How do you keep up with the Joneses when the Joneses are an oil-funded nation-state? The short answer is you can’t, but in sport, you have to try.
In an age of blooming WorldTour team budgets, led by the oil money backing UAE Team Emirates and the chemical money of Ineos, and followed closely by the grocery and drink money of Lidl and Red Bull, any team maintaining a financial status quo is, in effect, backsliding. Teams that can’t keep up financially will be left behind. That’s increasingly true both in the men’s and women’s pelotons, albeit at different scales.
Joe Lindsey
That reality is the motivation for a surprising move: EF Pro Cycling is opening up a search for a new title sponsor. The decision, announced Friday, is less about financial distress than a clear-eyed assessment of modern cycling economics. As budgets at the top of the sport continue to rise, team management believes additional backing is necessary to turn recent success into consistent victories, particularly with a near-term focus on winning the Tour de France Femmes.
Why now?
Longtime fans of EF, and the various iterations of Slipstream that came before, will recall a significantly more frantic, even desperate, sponsor search not too long ago. The #SaveArgyle campaign of 2017 came at the end of a long and, up until September of that year, fruitless search for a new title sponsor as Cannondale reduced its title sponsor commitment. With no title sponsor lined up for the following year, and only weeks left before key UCI deadlines had to be hit, team CEO Jonathan Vaughters turned to crowdfunding, raising just over half a million dollars in a few weeks. That was roughly enough for half a Rigoberto Uran, but nowhere near enough to run a men’s WorldTour team.
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