Unpacking every sponsor behind the 2025 Tour and its teams

Who or what is Cofidis? Can I stay in a B&B Hotel? Which of the cycling-sponsoring supermarkets should I choose: E.Leclerc, Intermarché, Lidl, or Rema 1000? Does Movistar have anything to do with movies? 

When watching the Tour de France or any other bike race, we will all have had these or similar questions in our head, wondering what exactly the various companies that sponsor the Tour and its participating teams. On the Tour rest day, we provide the ultimate guide to cycling’s sponsors.

The Tour de France itself has a long string of sponsors, the most prominent of which are featured on its four classification jerseys.

The yellow jersey for the GC leader is sponsored by LCL (an abbreviation for Le Crédit Lyonnais), a French banking network, since 2003 owned by Crédit Agricole (itself the title sponsor of a cycling team from 1998 to 2008). LCL was technically founded in 2005, but its predecessor Crédit Lyonnais harks back to 1863.

Since 2015, the green points jersey, first introduced in 1953 and sponsored by PMU (Pari Mutuel Urbain who hold the French monopoly on horse race betting) for 25 years, has been sponsored by Czech car manufacturer Škoda Auto, a subsidiary of the German Volkswagen Group, since 2000. By the way, it’s pronounced /ˈʃkɔda/, not /ˈskoʊdə/ or /ˈskoːda/. A Škoda rebranding in 2023 led to the green colour of the jersey becoming noticeably darker than the bright green it had been before.

The polka-dot mountain jersey celebrates its 50-year anniversary this year; it was introduced in 1975 after having existed as a prize since 1933. The jersey’s famous red polka-dots allegedly hails from the packaging of its first sponsor, Chocolate Poulain. The current sponsor is E.Leclerc, a French retailers’ cooperative & hypermarket chain that took over from its business rival Carrefour in 2019.

The white jersey for the best rider under 25 years was also introduced in 1975. No jersey was awarded from 1989 to 1999, but the white jersey came back in 2000. Krys, a French opticians’ chain, has been its sponsor since 2015, following Škoda who had been the white jersey sponsor from 2004 but then got ‘promoted’ to the green jersey.

All classification jerseys are produced by Santini, an Italian cycling clothes brand. The flamme rouge marking the final kilometre of each stage is sponsored by German tyre manufacturer Continental while the French département of Hauts-de-Seine sponsors an arch at kilometre 92 on each stage, derived from the département’s ordinal number.

Swiss watchmaker Tissot, part of The Swatch Group, provides the timing while French IT services and consulting company Capgemini presents the on-screen graphics. The famous combativity prize is sponsored by French real estate agency Century 21 – and since the company’s colour is gold, the formerly red bib number for the previous stage’s most combative rider has been golden since 2023.

If riders suffer a mechanical, neutral service is provided by Japanese cycling component manufacturer Shimano. And if they have to abandon, they can (in theory; most, if not all, riders now prefer the team car) climb into the broom wagon sponsored by Velux, a Danish window manufacturer.

Several other companies also sponsor the race. They are less visible in the race but feature in the famous caravan that covers the race route ahead of the riders, throwing give-aways to the roadside fans.

The emirate of Abu Dhabi stepped in as sponsor for 2017 when a planned Chinese sponsorship deal for what was then Lampre-Merida fell through, and the team started the season as UAE Abu Dhabi (still apparent in the team’s official UCI code UAD). In February 2017, Emirates, the airline of the neighbouring emirate of Dubai, joined as title sponsor, and the team has been known as UAE Team Emirates from then on. This means that the team is funded not only by Abu Dhabi, but by Dubai as well.

From 2025, XRG came in as title sponsor. It was only founded in late 2024 by ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company), the emirate’s state-owned oil company, as an energy investment company.

They ride Colnago bikes, a majority share in Colnago was bought by Chimera Investment, part of Abu Dhabi’s Royal Group controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of Abu Dhabi’s emir (who’s also the president of the UAE). Sheikh Tahnoun is also the chairman of G42, an AI development holding company that is visible on the team’s helmets whose paint scheme was AI-generated. 

