The arms race tightening its grip on pro cycling
Last week, Jonathan Vaughters was a guest in the Domestique Hotseat, and he articulated something that has been quietly understood in the peloton for years, but rarely stated so clearly. Professional cycling is locked in an arms race. One where costs keep rising, not because the sport as a whole is becoming structurally richer, but because a small number of teams are willing to spend whatever it takes to win.
Vaughters’ point cuts to the heart of the current imbalance. Teams like UAE are not primarily driven by the need for a commercial return. Backed by a state that is far less focused on a strict, short-term return on investment, their logic becomes simple and ruthless: spend whatever it takes to win everything.
Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe, Lidl-Trek and Decathlon CMA CGM are increasingly moving in a similar direction. That shift is hardly surprising, because their involvement has evolved from straightforward sponsorship into an equity-style stake in the team. And once a brand becomes an owner rather than a logo on the jersey, the investment lens changes. It is less about immediate payback and far more about building long-term value.
From their perspective, that approach makes sense. But as Vaughters notes, the consequences do not stay contained. That spending bleeds into the wider market. Salaries inflate. Expectations rise. And the cost of sponsoring a winning team escalates for everyone.
This is where cycling’s model starts to show its cracks. Teams are now expected to command sponsorship fees that sit in the same bracket as Formula 1, elite football and major US leagues. On paper, that sounds like progress. In reality, it is a comparison that collapses the moment you look at how those sports actually make money.
F1 and top-level football do not live or die by sponsorship. Their financial base is built on media rights first, with ticketing and merchandising adding serious weight behind it. Sponsors matter, but they sit on top of an already functioning engine. A team can lose a partner and still exist because the core revenues keep flowing.
Cycling is the reverse. Sponsorship is not the top layer, it is the entire structure. Teams do not share in media rights, there is no ticketing revenue to fall back on, and merchandising remains marginal, partly because most followers support the sport and its riders more than they identify as die-hard fans of a single team.
That mismatch is the pressure point. Sponsors are being asked to fund not just visibility, but the full cost of competing, year after year, in a sport that has few other dependable income streams. And in most cases, they are doing so without the one payoff that sells sponsorship so easily elsewhere: consistent moments of victory, with their brand front and centre on the finish line.
As a result, several smaller teams are starting to come under real pressure. Arkéa-B&B Hotels is set to disappear in 2025, Intermarché and Lotto have been forced into a merger, and at Team Picnic PostNL, the financial picture appears far from stable.
The arms race also shows up in something fans can see immediately: the way rosters are built.
Where once you could still find Grand Tour GC leaders and credible top five contenders spread across smaller teams, the trend now is clear: the strongest riders are clustering at the sport’s biggest powerhouses. Red Bull Bora hansgrohe is a prime example, with a remarkable depth chart that includes Remco Evenepoel, Jai Hindley, Primož Roglič, Florian Lipowitz, Daniel Martínez, Giulio Pellizzari and Aleksandr Vlasov. In other words, almost a quarter of their roster has proven GC potential.
As the team’s Head of Sport, Zak Dempster, put it: “We’ve got, like, seven GC guys, so it’s pretty hard to fit them when there are only three Grand Tours.”
The transfer market is accelerating the same shift. Riders who show early flashes of GC potential, like Oscar Onley and Matthew Riccitello, are being snapped up quickly by teams such as Ineos and Decathlon. Derek Gee’s expected move from Israel-Premier Tech to Lidl Trek points the same way, with riders leaving smaller structures to become part of cycling’s growing super squads.
But it isn’t limited to the names who have already offered a glimpse of their quality at the highest level. The war on talent can’t go unmentioned either. The same principle applies here: the teams with the greatest resources snap up the top prospects from the junior ranks because, quite simply, they have the most to offer.
What makes this trend so hard to reverse is that it is not just about ambition, but about leverage. Once the biggest teams start controlling both proven winners and the next wave of talent, they can spread risk across deeper rosters, stronger performance departments and bigger calendars, while smaller teams are forced to bet on a narrow set of outcomes and hope a sponsor stays patient.
In the short term, fans might get a spectacle of a few teams who go all-in on each other to win the biggest races. In the long term, the danger is competitive shrinkage, fewer viable projects outside the top tier, and a market where talent development becomes another asset controlled by the richest operators.
Cycling does not need less investment. It needs a model that enables teams to stay competitive and financially stable without state backing or a sponsor effectively becoming an investor. Designing that model is complex. But one thing is clear: the solution requires a collective approach from teams, race organisers, and governing bodies like the UCI to improve cycling as a product, with a more streamlined calendar, better commercialisation of the sport, and a revenue sharing system that accelerates growth and benefits all parties.
Until that changes, the arms race will keep shaping not just who wins, but who gets to keep playing.
