, so legendary but a touch of myth too. Many teams claim to be families but contract negotiations are business rather than nepotism; even if Giovanni Bernaudeau did get a ride. And as L’Equipe points out online, nobody ever got to the bottom of the cortisol testing that briefly halted Pierre Rolland.
More recently the team has been squeezed. It was born out of the Vendée-U amateur team, the thinking was if it was sending riders into the pro ranks why not retain them instead? Only the system of amateur teams has withered and instead many World Tour teams have their own development squad. If this “vertical integration” today is a copy of what Bernaudeau was doing 20 years ago, the problem for the French team is the likes of Decathlon, RedBull and UAE are eating their lunch, talent is siphoned away before it gets in the Vendée pipeline.
The squeeze has come in the other direction too with the team getting fewer invitations, it hasn’t had the “must have” riders since Peter Sagan – one of the oddest signings – left. Alas the uncertainty over the team has seen many of their best riders leave (Jegat, Jeannière, Burgeaudeau, Breuillard) so the appeal is diminished further for 2027. Still it looks likely to get a Tour de France start, if only because the competition for the two wildcard invites is light. As such the team is a vehicle to do the Tour de France if starting the race is the end in itself. But this is not settled, if, say Modern Adventure impress with results, make more signings and rise up the rankings then they’ll have some appeal which could come at the expense of XEFI.
Conclusion
A rescue and welcome news because of this. Now comes the rebuild. The glory days of Europcar may be hard to replicate but a few clever signings could open some doors. The team’s sponsor operates beyond France which should allow them to recruit wider too, former Paris-Nice winner Max Scachmann is linked to the team but they’ll have to plan beyond. While the sponsorship is to promote Xefi, its founder is also keen on sports and promotion so we’ll see how involved he gets too.