'In cycling, you can just buy success' - Jonathan Vaughters on financial fairness, super teams and the sponsorship dilemma

Rider contracts in cycling are becoming longer. The best young talents are being snapped up earlier. Just as recently as Wednesday, UAE Team Emirates ensured one of the brightest prospects in the peloton, Jan Christen, wouldn't be going anywhere until at least 2030. 

He's the third rider on the Emirati team to sign a contract until the end of the current decade after 18-year-old Pablo Torres and the sport's current pinnacle, Tadej Pogačar did the same earlier this off-season.

As more money has come into the sport in recent years, the 'super teams' have dominated the transfer market - buying out riders from their contracts at smaller teams, locking down all of the best talents as early as they can and ensuring they have the best chance at winning the biggest races now, and in the next generation.

But how does financial inequality in the sport harm racing? There's been dominance throughout the sport's history, of course, however, is it now a largely unregulated transfer system that is allowing the top-budget teams - UAE Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike and now Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe - to stay on top?

Cyclingnews sat down with EF Pro Cycling CEO Jonathan Vaughters, manager of one of the bottom-half budget teams in the peloton to discuss how he sees the current climate of transfers, long contracts and financial fairness in cycling while he was in London for Rouleur Live.

"Fundamentally, if you look at sports that are successful in building really big audiences, typically, they are sports where on any given year, any given team can become the winning team, right?" he explains.

"The best example of that is the NFL in the US, and the way the NFL tries to make it so that it's impossible for one team to just have a continuous dynasty is with hard budget caps."

"In sports with very organized financial fairness and recruitment rules, like the NFL, they have seen much greater growth in audience and fan base size. Why? Because the games are unpredictable and anyone can win. By creating an even playing field, you grow the interest in the sport."

For Vaughters, he also believes the annual NFL Draft is essential to this too, where the 32 teams' final standings at the end of the regular season are flipped for the selection of the best incoming players from the college system.

"Then there's also the way players are recruited, the worst team gets the first pick and the best team gets the last pick," continues Vaughters.

"So what's wrong with the way cycling goes about it, is not that it's this system or that system, it's that there's no system. The problem is that there's just nothing, there's no guardrails."

The UCI made some changes to the way transfers are to be conducted mid-way through the 2024 season, however, this was largely reactionary after the messy transfer of Cian Uijtdebroeks from Bora-Hansgrohe to Visma-Lease a Bike. It did little to move cycling towards a market with more defined rules, as is the case for sports such as football in Europe.

Vaughters thinks back to UAE Emirates' beginnings in the sport from the 2017 season, when they took over from the then Lampre-Merida team. That season, they won just 17 races, a number that has more than quadrupled to their tally of 81 this past year, with more investment from the Emirati government and superstar riders arriving in that time.

"Effectively, if you look at UAE in 2017 when they first came in. I still remember it was, I think the 2017 Tour, they weren't doing that well. The Sheikh, who sort of really funds the thing, came in, watched one day the Tour de France," he says anecdotally. 

"Basically, he was like, 'Why aren't we winning this? Why aren't we winning all the days?', and I think the team management told him 'Well, it'd be really expensive to do that', and he said, 'Yeah, and?' you know, like, 'Get on with it'."

For Vaughters, success in the sport is being bought and this isn't helping the excitement levels and part of the general attraction of bike racing - that it can be unpredictable.

"Effectively, in cycling at this point in time, you can purchase success, you can just buy success," he says.

"I think for people who like to see the sport, for sport, and not just a purchased victory, that you want to see an innovative, interesting sport, where you don't have just a team winning over and over and over again."

While the US team boss admits that "In order for that, there has to be a system", he isn't quite sure what that would look like, however, is certain that the current group of people in charge of coming up with one, both aren't doing enough, and may not be fit for the job.

"Now I'm not saying that we have to adopt the same system as the NFL, because maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but what I am saying is that there should be something. There should be some attempt to regulate the way riders are recruited, the way teams are constructed, and what is considered sort of financially fair," admits Vaughters.

"At least, that discussion should be happening. And it might be, but to me, it's in a very slow, moving and not particularly inventive way. It's highly bureaucratic, and honestly, the people involved in those discussions aren't actually people who are in the trenches."

Fundamentally, he sees it as a personnel problem.

"The governance level of the sport has lost touch with the down-in-the-trenches realities of the sport," Vaughters says.

"They are not people who have worked in teams. They are not people who have been entrepreneurs. They are not people who have ever had to sell, $10, $20, $30 million of sponsorship. They're not people that have ever had to negotiate a rider contract. They're not people who have had to deal with transfers.

"So there's a limited understanding, a limited knowledge base in the governance of the sport of cycling right now to actually understand how to deconstruct and how to remedy these problems. I think we basically just have to have a different set of people looking at these problems than currently are."

