A flurry of discussion around bringing a budget cap to professional cycling has stalled since late last year, but EF Educastion-EasyPost manager Jonathan Vaughters is not quite ready to give up hope. In a recent appearance on EF's Cycling Performance podcast, Vaughters made the case that a salary cap could reinvigorate a sport that has entered an era of unprecedented dominance by a tiny handful of riders.
"What would be great for the sport is if you had an NFL-style salary cap system. [Tadej] Pogačar can get his 10 million a year, but the rest of the roster is all on the minimum, so it's like Pogačar is racing for Cofidis," Vaughters said in the podcast appearance.
"Now we have an interesting race. Now I'm curious to see who wins this race. At Strade Bianche, at that point where he attacks every year, there's already 40-rider breakaway, he has to get his way through 40 riders before he wins the race because his team had nobody to control to race for the first 100 k."
The thought of Pogačar racing not for the all-powerful UAE Team Emirates-XRG but instead for plucky Cofidis was entertaining enough to inspire Escape Collective to ask Vaughters to expound on the topic. The longtime team manager obliged, making his case for an overhaul of the system while acknowledging that it all seems pretty unlikely for now.
Chris Marshall-Bell
"As a sport, it's our responsibility to make it the most entertaining product we can, and not just create such a separation between the top teams and the bottom teams that really there's certain people that are just gonna be alienated because the outcome is the foregone conclusion," Vaughters said.
The idea that racing is a "foregone conclusion" might sound overly emphatic but it is undeniably true that the men's peloton has become more stratified in recent years. Two teams (UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike) have split every Grand Tour since the start of 2023 between themselves. Of the 19 Monuments raced since then, all but three have been won by Pogačar or Mathieu van der Poel – who has led Alpecin-Premier Tech to impressive heights despite it being only in the middle tier of WorldTour budgets. In any case, the smallest teams have hardly been competitive in those biggest events for several years running now.
A salary cap could level the playing field, although before we go any further, let's define our terms. "Salary cap" is the predominant term used in the United States, where the National Football League (NFL) is the prime example of a "hard" cap. NFL teams cannot exceed a certain number for the payroll of their team roster. For the coming season, that cap is $301,200,00. The combined contracts of all the players on a team have to come in at or below that number.
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