In the space of a few seasons, you’ve watched Jumbo disappear from the yellow and black, AG2R vanish after a 25‑year run, Israel‑Premier Tech morph into NSN Cycling Team, and a Women’s WorldTour squad like EF Education‑TIBCO‑SVB simply cease to exist.
The racing goes on. The logos change. What doesn’t really change is the basic fact that professional cycling lives and dies by those names on the jersey.
So why do brands keep writing the cheques? What’s the real upside for them, what pressure does that create on teams and races, and how stable is a sport where a single sponsor can pull 80‑plus percent of a budget overnight?
A sport built on the logo
Most big sports started with clubs, tickets and gates. Cycling started with sponsors.
Newspapers invented the early Classics and Grand Tours to sell copies. Bike factories like Peugeot funded the first superteams. By the 1950s, “extra‑sportif” sponsors – supermarkets, tobacco, kitchen appliances – were paying to put their names on squads that raced through town centres for free.
That origin story still matters. Unlike stadium sports, road cycling doesn’t sell 40,000 seats 20 times a year. Races happen on open roads, most fans pay nothing, and organisers capture the bulk of whatever broadcast money exists. Teams, by and large, don’t.
The result in 2025: Men’s WorldTour squads run on a collective budget north of €570 million, and an estimated 87% of that comes from sponsors, overwhelmingly the title partner on the jersey. Lose that backer, and you don’t lose a slice of income – you lose the oxygen.
Women’s cycling is following the same path at a smaller but growing scale: combined budgets have jumped from roughly €33 million in 2022 to about €70 million across 15 top teams, boosted almost entirely by new sponsors and a more professionalised calendar.
Cycling is not just supported by sponsors, rather it’s sponsorship‑native.
What sponsors actually buy
If you strip away the hospitality tents and glossy launch videos, a cycling sponsorship buys three big things: visibility, values, and access.
Visibility at a ridiculous price
For a marketing director, a WorldTour jersey is a live billboard that travels through city centres, mountain passes and living rooms for three weeks at a time. Grand Tours and Monuments deliver global broadcasts that many niche Olympic sports can only dream of. One successful Tour de France campaign can put a logo in front of hundreds of millions of eyeballs – not just once, but day after day.
Independent media‑value audits regularly show that the equivalent ad spend to match a top team’s TV and digital exposure would be many times the sponsorship fee. Adjusted to 2025 media rates, the “earned media” for a well‑performing WorldTour team often clears nine figures on paper.
For brands comfortable with that calculation, cycling is still a bargain compared with buying primetime spots around the UEFA Champions League or the NFL.
Values you can’t buy off the shelf
The second thing brands are buying is association. Cycling projects a useful cocktail: endurance, suffering, teamwork, innovation, increasingly sustainability.
If you’re a supermarket chain trying to feel local and family‑oriented, sponsoring a team that visits 20 countries but still hands out caps at a village finish works. If you’re a government‑linked airline or development agency, a team lets you attach yourself to global mobility and tourism narratives. If you’re a tech or data firm, you can literally plug your product into the race – think on‑screen live data, performance dashboards, logistics systems – and demonstrate capability in real time.
In a world where ESG checklists matter, cycling’s low‑carbon, human‑powered image is a magnet. Sponsors now push teams and organisers to quantify sustainability: fleet choices, waste, energy use. That alignment is part of the sell.
Access to people who actually care
Cycling fans aren’t just passive viewers; a large chunk ride, buy kit and obsess over gear. That makes them appealing to both endemic brands (bikes, apparel, nutrition) and non‑endemic ones (banks, telecoms, supermarkets) that want to be part of a specific lifestyle.
On top of that, a WorldTour partnership is a powerful B2B tool. There’s VIP hospitality on iconic climbs, factory client days with riders, internal staff engagement, content for marketing teams to use year‑round. Many sponsors will tell you that the most tangible ROI isn’t a TV logo at all – it’s the multi‑million‑euro contract signed in a hospitality tent after a mountain stage.
That mix of mass reach, emotional storytelling and targeted access is what keeps the sponsorship pipeline flowing, even as individual names come and go.
The hidden cost for teams and races
All of that upside isn’t free. The same model that gives brands leverage puts teams and organisers under intense pressure – sporting, financial, and sometimes ethical.
One‑sponsor dependency
When roughly 87% of your budget comes from the name on the jersey, you are essentially an outsourced marketing department with bikes.
That creates concentration risk. When Jumbo stepped away from the superteam it co‑funded, it reportedly removed more than €20 million a year from the balance sheet. When TIBCO and Silicon Valley Bank exited EF’s women’s project, the team simply disappeared - albeit reborn with EF's continued support. Arkéa and B&B Hotels both signalling non‑renewal for 2026 immediately put their French WorldTour squad in “mortal danger”.
There is almost no buffer. Few teams have significant alternative revenues, and there’s no comparable “central pot” like the Champions League or Premier League rights money. UCI rules demand bank guarantees to protect rider salaries, but guarantees don’t save the project when a title sponsor walks.
Performance as marketing
If a brand is paying for visibility, it wants to be visible. That shapes sporting decisions.
You see it in race calendars weighted towards sponsor markets; in stage‑hunting rather than GC ambitions for teams that need daily breakaway airtime; in riders doing extra content days, meet‑and‑greets and travel that don’t show up on the training plan.
