'With 80% of their budgets, we can beat the super teams' – Inside EF's bid for a sponsor to win the Tour de France

It all started with a throwaway question. EF Education-EasyPost had enjoyed a successful Tour de France in 2024, with Richard Carapaz’s all-action three weeks yielding a stage win, a day in yellow, the king of the mountains classification and the combativity prize. 

On the sport’s biggest stage, Jonathan Vaughters’ team had again provided plenty of bang for their title sponsor and majority owner’s buck. From a marketing point of view, the whole season was now a success. Even so, EF’s satisfaction at a job well done segued into a desire for more during the post-race debrief. “But how do we win this whole thing?” they asked Vaughters. 

Given that Tadej Pogacar had just dominated the Tour while backed by the squad with the biggest budget in the sport, the answer was obvious. “A whole lot of money,” was the long and the short of Vaughters’ response. 

“For a while they just said, ‘Well, you’ll figure out a way to win it without a whole lot of money,’” Vaughters tells Domestique. “And I kept saying, no, it won’t. I mean, thank you for having the faith in me, but no, that’s not going to happen.”

Even so, the kernel of an idea had been planted, and the topic was revisited more seriously over the past two years. Both parties laid out their parameters. Vaughters pointed out that the team’s budget is less than half that of UAE Team Emirates. EF reminded him that their resources weren’t limitless. 

“They basically said, ‘We’re an education company, not a petro nation or a fracking entity or whatever. We have to be responsible with our marketing budget. We can’t blow out big numbers just to win races,’” Vaughters says. That apparent impasse led Vaughters to make a suggestion that initially went down like a lead balloon: sell the naming rights to the team. 

“I told them it didn’t mean they wouldn’t retain ownership of the team or that there wouldn’t be giant EF logos all over the uniform, but the most valuable asset that we hold is the name and the naming rights. Now at first, they didn’t like that at all. They said they were paying for the brand exposure, and if they weren’t the name of the team, then all of that would decrease pretty considerably.”

Vaughters didn’t disagree, but they had asked him a frank question, and he had given them a frank answer. After some consideration, EF gave their blessing to the idea. Two weeks ago, it was announced that EF was selling the naming rights to the team in order to bolster the budget enough to compete to win the Tour. The stated aim is to win the Tour de France Femmes in the next three years and the men’s race within the next decade.

It’s been a while since Vaughters thought seriously about winning the Tour, and it says something about the current budgetary disparities in cycling that it seemed altogether more plausible when his team, then known as Garmin, first hit the big-time back in 2008. 

On their Tour debut that year, Christian Van de Velde sprang an upset by placing fourth overall. A year later, Bradley Wiggins replicated that result (he was later promoted to third when Lance Armstrong was banned for life), but any hopes of winning the Tour were quickly dashed by burgeoning financial reality of the peloton.

That winter, Team Sky marked their entry into pro cycling by flexing their muscle in the transfer market and prising Wiggins away from his contract with Garmin. “To win the Champions League you go to Manchester United and I’m probably playing at Wigan at the moment,” Wiggins said as he looked to force the move through, and that summed up Vaughters’ team’s place in the firmament through the Team Sky era.

There was the occasional breakthrough, like Ryder Hesjedal’s Giro d’Italia victory of 2012 or Rigoberto Urán’s second place on the 2017 Tour, but Sky’s buying power seemed to place a natural cap on what a mid-sized team might achieve at the Grand Tours. The sense of a two-speed economy in cycling has only exacerbated over the past decade, with UAE Team Emirates-XRG entering the fray and a small cadre of so-called ‘super teams’ straining to keep up with them.

“I feel like in a pre-Sky era of cycling, we used to be able to dream about winning the Tour de France and I mean, we came fucking pretty close a couple of times, with Christian Van de Velde and Bradley Wiggins, before there were these mega budget teams,” Vaughters says.

“With the advent of your super teams and the enormous budgets, we haven’t really been able to truly dream about that. Ok, in 2017, we were the smallest budget team in the entire WorldTour and we finished second to Chris Froome in the Tour de France by the smallest margin of any of his wins. 

“But I feel like now, that’s very difficult: the top talents in cycling, they get locked up very early and for very high prices, so there aren’t any Rigoberto Uráns floating around on the market for sub $1 million contracts anymore. That just doesn’t happen.”

Even though Carapaz is a past Giro winner and an Olympic champion, at this point beating Jonas Vingegaard to the maglia rosa in May would almost feel like a bigger upset than Hesjedal’s wholly unexpected victory back in 2012.

“I agree with that, but it’s been a long inflationary process that sort of started with Sky entering the sport and just coming in and paying whatever people wanted to soak up the talent,” Vaughters says. 

In the interim, he cut his cloth accordingly. His team was on the brink of collapse and resorting to crowdfunding in the autumn of 2017 when EF stepped in to become title sponsor and majority owner. 

