There it is. From February 28 the price of watching bike racing in the UK and Ireland via a TNT Sports subscription is going up from £6.99 to £30.99 a month, a 443% increase.
Don’t worry, you may be thinking; I get Eurosport for free through my Sky or Virgin Media TV package. Unfortunately, by the end of February that’ll be gone too.
Oh, and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company behind this whole heist) have confirmed that after buying the exclusive UK rights to broadcast the Tour de France from 2026, there will be no free-to-air live coverage.
It’s not a shock; something like this was always surely in the works. It doesn’t make it not sad and it does likely make it bad for the sport. But really, the people behind this decision don’t care about the sport, which makes it hard to feel anger rather than despair.
One of these people behind the decision, and more precisely the one carted out by his paymasters to explain to everyone why this is actually a good thing, is called Scott Young, the group senior vice president of WBD Sports Europe.
I’m sure Scott Young is a nice man – maybe he’s not, but best to give him the benefit of the doubt. So let’s hear him out.
“The new home of cycling in the UK is going to be TNT Sports,” Young said about the changes. “There is going to be a price rise for this premium sports channel. What we’ve looked at is creating value for money, taking the most premium sports properties as possible and creating the adjacency, creating a sports ecosystem where you get value.”
What he’s talking about here is the fact that cycling used to sit outside of the premium TNT Sports package that included some Premier League and all Champions League football games, as well as other things like rugby and tennis, but cycling will now be folded into this bigger bundle alongside a variety of other niche sports, where you pay for everything even if you don’t want it.
“We’re building out the best sports and entertainment profile we have in this country,” Young continued. “People can choose to make their decision as to how they want to engage with us in the short term. We are investing in cycling.”
Judging by the reaction so far, a lot of people will be choosing to no longer pay a subscription and instead utilise … other means of watching live bike racing, which we won’t go into detail on to do our bit to keep that safe haven alive (DM me if you must). I won’t even broach the topic with Caley about potentially expensing a TNT Sports subscription; that’s not a good spend of your membership dues. It is every person’s right to die on a hill of their choosing, no matter how niche and increasingly expensive.
You might be thinking, is it not quite rich for a subscription-based media outlet to be lambasting a TV company for trying to operate the same model? And when we (we won’t) increase our prices by 443% overnight and try to palm it off as you now get access to snooker, rugby and tennis media too, we’ll admit our hypocrisy.
I would imagine this move makes ‘business sense.’ If so, it would be better if that’s how WBD positioned this change because the corporate double-speak of the message above just reads to us regular folk as greed.
Likely, WBD’s cycling coverage wasn’t profitable. Frankly, that’s not my problem. And if the solution is to pay £371.88 annually (more than double the BBC licence fee!) then something isn’t right. A quick search reveals I can get a Sky TV subscription that comes with various cable channels, Netflix and Sky Sports (AKA Premier League and NFL, proper big sports) for what in £42 a month. In contrast, that now seems to be value for money.
Some cycling content will be broadcast on WBD’s free-to-air channels, such as Quest and DMAX. This will not include live cycling, but rather highlights shows of the Grand Tours, and a new hour-long programme called ‘The Ultimate Cycling Show’, hosted by Orla Chennaoui and Adam Blythe, and scheduled to debut on Quest on February 27. For those unfamiliar with these channels, a quick glance at the schedule shows un-ending repeats of basically five different TV shows focused on either uncovering tat in storage lockers and selling it on for a profit (shows that are almost definitely faked, I learned the hard way) or people repairing cars and family heirlooms.
“It’s like the crossover point between traditional television coverage and what you might see on YouTube,” Chennaoui says of the show. “It’s injecting more fun, spontaneity, unpredictability into a magazine show every week.”
The TV personalities like Chennaoui and Hatch aren’t to blame; they’re just people trying to do their jobs as the shifting sands of media jobs become increasingly unsteady under foot.
In some sort of call with the media, Rob Hatch was apparently pressed, Cyclist says, on whether zero free-to-air live racing coverage will harm how many new fans find the sport.
“Society has changed,” Hatch replied. “Kids don’t watch telly. They watch YouTube.”
I can say for sure that whether on the telly or YouTube, ‘kids’ are not watching cycling. For various reasons the sport has inflicted upon itself. And amongst the wizened adult viewers, this move may be enough to push them away from flicking on Tirreno-Adriatico, and only really tuning into the Tour de France.
But maybe that is all Warner Bros. Discovery needs, a fleet of Tour de France fans signing up for £30.99 a month at the start of July (in 2026, this summer will see the final ITV Tour de France and we will be cherishing every second of it), forgetting to cancel it for a couple of months, and bam. Profit.
Really, the grim likelihood is WBD only need a quarter of current subscribers to upgrade to the more expensive package and they’re in the clear. But what will the knock-on effect be of fewer eyeballs on the sport when, to give one example, teams have to show sponsors a return on their money at the end of the season?
“The algorithms will push people to TNT Sport cycling,” Hatch argues. “We’ll captivate people with interviews, with the chemistry between these two [Chennaoui and Blythe], I’ll do the Gruppetto [Hatch’s YouTube show] every week, we’ll be telling people what’s on … that’s the way we’ll get new people to the sport.”
I don’t know about you, but when getting into a new sport I always first seek out interviews with sportspeople I know nothing about, magazine shows discussing topics I am clueless on, rather than lazily happening upon some live sporting contest being beamed into my living room from somewhere around the world, and the spectacle of the actual thing hooking me in.
“We want investment in the sport,” Chennaoui says. “We might want it free-to-air but without investment where does the sport go? Besides, if you’re a cycling fan, I think you want to see it alongside football and rugby and the big sports in this country. That’s where cycling belongs.”
The key difference being that football and rugby are two of the biggest sports in the country, with self-sustaining fan bases that make a ‘premium’ subscription package makes sense. A massive, captive audience that will watch most weeks in equal numbers.
Cycling is obviously not the same, it’s popularity is smaller overall and peaks over a few months from spring to summer.
You know what, hook me up to the Saudi money faucet. Better the devil you know than the one that buys into a monopoly and hikes the price, all the while telling you that things are actually going to be better now. If we’re playing silly money games, put all the cycling on one streaming service for a loss-making cost that his holiness Mohammed bin Salman will foot the bill for. I’ll take my lashings before the start of the AlUla Tour. Stream it on Quest if you like.
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