Compared to many professional sports, the financial workings of pro road bike racing are stubbornly opaque. Unlike American sports like the NFL and NBA, pro cycling's business model has no salary cap to track and control team spending, nor do cycling teams disclose contract terms for riders. And in contrast to F1 or England's Premier League, teams also are not required to publish detailed financial reports.
While any number of stories have surfaced the past decade with information on team budgets or rider salaries, in most cases these are educated guesses or figures provided by anonymous sources. All of that makes it next to impossible to gauge the health and growth of the sport. Teams come and go – but is pro road racing healthy?
An internal UCI document from last summer, obtained by Escape Collective, sheds significant light on the finances of the men's side of the sport’s top circuit, the WorldTour. The overall picture that emerges from the report is of a sport at a delicate moment: pro cycling is growing, but only at the top. It’s increasingly stratified, and teams at or below the median are stretched thin in terms of resources and competitive ability. While they may win races, any notion of true competitive parity is, ultimately, a myth. And the single biggest thing driving that is the gap in financial resources available to each team.
The report, prepared by auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for a UCI working group exploring financial sustainability proposals for the sport, contains mostly top-level information and does not identify teams by name. But it includes data through 2024 and offers a holistic look at the sport’s 18 men's WorldTeams: how much they spend each year, broadly where they spend it, and the trends that are shaping the sport. Much of this information has circled inside the sport for years but has not been publicly reported.
The document identified a variety of financial sustainability models from other sports – largely spending caps of some kind – and evaluated their applicability to cycling, with the conclusion that an overall budget cap was the most promising way to flatten the huge disparity in spending among teams.
In a statement to Escape Collective, the UCI acknowledged the authenticity of the document, which it said is confidential, and confirmed that "a working group was put in place to explore the best possible model for financial fairness regulations in cycling." That relatively mild statement highlights an obvious truth: the UCI clearly thinks those rules are necessary. And the organization is not alone in voicing concern about the sport's increasingly top-heavy look.
“On one hand it’s fantastic to see how cycling is continuously increasing and it’s great to see sponsors come in,” Jayco-AlUla general manager Brent Copeland told Escape earlier this spring. “But on the other hand, it’s difficult for all 18 teams to find sponsorships that can equalize that kind of investment.” (Copeland is also the current president of the pro teams’ association, the AIGCP, but spoke to Escape solely in his capacity as Jayco team manager.)
Cycling’s growth presents an opportunity, but also a threat, and how those who hold power – teams, race promoters, and the UCI – respond may decide the future of the sport.
Average team budgets are rising fast
Pro cycling grows in a punctuated equilibrium style of evolution, and it is again in a period of rapid financial and sporting shifts. The average team budget on the WorldTour grew 40% in the four years from 2021 through 2024, from €20 million to €28 million.
The degree of change since 2020 is likely distorted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which sharply but briefly suppressed economic activity worldwide, including in pro cycling. But even accounting for those flat budgets (which show up in the below graph in 2021), the trajectory changed sharply from the half decade prior to the pandemic.
On that longer view, the current sharp increase fits a broad historical pattern; twice in the past two decades the sport has seen fast and steep jumps in average team budgets. One of these, however, is a phantom: the sudden budget increase in 2005 was a direct result of the advent that year of the ProTour, which cut the number of teams at the sport’s top level by a third, artificially boosting the average team budget from €5 million to €8 million in a single season by simply culling the smallest and poorest outfits from the sport's highest team registration tier. Still, average budgets rose 25% further, to €10 million, by 2007.
After a few flat years, the next jump up began gathering in 2009 and manifested by 2011, and that one is far more instructive to modern trends. Starting in 2009, the sport saw the debut (or return) of wealthy benefactors like Igor Makarov (Katusha), Andy Rihs (BMC Racing), and Oleg Tinkoff (Saxo-Tinkoff). Most significantly, this era also saw the entrance of Team Sky, in 2010, and Jumbo, in 2015, as sponsors. By 2015, team budgets had nearly doubled again, to an average of €18 million, even as major sponsors like RadioShack and Rabobank left the sport.
Then, as teams and sponsors churned in and out of pro cycling, budgets rose modestly for the next four seasons. But amid that growth, new superteams were rising that would drive far faster change to come.
The growth is at the top
The WorldTour field is divided into roughly three strata: the superteams (and those striving to be), the status quo or middle class, and the stragglers fighting relegation. And substantially all of the growth in the sport, in terms of the teams, has accrued to the 5-6 outfits at the very top.
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