At the sharp end, the demand to be competitive can fuel an arms race in equipment, staff and marginal gains – costs that then need to be justified back to the boardroom. At the less wealthy end, it can push teams to over‑stretch: hiring slightly beyond their means in the hope that results lock in the sponsor, only to be exposed if those results don’t come.
Name churn and identity
Because the sponsor is the identity, every shift means a rebrand. That’s part of the game – but it comes with a price in fan connection and long‑term equity.
Compare cycling to, say, Borussia Dortmund or the New York Yankees: the shirt sponsor changes, the club remains. In cycling, the “club” is often the sponsor. Once Rabobank leaves, does the project feel the same? Once Sky goes, how many casual fans instantly recognise Ineos as a continuation?
A visual representation of the team changes of EF Education–EasyPost since its creation to convey the changing face of brand sponsorship and team naming
That churn makes it harder to build generational loyalty, heritage merchandise, and the kind of global fanbases that create their own revenue streams. Which, in turn, keeps teams dependent on the next sponsor deal. It’s a loop.
Event fragility – especially outside the WorldTour
Races face similar pressure, with less margin.
The Tour de France, Giro and Vuelta have waiting lists of partners. A mid‑tier one‑day race in Central Europe – or even a prestigious women’s stage race – often hangs on a small cluster of local sponsors. When one disappears, there is no cushion.
The collapse of the Women’s Tour in the UK after organiser SweetSpot entered liquidation was a brutal demonstration. A race that had become a flagship of the women’s calendar simply couldn’t plug a sponsorship hole and vanished, at least for now.
Behind the scenes, organisers talk about the same issues as teams: short‑term deals, rising costs (security, TV production, sustainability demands), and a calendar that makes it hard to guarantee star riders for sponsors.
Can the sponsorship model hold?
Look at the topline numbers and the answer seems to be yes. Men’s WorldTour budgets are at record levels. Women’s cycling has doubled its collective budget in three years. Global sports sponsorship is a growing market, and cycling sits neatly in the sustainability‑friendly, digital‑friendly corner.
Examining the structure underneath makes the picture more uneasy.
Growth built on a narrow base
Cycling’s commercial boom is still fundamentally a bet that enough brands, with enough patience, will always want to buy the visibility and associations the sport offers. But power is concentrating: a handful of wealthy backers and state‑linked projects can dwarf the budgets of mid‑market teams, distorting competitive balance and making it harder for smaller squads to offer sponsors the same stage.
For those mid‑tier outfits, the risk is a slow squeeze: results become harder to achieve, exposure drops, the sponsorship proposition weakens, and renewal discussions get tougher.
No real Plan B
The biggest structural weakness is the lack of alternative, predictable income.
Teams still receive little or no share of broadcast rights. Ticket revenue is marginal. Merchandising is, with a few exceptions, under‑developed. A handful of organisers are experimenting with direct‑to‑consumer digital products – streaming, subscriptions, NFTs, virtual fan zones – but none comes close to replacing a major sponsor if it walks.
That leaves the sport exposed to macro shocks it doesn’t control: a supermarket merger, a tech downturn, a political controversy.
Israel‑Premier Tech’s evolution into NSN Cycling Team is a case study. Political heat around the project created reputational risk some sponsors no longer wanted to carry, even if the sporting and media logic still stacked up. In a sponsorship‑first economy, that kind of external shock doesn’t just remove a logo, but can reshape the whole team.
Signs of adaptation
There are, however, green shoots.
Teams are slowly moving away from single‑sponsor dependence towards portfolios of partners that each take a slice of the budget. That spreads risk and can actually deepen activation: different brands focus on different assets – hospitality, tech storytelling, grassroots projects, women’s squads.
The UCI has pushed for more professional financial management, nudging teams towards maintaining 12‑month operating reserves – and already requiring a bank guarantee 15-25% of the overall budget – and introducing the Women’s ProTeams tier to clarify the commercial ladder. Sponsors are increasingly signing multi‑year deals and demanding clear measurement of their ROI – unglamorous, but a foundation for stability.
Most importantly, there is now genuine debate about revenue sharing. It’s slow, political and messy, but the idea that teams should share in broadcast and central sponsorship income is no longer fringe. If even a modest percentage of those revenues were redistributed to squads with strict governance conditions, the existential cliff‑edge when a sponsor leaves would be much less sheer.
What it means for the sport – and for fans
For brands, the calculation is unlikely to change dramatically in the near term. If you want cost‑effective global exposure, rich storytelling and an association with endurance, tech and sustainability, pro cycling is still a compelling buy.
For teams and races, the message is sharper: the sponsorship‑only model works – until it suddenly doesn’t. The sport’s recent history is littered with projects that looked solid right up until the moment a board decided the logo could work harder elsewhere.
Stability won’t come from finding “better” sponsors; it will come from changing the structure around them. More diversified partner portfolios, genuine shared revenues, professionalised financial standards, and a stronger, commercially credible women’s side that broadens the base.
For fans, that might mean a slightly less romantic future: more talk of media rights and governance, more corporate jargon in press releases. But it also means fewer stories of beloved teams folding in November because a backer changed strategy.
The names on the jerseys will always change. The real question is whether the sport can build something underneath those logos that remains when they’re gone. As we enter 2026, cycling is only just starting to answer that question – and the next decade will decide whether the model that built the peloton can also sustain it.
