Does professional men’s cycling need a budget cap to make it more competitive? That is the idea being promoted by the UCI, the sport’s governing body, which is concerned that the current WorldTour is divided by the haves and the have nots, thus making the sport less attractive to fans and investors.
The notion of a budget cap is nothing new in cycling: certain teams, riders and individuals – mostly French – have been calling for a cap to level the playing field for decades, and the UCI’s president David Lappartient first called for one in 2017 when Team Sky were all-conquering. Now, he might finally be about to get his way. Since the summer, the UCI has been working with the Switzerland-based consultancy firm, PwC, to investigate how the sport could become more financially sustainable. The buzz phrase they’ve opted for is a Financial Fairness Initiative (FFI), and they’d like to see a budget cap, or FFI, in place for the start of the 2026 season.
Discussions are still at an early stage – all 18 WorldTour teams were only informed about the proposals on the eve of Il Lombardia – and no set model as to what a prospective FFI would look like is even close to being agreed upon, but a hybrid system of a budget cap and a ‘luxury tax’ that financially penalises those who overspend is part of the current proposal.
Even though talks are very much in their infancy, the idea is already causing consternation, with the majority of riders and their agents said to be dismayed by the prospect, and Richard Plugge, manager of Visma-Lease a Bike, publicly voicing his current opposition to a budget cap, saying there are more pressing matters to prioritise. So should it happen? And will it happen?
'Buying speed'
It’s not difficult to understand why the UCI would be in favour of implementing a model that prevents the superteams from further increasing the gap between themselves and the rest: while there have always been superior teams, and money hasn’t always correlated with success (Ineos Grenadiers is a very recent case in point), the past two seasons have been characterised by unprecedented dominance, with Jumbo-Visma winning all three Grand Tours in 2023 and UAE Team Emirates claiming 81 victories in 2024.
Figures from a PwC presentation highlight how the richest team in the sport (thought to be UAE) has a budget in excess of €40m more than the least-wealthiest team, while they also spend more on staff wages than the eight teams with the lowest expenditure pay out in rider wages. The six richest teams, meanwhile, pay 55% of all WorldTour rider salaries. Perhaps most stark is that the two teams with the deepest pockets spent €4.7m on equipment in 2024, compared to 10 teams spending less than €1.5m. As one commentator put it, “the richest teams are buying speed”.
The backdrop to the differences in budgets is that teams like UAE and Visma are able to recruit riders as super-domestiques who would otherwise be leaders at most other teams. Referencing that trend, Romain Bardet, a long-time advocate for a budget/salary cap, said earlier this year: “Where is the competition?” He added: “There is a good chance that guys from the same two teams will make up the podium or top-five [in any Grand Tour] and I find that a bit less interesting.”
Others, including the UCI, side with that viewpoint, and it fears that the bigger the chasm grows between the richest teams and the rest, the less attractive the sport will be for both supporters and current and potential sponsors. A budget cap, however presented, would be an attempt at making the sport more competitive.
Prospective loopholes
The argument put forward by Plugge was that while a budget cap might be something worth exploring, now is not the time. For two years, some of cycling’s biggest names, including Plugge, have been trying to restructure and reform the sport, under the guise of One Cycling. Simplified, they’d like to lessen the control and power enjoyed by ASO, the organiser of the Tour de France, and create a shared economic model where revenue is divided between the teams, like in Formula One and most American sports. The idea is also that the best riders would race against each other more often and the sport would thus become more understandable for spectators. Without a restructured WorldTour, Plugge’s opinion is that you can forget a budget cap because right now there’s no shared revenue stream. One Cycling must come first, basically.
Naturally, riders are also sceptical – they don’t want to have their wages reduced, and neither do their agents whose commission would also be impacted. Similarly, the richest teams, of which Plugge manages one, don’t want their place at the top of the sport to be taken away from them. They’ve successfully managed to acquire big-name sponsors with big chequebooks, so why should they have their spending limited because other teams are unable to attract similarly wealthy sponsors?
Additionally, it has been raised by many that just getting FFI off the ground could be legally very challenging. Unlike in American sports, where budget caps are most common, not all teams, riders and staff are based in one country; it’s commonplace for cycling team staff to be residing in as many as 10 different European countries. Finding a transnational system is therefore difficult, but not impossible – both European football and Formula One have introduced financial restrictions in recent years, and their competitors are spread across various countries.
The prospect of loopholes being exploited is real though. Could, for example, a team top up a rider’s salary by external personal sponsorship that wouldn’t need to be registered on the team’s accounts? Wout van Aert’s Red Bull sponsorship and Mathieu van der Poel’s agreement with Canyon spring to mind. These are all factors the UCI is aware of but would have to figure ways around.
Too early to predict
Presently, given that talks have only just begun, it’s too early to give a prediction on the likelihood of FFI being introduced in just over a year’s time. What is clear, though, is that there is not (yet) universal support for a budget cap; this is just another topic to add to cycling’s long list of ‘Things we can’t agree on’.
But few would doubt that the current landscape of five superteams – UAE, Visma, Ineos, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Lidl-Trek – is healthy for the current and long-term prognostic for the sport. Something clearly needs to be done to lessen those teams’ competitive advantage borne out of bigger budgets. The UCI is pushing the idea that a budget cap would help solve the competitive and financial discrepancy.