The team kit is produced by Pissei, an Italian cycling clothing manufacturer, and Tadej Pogačar sports a watch by Richard Mille, a Swiss luxury watch company founded in 2001.

The title sponsors are Visma, a Norwegian business software company, and Lease a Bike, a Dutch company that offers bicycle employee leasing, branding itself as “a bike scheme for any business”, owned by the Dutch Pon Holdings which also owns the Cervélo bikes the team rides as well as other cycling brands, a.o. Cannondale. Both title sponsors as well as main sponsor L - founders of loyalty (a Dutch company that designs retail loyalty programs) are B2B (business-to-business) companies. It is not unlikely that this was a conscious choice when looking for sponsors; cycling races offer a great opportunity for VIP experiences not only for the sponsors themselves, but their business partners as well.

Rabobank came (back) in as a ‘co-sponsor’ just before the 2025 Tour; they are a Dutch bank that was title sponsor of the team from 1996 to 2012 (and continued to sponsor a women’s team until 2016). The Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo, though no longer a title sponsor, is still involved as a co-sponsor. 

The remaining co-sponsors are Czech car brand Škoda and SRAM, a manufacturer of cycling components.

Jonas Vingegaard’s red-and-white helmet sports the logo of Bygma, a Danish chain of construction materials stores (Bygma is a contraction of the Danish word for construction materials, “byggematerialer”).

The team started a women’s squad for the 2021 season, built around star signing Marianne Vos.

BORA became title sponsor in 2015 and is a German manufacturer of kitchen appliances. BORA is most well-known for the exhaust extractor systems integrated into cooking tops that the company started with but has since branched out into products like steam ovens, fridge-freezers, and lighting.

hansgrohe joined the team in 2017; also from Germany, hansgrohe manufactures plumbing materials and sanitary fittings and is not to be confused with Grohe, another German company in the same line of business that was founded by the son of Hans Grohe in an adidas-Puma kind of situation.

Ahead of the 2024 Tour, Red Bull joined not only as a title sponsor, but also as a part-owner of the management company running the team that had until then been solely owned by team founder Ralph Denk. Founded by Thai Chaleo Yoovidhya and Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz in 1984, Red Bull has been marketed as ‘the’ energy drink, containing caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins. However, the drink contains a similar amount of sugar as a cola or other soft drink, and claims that it improves physical and mental performance have not been conclusively proven. 

The sponsorship (and in some cases, ownership) of teams or events in football, Formula 1 (and motor sports in general), ice hockey, air racing, wingsuiting, and other extreme sports has played a big role in spreading brand awareness, and the brand had been individual sponsor of pro cyclists before starting its team sponsorship.

AG2R La Mondiale is a French insurance company. It started sponsoring the team back in 1997 and has been title sponsor since 2000. Since a merger with La Mondiale in 2008, the name of the company has been AG2R La Mondiale, but their team sponsorship will end after the 2025 season when Decathlon take over as sole title sponsor.

Decathlon, a French sporting goods retailer had been title sponsor of the team for two years (2000 and 2001) before stepping down but returned for the 2024 season.

The team rides bikes and wears kit made by Van Rysel, a Decathlon store brand founded in 2019 (the name means “from Lille” in Flemish; Lille is where Decathlon opened its first store in 1976), and French fashion brand Armand Thiery is an ‘official partner’ of the team.

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is a French bancassurance (banking and insurance) group consisting of the Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne (CMB, operating in the départements of Côtes d’Armor, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine, and Morbihan), the Crédit Mutuel du Sud-Ouest (CMSO, operating in the départements of Charente, Dordogne, and Gironde) as well as several other subsidiaries (one of which, Fortuneo, was a title sponsor from 2016 to 2018). The mother company Arkéa took over from 2019 but will end its sponsorship after the 2025 season.

B&B Hotels is a chain of budget hotels founded in Brest in 1990 that came in as title sponsor in 2024 but will also stop its sponsorship after this year, leaving team manager Emmanuel Hubert searching for new sponsors.

