Who fancies a long-term contract? Finance, future and feel-good vibes guaranteed for many more laps around the sun? First, there was Chris Froome and Michael Woods on their contract-until-retirement deals at Israel-PremierTech. Then there was Mathieu van der Poel and his 10-year marriage with Canyon, and latterly Wout van Aert joined the exclusive club by signing an “eternity” contract with Visma-Lease a Bike. And for what it’s worth, UAE Team Emirates have handed out six-year deals to four different riders in the past few seasons.
It’s easy to forget with all these various printers spitting out long-term agreements that until a few years ago a good contract in cycling was considered to be two or three years in length. But then, as we all know, everything changed in 2019 with the arrival of Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel, upending the rulebook and conventions of pretty much everything in cycling. And contracts were not immune from the changes.
“There’s one very clear reason why we see longer contracts: the new stars of cycling have incredible results when they are super young, and so it’s normal that teams want to sign them for five, six or seven years,” says Alex Carera, arguably the sport’s premier super-agent and the man who is currently rumoured to renegotiating Pogačar’s contract with UAE that is thought to include a buyout clause of €100m. There is a second reason, too: “In the past, there was a greater risk of doping, but now sponsors are more comfortable and feel safer investing in cycling with these stars, allowing teams to invest more money over a longer period,” says Carera.
But is the trend of keeping riders in the same team for half a decade or more a good or bad development? What happens, like in the case of Cian Uijtdebroeks last winter, when a rider wants to jump ship early? And is a long-term deal really worth the paper it’s printed on?
Conditions and clauses
Agent Gary McQuaid has been wheeling and dealing inside the professional peloton for most of the past two decades, and the consequence of the “increasingly popular” long-term contracts is that each year he has fewer deals to sign. “Before I would have nine or 10 a season, but now I’m doing four a year,” he says. And rather than most deals happening at the Tour de France as per previous tradition, they’re often tied up before the Giro d’Italia. “Teams want to lock down contracts early and hang onto their riders.”
McQuaid echoes the views of most in the sport when he judges Van Aert’s deal to be “marketing spin”, but adds that all long-term contracts have multiple clauses and conditions attached to them, often performance-orientated. In practice, what this means is that if a rider doesn’t continue to fulfil the expectations set of them, à la Froome, their salary won’t be as high. “I don’t know how Visma has structured Wout’s deal, but surely they’ll have something in the contract that is linked to the number of UCI points he gets,” McQuaid says. “He won’t be able to turn up 10 kilos heavier and DNF every race. There’ll be loopholes and conditions in there.”
Britain's Josh Tarling is among the young riders handed a long-term contract by one of cycling's biggest teams
At the younger end of the spectrum, more teams are signing teenagers on multi-year deals, fearful that if they allow them to develop at a separate U23 team they will lose the opportunity to sign them at a later stage. “I’m not a massive fan of these deals because a lot can change in five years, but if I’m in the position of UAE or Red Bull, I want to sign these next best talents on three- or four-year deals because if they race for a development team instead, all they’re doing is putting themselves in a shop window to be bought by someone else,” says Jamie Barlow, an agent who negotiated Josh Tarling’s five-year deal with Ineos Grenadiers when he was just 18.
Bigger teams and deeper pockets
What happens, though, if a rider and team fall out, circumstances change and reality is altered? Can a rider who is in theory tied down to the same employer for an extended period of time wiggle themselves free? “We saw that happen with Cian last year,” Carera points out, himself having engineered the young Belgian’s move from Bora-Hansgrohe to Visma in an acrimonious deal that forced the UCI to tighten up its rules surrounding buy-outs. “The teams need to respect the rules and law. For example, in Belgium where Cian is from, you can decide if you’re not happy with your employer and can pay your way out. A team with more money can do this.”
McQuaid sides with Carera. “A three-year deal is commonplace for top-100 ranked riders, but ultimately things can change – a rider might want to leave or a team’s main sponsor might pull out – and some system is going to have to come in where these high profile cases of riders wanting to leave and not being able to will be a thing of the past,” he says. “There’s a lot of exciting, young talent out there on maybe €100-200,000 contracts, but if they have a good year, like Marc Hirschi did in 2020, they can all of a sudden command five or six times that amount. It’s certain that we’re entering into a phase of cycling where the sanctity of a contract is less rigid than it was 10 years ago.”
A rider who has an excellent year as Marc Hirschi did in 2020 can command a much higher salary in contract negotiations
Buy-out clauses are becoming more and more common – Barlow says that “it’s as good as a prerequisite in any contract I sign for my riders” – but they are not yet universal. The argument goes that if cycling introduced a football-type transfer market, it would allow teams to reap transfer fees for selling riders – something that would be akin to a windfall for development and smaller teams – but the fear among many is that it would disproportionately favour the bigger teams with deeper pockets. Something else benefitting the teams with greater resources is ‘first refusal’ clauses. “How these work is that a rider signs a deal and if in two or three years time they get a rival offer, their current team has the right to match that offer and the rider has to stay,” McQuaid explains. “I’m against that as a rider might need a fresh environment – it’s not just money-related – and teams like UAE are able to match any offer.”
How cycling’s contracts and approach to transfers develop is unknown, but what is clear is that the move towards longer-term deals doesn’t necessarily mean that the rider will continue to ride in the same jersey for as long as the piece of paper suggests. Uijtdebroeks proved that last year, and Remco Evenepoel and Tom Pidcock are both said to be itching for moves away from their respective teams despite being on multi-year deals. “In the future I think it’s very possible we’ll see it happen more often,” Carera concludes.
