The finances of professional cycling teams

Abstract

Although cycling races are usually won on an individual basis, professional road cycling is a sport practiced in teams. This chapter focuses on cycling team's finances which are in at least three ways very different from the finances of teams in most other sports. First, although cycling teams operate like small businesses, according to the rules of the International Cycling Union (UCI) they are not run for profit. As a result, team budgets should, in principle, equal revenue as well as expenses. Second, cycling teams do not have a home stadium or arena. The lack of a home venue, and thus the impossibility of hosting their own cycling races, prevents cycling teams from collecting ticketing revenue, an important source of revenue in most team sports. Third, while revenue from broadcasting rights is an ever-growing source of income in many other sports, it is currently not available to professional cycling teams. As a result, as of 2015, cycling teams are still almost exclusively financed by sponsorship money. In this chapter, we show how team budgets have grown substantially in the past 25 years and we discuss in detail the different costs and the (potential) sources of revenue to the teams.