Are you fed up with Jumbo-Visma’s domination of world cycling? It’s almost over, at least in its current form. The Dutch team achieved an unprecedented feat this year, winning the three Grand Tours, what’s more thanks to three different riders: Primoz Roglic on the Giro, Jonas Vingegaard on the Tour de France and Sepp Kuss on the Vuelta, including Vingegaard and Roglic quietly completed the podium.
But Jumbo, a Dutch supermarket chain, will not extend its partnership contract which expires in 2024. Faced with this disengagement, Richard Plugge – the manager of the powerful team – has a plan revealed a week ago by the Dutch site Wieleflits: merge with the Soudal-Quick Step.
Or rather, absorb the Belgian entity where Remco Evenepoel and Julian Alaphilippe play in particular, under the shaky leadership of Patrick Lefevere, former king of the classics who is now eager to retire, when he will celebrate his 69th birthday next January. The Belgian daily The evening even announced that the Wolfpack could be disbanded, and all its members asked to find another pack.
A revolution in the peloton
“It’s unprecedented in cycling, it’s as if Red Bull joined forces with Ferrari in Formula 1.” The image is suggested by Matthieu Llorca, lecturer in economics at the University of Burgundy, has Dijon. Seeing major brands leaving the cycling world is nothing new. If we only go back to the beginning of the century, we can remember Once, Banesto, Mapei, Saxo, Rabobank (ancestor of Jumbo-Visma) or even Sky, for reasons of strategy or against a backdrop of history of doping.
But the current event, the exact contours of which remain to be defined, takes place in a new context. “When we compare with Rabobank or Mapei, the duration of Jumbo’s sponsorship will have been much shorter,” notes the specialist in sports economics, particularly cycling. The company, which arrived in 2015 as a co-sponsor with Lotto, the Dutch national lottery, became the main partner in the formation of Plugge in 2019, associated with the Norwegian IT company Visma. She will therefore not renew her five-year contract.
“In four years, the team has won everything, but the situation has changed compared to the previous decade, with higher interest rates and inflation,” notes Matthieu Llorca. We need more and more resources to win. » In 2009, Rabobank proudly announced a budget of 10 million euros. During the last Tour de France, the average budget of a team was 18.5 million euros, but that of the big names was much more.
Cards redistributed
Recent years have been marked – and not only in cycling – by the emergence of richly financed “state teams”: UAE Team Emirates (United Arab Emirates), Bahrain-Victorious, Jayco AlUla (Saudi Arabia) and Israel – Premier Tech have joined Astana (Kazakhstan).
According to Sportune, UAE, with the gifted telegenic Tadej Pogacar at the head of the gondola, displayed during the last Tour a budget of 35 million euros, far from the extremely wealthy company Ineos (50 million), but ahead of Jumbo-Visma (27 million) and Soudal – Quick Step (20). In a sport where the races are (for the moment) free and where the TV rights go to the organizers, only sponsorship keeps the teams alive, all of whom seek to participate in the Tour de France, the alpha and omega in matters media visibility and the spin-offs that go with it.
On this subject, the Netflix docuseries At the heart of the peloton has given a facelift to the Grande Boucle and all its surroundings, which clearly inspired Amazon, broadcaster of a doc devoted to the Jumbo-Visma on its Prime Video platform, and whose rumor about involvement in the future project by Richard Plugge has spread in recent days.
“The news can give ideas to certain brands, which can do like Jumbo and come for a short period of time,” judges Matthieu Llorca. The slogan of Stade Toulousain fans – “We come, we win and we leave” – applied to cycling, in fact. “We could also see more mergers, like that of Arkéa-Samsic and B & B Hotels,” adds the economist. The new Arkéa-B & B Hotels team, to be born in early 2024, will also welcome the Northerner Florian Sénéchal, who leaves the Quick-Step before it is eaten by Richard Plugge.
And the runners in all this?
Obviously, it was tempting when the first rumors of “merger-acquisition” arose to imagine a formation which would associate Jonas Vingegaard, Wout van Aert and Primoz Roglic with the prodigy Remco Evenepoel. That won’t happen, and not just because such an assembly would cost an arm and a leg (and a few fingers, too). Roglic announced on Saturday, before winning the Tour of Emilia in Italy, that he would leave Jumbo-Visma, where Van Aert, Christophe Laporte and Vingegaard recently extended their extensions.
As for Evenepoel, spearhead of Soudal – Quick Step, the 2022 world champion maintains very tense relations with Jumbo, and The Team announced on Sunday that a very nice contract awaited him at Ineos. The opulent British team is looking for a star capable of winning a Grand Tour, while Egan Bernal has never regained his level before his very serious accident in January 2022, and Geraint Thomas wears his 37 years as best he can .
And our national Julian Alaphilippe then, so often crushed by Patrick Lefevere since he no longer wins? Total Energies could recover the double winner of the rainbow tunic (2020 and 2021), who will however have to significantly reduce his current salary (2.3 million euros per year, according to Sportune). We will therefore cause transfers in cycling until much later than usual this year.
But we must not forget the inevitable social disruption that the possible future mega operation will generate. “Riders will be left behind, but also other team members, such as mechanics or doctors,” recalls Matthieu Llorca. We write it here, because it is certainly not these “little hands” that we will talk about in the days to come.