This week reports uncloaked a behind-the-scenes push to overhaul the business model of professional cycling. Led by Jumbo-Visma CEO Richard Plugge and Soudal-QuickStep’s wealthy backer Zdenek Bakala, the scheme is designed to bring large amounts of venture capital into the sport to help shore up what are increasingly dire economics.
The details of the plan are still unclear, but Plugge and EF Education-EasyPost CEO Jonathan Vaughters spoke to the ‘Radio Cycling’ podcast revealing some new information.
The plan is to combine a number of teams and events into a more easily-digestible format accessible to new viewers, one that avoids any overlapping races such as now exist in the current WorldTour.
The tenets of the scheme sound very much like the genesis of the WorldTour that dates back to 2004, ensuring the top riders and teams are in the same series of races throughout the year.
There is one key difference, according to Vaughters, in that Plugge’s project aims to bundle races into one package to sell rights to broadcasters and bring in revenue that can be shared with teams – all of which still sounds very familiar to anyone who followed the last attempts at a breakaway league that Bakala threw his weight behind in 2011.
This time it appears to be more serious, with Reuters reporting that a consulting group is appealing for interest from investors with an imminent deadline, trying to, according to the podcast, raise €600 million to bring Giro d’Italia organisers RCS Sport into the fold.
However, as both the UCI discovered with the ProTour from 2004-2008 and teams discovered in the attempted breakaway league of 2012, no change can happen without Tour de France organisers ASO.
Plugge revealed on the podcast that he has already spoken to ASO’s head of strategy Yann Moenner and intends to hold further discussions with the ASO and the UCI “in the coming week”.
“The world is changing around us, and our competitors are not the other teams or organisers,” Plugge said. “Our competitors are football or rugby, NFL and Formula 1. So we need to make sure that we are ‘future ready’ as a sport. And I think [UCI President David] Lappartient has some ideas about that. Yann [Moenner] – many people have some ideas about it. But we have to make sure that in five years’ time, this sport is bigger than it is today and then everybody will be benefiting from that.”
Vaughters, having rescued his team from a late-season near-demise, said he was in full support of the proposal.
“I can…
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