‘We willingly let Richie go’: Vaughters explains EF Education’s 15 percent budget cut

EF Education-EasyPost are operating with around 15 per cent less to spend in 2027, and team manager Jonathan Vaughters says that is why Richard Carapaz is riding for NSN next season.

“It was a little bit of a sad situation where our economic resources were stretched to the point that we needed to make some hard decisions,” Vaughters told Escape Collective.

Two things caused the shortfall. Oatly are no longer a co-sponsor of the women’s team, which matters to the men because the two squads share a budget, and operating costs have risen across the sport in a way that hits harder on a team of EF’s size than on the wealthiest squads.

“That’s the first, you know, ping,” Vaughters said of the Oatly departure. “The second one is just world economics. Our operational costs have gone up a lot, and when you’re a smaller-budget team that hits you a lot harder than it does at UAE.”

Vaughters had foreseen the problem before it hit. 

On the Domestique Hotseat last December, Vaughters called the commercial model of bike racing absurd, arguing that teams operate on three-year licences reviewed annually, which makes them effectively one-year licences, and that without meaningful media rights the sport leaves sponsorship doing all the work. 

“We’re just as expensive as F1, but without any revenue,” he said then.

With EF Education's travel and race costs largely fixed by external costs, the saving had to come from the salary bill. The largest line on it belonged to a rider coming off one of the best seasons of his career but who is now 33 years-old and had been hit by injury and illness in 2025.

“When it comes down to like, well, what are the cost centres that you can get rid of? Well, there’s not so many options, right? A very simple option would be to just let your most highly compensated rider leave,” Vaughters said.

Carapaz had a year left on his contract and had taken a second Tour de France mountains classification in 2026 along with two stage wins, plus a top five at the Vuelta.

He was let go and signed a three-year deal with NSN on Friday.

“We willingly let Richie go. It was not forced, it was not a Brad Wiggins situation where we were fighting it tooth and nail,” Vaughters said, referring to Wiggins leaving Garmin for Sky at the end of 2009. 

He would not say whether NSN paid anything for the release.

Tao Geoghegan Hart arrived on Monday from Lidl-Trek, three seasons without a professional win since the crash at the 2023 Giro that broke his hip. Vaughters is explicit that signing a rider the sport has largely written off is a deliberate bet.

“Sometimes you just gotta take the gut check and let the big-name rider go and put faith into someone who nobody’s heard of, nobody’s counting on, or everybody has written off,” he said. 

“You just have to say, we’re going to take that responsibility, take that risk, and we are going to ignore what public opinion is.”

The search for an additional title sponsor, announced in January, has not been successful. 

Vaughters pitched it then as a chance to win both Tours de France, with EF’s budget reported at around €21 million against UAE’s rumoured €65 million. He says conversations continue and EF itself remains committed, having rescued the team at the end of 2017 when it faced a shortfall of its own.

“To get back to a more normal scenario, what we need is someone to replace Oatly, and we need the world to be a slightly friendlier and less inflationary place,” he said. 

“Hopefully we come up with some new partner money for 2028, and we can go back at the transfer market a little bit harder.”