On super teams

It's no illusion that a small number of teams can actually say they are going to challenge for the Tour de France. That number is perhaps down to one after Pogačar's true dominance in the 2024 edition and season. However, that itself isn't new - Merckx, Anquetil, Hinault, Indurain, Froome, you name it, each era had its Grand Tour autocrat.

But it isn't the superstar rider so much that is having a negative effect on the sport according to Vaughters, but the super team he or she may be part of. Big investments have landed from Lidl, Red Bull and Decathlon in recent years, and huge names that are well-known and appear great for the sport. But Vaughters, someone who deals with the day-to-day struggle of tying down sponsorship, doesn't believe it's all so rosy.

"More money coming into the sport of cycling, that's great, OK. But I think the unfortunate side effect of the super team in cycling is that as opposed to what I've seen people say: 'It's going to elevate the level of the sport, the bigger sponsors are going to come in even bigger than before', is that they're not going to come in at the level that UAE does because they can't justify it to their shareholders," explains Vaughters.

"Imagine you're a company right now that says, 'I have 20 million to spend. I can do Formula One, I can do football or I can do cycling.' You come to a cycling team and say, 'I have 20 million to spend, but I would like to win the Tour de France'. 

"Someone like me would say, 'That's not enough, sorry.' That sponsor is going to think, if my 20 million isn't even going to get me in contention to win the Tour de France, then I'm just going to do Formula One, or I'm going to do football."

The purchasing of success in the sport is widening the gap from top-budget teams to those at the bottom, not just on the road itself at races but even before that when it comes to securing financial backing. The size of sponsor teams like EF can secure, need assurances of what they are buying into, but that is difficult to offer.

"What you end up doing is actually discouraging sponsors from coming into the sport. You're creating this point where it becomes harder and harder for teams like an Intermarché or whoever, to find their place in the sport, to find a sponsor, because they cannot sell the dream of winning the Tour de France," says Vaughters.

"That's what a $20 million sponsor wants - to at least think, maybe not next year, maybe not three years from now, but if we keep going with this, if we spend 20 million here for five years, 10 years, we eventually gonna have a shot. Then it's gonna come, our year.

"And that has become more and more unrealistic. I think it's discouraging for a lot of sponsors that would like to be in the sport, that the price tag has gotten so high. It's sort of outstripped the audience level of the sport of cycling itself. Then they move on."

Intermarché-Wanty, to take Vaughters' example, are a team who've spoken openly about their struggles to survive and compete in a sport where they manage on a budget less than a third of the size of UAE. Performance manager Aike Visbeek even said "It requires meticulous management" to just compete, speaking to HLN back in November.

Offering different routes to success

So what do you offer a sponsor when winning the biggest races isn't always on the table? You have to think outside the box, and that's just what Vaughters and EF try to do, from their marketing to social media management and branding of their riders. It's also about a tapering of goals more achievable to what their budget can handle.

"We want to win, so we're going to have to figure out where and how and when we can win on our terms, and not try to take on something that's untenable for the size of team here," he says. "We're well less than half the budget of UAE as well so there's that to consider.

"We don't have a big state-funded sponsor. What we do have, is a bunch of companies that are interested in true marketing metrics and achieving marketing objectives. Oatly, EF and EasyPost all have set marketing objectives.

"What we do is develop a top-down strategy. The polka dot jersey at the Tour de France is a perfect example - this was the highest visibility, something that we can do for our sponsors, so let's focus on that objective with the riders that we have and plan sort of how we're going to leverage it if we actually do win that."

With a large media team ready to push out videos and content to maximise the reach of achieving something like winning the King of the Mountains classification at the Tour, which they did with Richard Carapaz, alongside a stage win, EF have found an alternative route to meet their sponsor's demands.

Vaughters has already been outspoken in his disdain towards the UCI points system and how it makes teams fight for results not true to the point of the sport. But from a business standpoint, these bigger targets are also more valuable than chasing placements or a number of riders finishing in the top ten. The big wins are still the objective.

"For us to chase around sixth place in the Tour de France is, not valueless from a sporting standpoint, but from a business standpoint, it truly is. It just means nothing," he admits.

"Because we have metrics-driven companies that are interested in marketing and the exposure they get in the sport, they're not interested in the ego of it. We have to position ourselves to go after things that are going to create buzz, that are going to create excitement, that are going to pull in new fans.

"The sport is driven by publicity, and winning races on its own doesn't get you there anymore. From a marketing standpoint, if you're just saying we're gonna win 50 races next year or 20 races, that is unsuccessful for a sponsor. 

"It just isn't interesting for big sponsors now. It's got to be: we won the race, we created a compelling story out of it and the athlete is an interesting, well-spoken person. All of that has to line up now so that you've created value."

For those in the sport who relish a compelling story, Vaughters continues to be the figure who crafts a fascinating narrative out of the chaos of WorldTour racing.