The team’s bike supplier Bianchi also announced that they will move to Bahrain Victorious for 2026. Bianchi is an Italian bike brand, founded in 1885 but ultimately owned by Italian-born Swedish entrepreneur Salvatore Grimaldi since 1997. 
The Breton regional government, title sponsor from 2005 to 2015, is still an ‘institutional partner’.

Since 2020, the team has also run a women’s squad.

The team has been owned by INEOS since 2019 as part of the INEOS Sports Group that also includes full ownership of football clubs OGC Nice and FC Lausanne-Sport, a minority stake in football club Manchester United, and a one-third stake in Formula 1 team Mercedes-AMG Petronas. Sir Ben Ainslie’s America’s Cup team was also supported by INEOS and named INEOS Britannia, but they split ways in early 2025.

INEOS is a petrochemical conglomerate, founded and majority-owned by Jim Ratcliffe who was at one point the richest person in the UK and an outspoken supporter of Brexit but has since changed his official residence to Monaco for tax avoidance purposes.

Since 2020, the team’s name has been INEOS Grenadiers in order to market the INEOS Grenadier, a 4x4 off-road utility vehicle. The vehicle’s name, and even more so the team’s name, deliberately evoke an association with the famous and feared British military units of the 18th and 19th century, and the models Quartermaster and Fusilier. Despite this national(istic) undertone, the vehicles are actually manufactured in France.

In late June, the team announced that French energy company TotalEnergies, one of  the biggest oil and gas companies worldwide, would join the team. By calling this a ‘jersey sponsorship’ and not changing the name despite the TotalEnergies logo being very prominent on the new kit, the team avoided running foul of a UCI rule that prohibits teams with the same paying agent (i.e. management company) or main partner to compete in the same races, allowing INEOS Grenadiers and Team TotalEnergies to continue to race against each other. In any case, the new sponsorship fuelled rumours of a merger between the two teams.

The Navarrese team has been around since 1980. Since 2011, it has been sponsored by Movistar, a brand of Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica, marketed in Spain and Hispanic America. Other Telefónica brands like O2 (for Europe) and Vivo (for Brazil) also appear on the team kit.

A women’s team was added for the 2018 season and has been part of the structure ever since.

The team has been sponsored by La Française des Jeux, known as simply FDJ since 2010, ever since its founding in 1997, making it one of the longest-lived sponsorship agreements in pro cycling. FDJ is the operator of the French national lottery but also offers online gaming and sports betting. Since its privatisation in 2018 (though the French state still holds about 20% of the company), the company has acquired the Irish national lottery in 2023. In October 2024, it bought Kindred Group, the parent company of Unibet (title sponsor of ProTeam Unibet Tietema Rockets), through a squeeze-out, and in March 2025 the company changed its name to FDJ United. It remains to be seen which, if any, consequences the takeover of Unibet will have for the two teams.

Since 2018, the team has had another title sponsor that even gets top billing: Groupama (an abbreviation for Groupe des Assurances Mutuelles Agricoles) is a French insurance group and one of the largest mutual insurers worldwide.

Managed by Alexander Vinokurov and named for Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan since 1997, the team has been sponsored by the state of Kazakhstan since its start in 2007. The sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna has been the vehicle for that sponsorship since its establishment in 2008, and the logos of several of the companies it holds – such as KazMunayGaz, Astana Motors, Air Astana, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (the national railway company), or Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) – have appeared on the team kit in the past. From 2022 to 2024, the team was called Astana Qazaqstan Team in an attempt to spread awareness of the country’s name in Kazakh when written in the Latin alphabet.

For the 2025 season, XDS (also known as Xidesheng) stepped in as a new title sponsor. The Chinese company produced bicycles and other carbon-fibre products, and the team now uses its X-Lab series of bikes.

Originally founded for the 1999 season, the team has existed in its current guise since 2005, with Iwan Spekenbrink as general manager since 2008. A women’s team was added for 2011. DSM (now dsm-firmenich) became title sponsor for the 2021 season, and PostNL joined for 2024. A year later, Picnic became the new title sponsor, and dsm-firmenich was removed from the team name, though it still features prominently on the team kit.

