Manuela Fundación, the Spanish team that attempted to break into the WorldTour in 2020 via a buyout of the Mitchelton-Scott squad, is to fold.
Registered as a Continental squad for a single year in 2022 and before that racing at amateur and U23 level, the team has apparently failed to provide the necessary paperwork by the October 31 deadline to continue in 2023.
A member of the team staff told Ciclo21 that it was hoping to return to cycling at a future date.
The 11-man team took no wins in its single year in professional cycling, although it did manage to get a podium with a King of the Mountains classification victory in the Vuelta a Asturias with Isaac Cantón. A former U23 Spanish National Champion, Cantón subsequently quit the team mid-season and began racing again at amateur level. He has now retired.
However, Manuela Fundación’s attempted takeover of the BikeExchange-Jayco team in May 2020, then known as Mitchelton-Scott, was where the Andalucia-based non-for-profit organisation hit the mainstream sports news cycle.
In less than a week, what appeared to be a done deal fell through when it emerged that Gerry Ryan, who owned Mitchelton-Scott's WorldTour licence, was not fully on board with the take-over. The takeover by Manuela Fundación, which had seen team vehicles already stripped of decals and prepared for their new logos, collapsed.
The deal, masterminded by team manager Shayne Bannan and financial director Alvaro Crespi was binned by Ryan, saying “it wasn’t the deal [he] thought it was.”
“What was happening is he [Bannan] had a team of advisers,” Ryan told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 “and I think, in translation, a lot of things got misconstrued about what they were looking for and what we were actually looking for.”
Bannan and Crespi subsequently left Mitchelton-Scott at the end of June 2020, and were replaced by Brent Copeland and Darach McQuaid.
Manuela Fundación continued to sponsor cycling in Andalucia, with teams at multiple junior levels up to U23 and the Continental team, the latter for what now appears to be set to be a single year, in 2022.