“EF said they wanted the team that produces the largest media value of any team in cycling per dollar spent, and we’ve achieved that objective for them every year,” Vaughters says. “As far as UCI points or whatever, I mean, I don't give a rat’s ass, but as far as media value produced per dollar spent – and that’s the one category that isn’t on Procyclingstats – we win it every year. 

“But now their ambition is greater. And that allows me to dream a little bit more and to sort of get out of my comfort zone and say, all right, let’s try to build something bigger.”

Last year, Reuters reported EF’s budget to be in the region of €21 million, while UAE’s estimated budget is in excess of €60 million. The gulf is considerable and Vaughters is realistic about the prospects of attracting a title sponsor with the resources to plug that gap entirely. 

“Because we are so used to running lean and we know how to do it, I don’t actually see that we need to match them dollar for dollar, or even close, really,” he says. “To my thinking, with 75, 80% of what their budgets are, we can beat them. But we can’t do it at 50%, that’s just not going to happen.”

Vaughters’ confidence is born partly from the idea his team would use a reinforced budget to focus on very specific goals – namely, the men’s and women’s Tours de France – rather than seeking to dominate every race on the calendar like the current big beasts of the peloton.

“As an organisation, we don’t have any interest in sort of mechanistically winning, 100 races a year where you've got riders getting paid €3-4 million a year winning the Trofeo Laigueglia against Italian Conti pros that work at a pizza shop in the off-season,” Vaughters says. 

“We’re not after that – we’re after winning a Tour de France, but not by demolishing the spirit and the ethos of the team to become a sort of monolith like Ineos etc. Winning 100 races a year and accumulating 20,000 UCI points – you’d be amazed at how little the media valuation changes when you do that.”

But where precisely would Vaughters spend an augmented budget in pursuit of Tour victory? In football, there is generally a direct correlation between a club’s wage bill and its position in the league, but the picture is slightly hazier in cycling. Tiesj Benoot of the ever-more ambitious Decathlon CMA CGM squad, recently told Domestique that his new team’s investment in coaching, equipment and infrastructure would be a bigger factor in their success than salaries. 

“I think the number one thing you need to spend a budget on is talent recruitment and talent retention, but when I say talent, I don’t exclusively mean riders,” Vaughters says. “I also mean, aerodynamicists, sports scientists, nutritionists. We find really talented guys in those areas that are sort of new to the sport. They come in and they do an incredible job for us, with incredible ideas, but they're usually under-resourced.

“We’re a great ideas team, but up to this point, we are not a great execution team. That’s where we need to improve, and that just takes more people. You can’t coach 30 riders with only three coaches, and you can’t do hands-on nutrition programmes for 30 riders with two nutritionists.”

Even so, the main draw of a bigger budget is to sign or develop the best riders. Vaughters points to how he missed out on signing Isaac del Toro to UAE as an example of the difficulty of competing against deeper pockets, and he acknowledges that EF “got lucky” with Ben Healy’s recent decision to extend his contract despite more lucrative offers from elsewhere. 

Then again, perhaps they made their own luck on that one. Healy has long acknowledged that EF’s hands-off approach had chimed with his preferred way of working. It would be difficult to picture the Irishman ever signing up for Visma’s micro-management.

“He decided to make a loyal and emotional decision versus like a purely financial one, which is unusual in this day and age in cycling,” Vaughters says. “But that’s not going to happen every time.”

Searching for sponsors is nothing new for Vaughters, who has been courting backers for his team since it began life in 2003 as a junior team sponsored by Denver-based magazine 5280. The difference this time, however, is that the process is a public one. Rather than approach prospective sponsors individually, Vaughters essentially put out a call for tender.

“The response has been really, really good, but we are early, and we knew that – people aren’t at the decision-making points for their 2027 budgets yet,” he says. 

EF’s own decision-making is fluid too. While the naming rights of the team are on sale, the placement of any new sponsor’s name would ultimately depend on how much they are willing to pay for the privilege. With EF’s current budget assured for the coming seasons, this is a rare occasion where cycling sponsorship is almost a seller’s market.

“There’s not a set price, there’s a number of different ways we can go about it,” Vaughters says. “It just depends on what somebody wants. They might very price sensitive and say they just want to be the second name after EF, or they might say they want the whole name, and they want to change the colour of the uniform to blue. If that happens – blue would be pretty boring – but if that happens, that price tag is much larger. So it depends on what they want.”

What EF want, meanwhile, is to win both Tours within the next decade. With Cédrine Kerbaol and world champion Magdeleine Vallieres already on the roster at EF Education-Oatly, the Tour de France Femmes seems the more attainable target in the here and now, while the men’s Tour looks set to be a longer-term target. But that’s part of the appeal of the project.

“The idea here is to, well, as we say in Colorado, put us within spitting distance of where the biggest teams are, then figure out a creative and kind of weird way to pull off an upset victory at the Tour de France like the Giro in 2012, in our own sort of creative, fun, non-sequitur way,” Vaughters says.

The stakes are higher, but the story is familiar.