Picnic is an online supermarket. The company was founded in the Netherlands in 2015 and has since expanded to Germany and France, offering grocery deliveries when ordering via the company’s app.

PostNL is a Dutch mail, parcel, and e-commerce company. In 1998, it was spun off from KPN, the Dutch postal, telegraphy and telephone company, as TNT (taking the name of the Australian logistics company after a friendly takeover in 1997). After floating the express delivery service as a separate company called TNT Express in 2011 (since acquired by FedEx), the parent company changed name to PostNL.

dsm-firmenich was formed in 2023 after the merger of Royal DSM, a Dutch chemical company, and Swiss-based Firmenich, a producer of fragrances and flavours.

Founded by Jonathan Vaughters as a junior team in 2003 and undergoing several name and sponsor changes and mergers, the team secured EF Education First as new sponsor from 2018 onwards. The new sponsor also acquired the team management company, renaming it from Slipstream Sports to EF Pro Cycling. EF was founded in Sweden in 1965 but is now headquartered in Switzerland. It offers language training, educational travel, and cultural exchanges, based on the idea of immersion in a language as a way of ‘learning by doing’.

Since 2022, EasyPost has been the second title sponsor. The US company offers a shipping API (application programming interface).

The team has been riding Cannondale bikes since 2015. Owned by Canadian conglomerate Dorel since 2008, the US bike manufacturer (though production happens in Taiwan since 2009) was acquired in 2022 by Dutch Pon Holdings who also own a.o. Lease a Bike and Cervélo.

From 2022 onwards, EF Education also sponsored a women’s team, EF Education-TIBCO-SVB, but ended that sponsorship after the 2023 season and instead started a women’s squad as part of EF Pro Cycling, currently known as EF Education-Oatly.

Quick·Step Floors has been involved in cycling since 1999 and has sponsored this team since its inception for the 2003 season. The Belgian company is a subsidiary of US flooring manufacturer Mohawk Industries and offers laminate, vinyl, and hardwood flooring.

On a Tour rest day in 2022, Soudal was announced as a new title sponsor for the team from 2023, having been a title sponsor of the Lotto team from 2015 until then. Soudal is a Belgian producer of silicones, caulks, polyutherane foams, and adhesives for construction, do-it-yourself projects, and industrial applications.

From 2016 onwards, French gas provider Direct Énergie sponsored Jean-René Bernaudeau’s team. After the sponsor’s acquisiation by French energy company Total, one of the biggest oil and gas companies worldwide, in late 2018, the team was renamed Total Direct Énergie from April 2019, and after the sponsor’s rebranding to TotalEnergies, the team has been named Team TotalEnergies since June 2021.

In late June 2025, the sponsor was announced as a ‘jersey sponsor’ at INEOS Grenadiers and can be seen on two team kits during the Tour. This new sponsorship fuelled rumours of a merger between the two teams.

Founded for the 2017 season, the team is owned by its title sponsor Uno-X, a chain of unmanned self-service fuel and charging stations across Norway and Denmark, where all of the men’s teams riders come from. Since 2022, they have also run a women’s team that directly entered the Women’s WorldTour. 

Coinciding with this year’s Tour, Uno-X has launched an advertising campaign in Norway and Denmark that centres around Magnus Cort, using the phrase “betal med Cort” (Norwegian and Danish for ‘pay by card’) as other riders of the team try to tap Cort at a self-service station.

Uno-X is wholly owned by Reitan AS, a Norwegian retailing conglomerate owned by the Reitan family that consists of retail, real estate, and investment branches. Several other Reitan Retail brands feature on the team kit, with discount supermarket chain Rema 1000 being the most prominent. Reitan also holds the rights to the 7-Eleven brand for Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and the team raced Liège-Bastogne-Liège in a throwback kit to the 1980s 7-Eleven team.

Started in 2018 as a non-UCI Team, the Swiss Racing Academy was taken over in April 2022 by Swiss ex-pro cyclist Fabian Cancellara who brought in Montres Tudor, a Swiss watchmaking company and sister company of Rolex, as the new title sponsor.

