The ever-widening gap between the super teams that dominate the peloton and hoard the best riders and the large middle class who have to make do with the crumbs they leave behind continues to draw criticism.
Inequality continues to grow in cycling. We see it with mega-structures such as UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Visma-Lease a Bike or Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe that, at the stroke of a cheque, no longer hoard the best riders in the world, making it very difficult for others to compete on equal terms, but are also tying their riders with long contracts that promise to continue deepening the sporting and economic gap that has emerged in the World Tour.
In the face of this, the rest of the teams are seeing how their chances of achieving victories are increasingly less and they have to satisfy their sponsors with other types of stories and objectives. One of the squads that has been working best on this, with intense work on image and selling a cycling philosophy, even beyond the road, is Jonathan Vaughters’ EF Education-EasyPost, who expressed his opinion on the direction that cycling is taking today.
The owner of EF Education-EasyPost did not hesitate to make the comparison with U.S. professional leagues “If you look at sports that are successful in creating large audiences, they are usually sports where, in a given year, any team can become the winning team.” he said, referring to what happens in sports like the NBA or the NFL where a draft system is set up in which the lowest-ranked teams from the previous season are the first picks in the draft so they are eligible to have the best players the following year.
Obviously, for this to work there are budget limits that are strictly enforced, not in the creative way that is done in, for example, soccer where the gap between teams and leagues creates tremendous inequalities at the sporting level.
The problem with cycling for Vaughters is that “it’s not that it has a better or worse system, it’s that there is no system. The problem is that there are no limits. In practice, in cycling today, you can buy success”.
The problem with super teams is that only a very small number of them, for example, will be able to fight for a Tour de France. Also, the level of contribution of these sponsors such as Emirates or Red Bull is driving up the cost of cycling so the contribution of any sponsor that comes in will have to be higher without even guaranteeing them success against these super teams.
This could mean that these sponsors will consider investing in other sports rather than cycling, “What you do is discourage sponsors from coming into the sport. It creates a point where it becomes increasingly difficult for teams like Intermarché or any other to find their place in the sport, to find a sponsor, because they can’t sell the dream of winning the Tour de France.”
The only solution left for teams like EF Education-EasyPost is to monetize their sponsors’ investment in other ways such as better managing social media and the image of their riders with intense marketing work and setting achievable if more modest goals “We want to win, so we’re going to have to figure out where, how and when we can win on our own terms, and not try to take on something that is unsustainable for the size of the team that we have here.”
Source: www.brujulabike.com