The team kit also features Red Bull and Hugo Boss who are respectively title sponsor and non-title sponsor of rival team Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, but as neither company appears in the name of the Tudor Pro Cycling Team, the letter of the UCI’s regulations is adhered to.

Founded as a cyclo-cross team with a limited road program in 2009, the team got a ProConti licence for 2019 and has since combined several cycling disciplines at the highest level. Since 2020, they also run a women’s team, currently named Fenix-Deceuninck.

Alpecin is a shampoo that claims to reduce hair loss, a brand of the German Dr. Wolff Gruppe. The brand was title sponsor for Team Giant-Alpecin (now Team Picnic PostNL) in 2015 and 2016, for Katusha-Alpecin from 2017 to 2019, and has been sponsoring this team since 2020.

Deceuninck is a Belgian manufacturer of doors and windows. The company sponsored Deceuninck-Quick·Step (now Soudal Quick·Step) from 2019 to 2021 and has been title sponsor of Alpecin-Deceuninck since 2022.

Since 2018, the team has been riding bikes from German manufacturer Canyon which only offers its bikes for direct sale.

The team, comprising both men’s and women’s squads from the start, was founded ahead of the 2012 season with substantial funding from Australian businessman Gerry Ryan, and several companies wholly or partly owned by Ryan have served as title sponsors: BikeExchange, an online cycling shop and marketplace, was title sponsor in 2016 and from 2021 to 2022, while Mitchelton, a winery estate in Victoria’s Nagambie Lakes wine region, was title sponsor from 2018 to 2020.
Ryan’s current title sponsor is Jayco Australia, a manufacturer of RVs (recreational vehicles, also known as campers) that Ryan founded in 1975 after a study tour to the United States of America. Jayco Australia is fully independent from the US company that Ryan studied.

Since 2023, AlUla has been the second title sponsor. AlUla (or al-ʿUlā) is an oasis city in the Hejaz in northwestern Saudi-Arabia, inhabited for over 4000 years. The AlUla Tour stage race has been running since 2020, and since 2023, AlUla has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The Royal Commission for AlUla was founded in 2017 to promote tourism in AlUla; it is a government agency chaired by Saudi crown prince and prime minister Mohammed bin Salman. Since his appointment as crown prince in 2017, ‘MBS’ has led a series of societal reforms that aimed to push back the ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment and gradually modernising the country, but also purged competing Saudi elites, many of whom other members of the large Saudi royal family, and ordered the assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Launched as the Cycling Academy Team ahead of the 2015 season on the Continental level by Israeli ex-pro cyclist Ran Margaliot and Israeli businessman Ron Baron, Canadian-Israeli billionaire entrepreneur Sylvan Adams joined as co-owner in 2016, and Margaliot left the team management after the 2018 season. Although Baron and Adams are joint owners, Adams has become the driving force behind the team. 

Adams was president of a Canadian real estate development company founded by his father Marcel, a Holocaust survivor. In 2015, Adams made aliyah and settled in Israel. A keen cyclist himself, he funded the 2018 Giro d’Italia start in Israel as well as the building of a velodrome in Tel Aviv the same year. Since 2017, he has put forward much of the funding for the team and, wanting to promote his new home country internationally, added Israel to the team’s name which was Israel Cycling Academy from 2017 to 2019. After a takeover of the folding Katusha-Alpecin team, acquiring that team’s WorldTour licence, the team was called Israel Start-Up Nation in 2020 and 2021 in order to promote Israel’s start-up scene.

From the 2022 season onwards, Premier Tech stepped in as title sponsor. The Canadian tech company offers fertilisers and herbicides, automated systems for industry and agriculture, wastewater treatment and solid recycling as well as digital manufacturing services and life sciences. Premier Tech had been a title sponsor and co-owner of Astana-Premier Tech (now XDS Astana Team) in 2021 but parted ways with the Kazakh team prematurely after just one season over differing visions for the future.

Despite having no connection to the Israeli government, the team has faced criticism due to Israel’s continuing military campaign in Gaza, with the stage 11 arrival in Toulouse disrupted by a protestor.

One of the team’s smaller sponsors is Vini Fantini, the main brand of Italian winemakers Fantini Wines. Vini Fantini is also a non-title sponsor at Intermarché-Wanty and title sponsor of Italian ProTeam Solution Tech-Vini Fantini.

Started in 2011 as Leopard Trek and racing in the following seasons as RadioShack-Nissan-Trek and RadioShack-Leopard, the team ownership was taken over by US bicycle manufacturer Trek ahead of the 2014 season. After two years as Trek Factory Racing, Italian coffee producer Segafredo came in as title sponsor for 2016 and stayed until mid-2023.

Ahead of the 2023 Tour, German-based discount supermarket chain Lidl was announced as new title sponsor. Lidl supermarkets can be found in 30 European countries as well as the United States of America. Part of the Schwarz Group that also owns the Kaufland chain of hypermarkets, the company has been criticised, especially in the early 2000s, for poor labour conditions in its own stores and distribution centres as well as at suppliers, spying on employees, trying to prevent the forming of employee organisations, and attempting to sack employee representatives. However, Lidl’s entry-level salaries now exceed the minimum wages agreed in collective agreements, and the company provides employee benefits above the legal requirements. 

Ever since its founding for the 1997 season, the team has been sponsored by Cofidis (short for Compagnie financière de distribution, which is why the final S isn’t silent!), a French consumer credit company that also expanded to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia. Since 2024, Cofidis has been wholly owned by the Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, a French cooperative bancassurance group, not to be confused with Crédit Mutuel Arkéa – CMAF operates almost nationwide while Arkéa only operates in Brittany and around Bordeaux.

Since the 2022 season, they have also run a women’s team.

The team was founded ahead of the 2017 season as Bahrain-Merida. It was renamed to Bahrain-McLaren for 2020 and has been named Bahrain Victorious since 2021.

Despite no longer being a title sponsor, Taiwanese bike manufacturer Merida continues to be the team’s bike supplier, but this relationship will end after this season as Bianchi has been announced as bike partner for 2026. 

The McLaren Group, a British motorsports company, has been partly owned by Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat since 2007, and Mumtalakat fully acquired the company in 2024.

The main part of the team funding comes from the government of Bahrain, either through the sovereign wealth fund or indirectly via state-owned businesses such as Bapco Energy (Bahrain Petroleum Company, the country’s oil producer), the EDB (Economic Development Board) with its Business-friendly Bahrain brand, Al Salam Bank, NBB (the National Bank of Bahrain), Beyon (the parent of telecommunications company Batelco), and the aluminium smelter Alba (Aluminium Bahrain).

The Belgian national lottery has been sponsoring this team since 1985, celebrating its 40-year anniversary with a special kit earlier this year. The women’s team was started for the 2006 season, but Lotto Ladies did not apply for a Women’s ProTeam licence for 2025 and will not race the Tour de France Femmes.

For the men’s Tour, non-title sponsor Caps Energy Card, a Belgian company offering refuelling/charging cards for businesses, received equal billing on the team kit, partly to reward the sponsor’s loyalty since 2012, partly in an attempt to alert prospective new sponsors by saying “your advertisement could be here”.

Rumours of a merger between Lotto and Intermarché-Wanty have started to fly during the Tour.

The team was founded for the 2008 season, and Wanty, a Belgian engineering and construction company, has been title sponsor since 2013. In late 2020, the team acquired the WorldTour licence of the disbanding CCC Team, stepping up to the highest level of road cycling from 2021. The same year saw the arrival of Intermarché, a brand of French retail group Les Mousquetaires, as title sponsor.

Vini Fantini, the main brand of Italian winemakers Fantini Wines, is one of the team’s smaller sponsors. Vini Fantini is also a non-title sponsor at Israel-Premier Tech and title sponsor of Italian ProTeam Solution Tech-Vini Fantini. Since 2013, the team has run the Want You Club, a business club for its many smaller sponsors.

During the Tour, rumours of a merger between Lotto and Intermarché-Wanty have started to fly.