OUTERLINE AIRmail: Fragmented Fans, Fading Stars, and the Future of Cycling’s Business

Key Takeaways:

● The Costs and Complexities of Watching Sports

● “Rouleur Live” Downloads

● Froome Ages Out?

● The Status of Women’s Sports

● Continuing Challenges in the Bicycle Industry

A recent article in The Atlantic magazine bemoaned the ever-increasing difficulty of watching sports on television. Even as broadcasters and content owners talk about the expanding reach of sports, and as the airwaves are flooded with sports content, commentary and gaming opportunities on an almost 24-7 basis, it is frequently becoming increasingly difficult – and sometimes prohibitively expensive – for individual fans to watch their favorite teams or sports. This problem gained widespread attention when many irate fans discovered Monday Night Football on YouTube TV was suddenly unavailable last week because of a broadcasting dispute with Disney. Many fans are now either turning to illegal “pirate” sites or even changing their team allegiances because of the skyrocketing costs and frequent local market black-out arrangements. “The sports-broadcast sphere has become a fickle, fragmented mess” and it’s something that broadcasters and rights owners should be taking careful note of, before they begin to permanently frustrate and drive away fans. “Will the leagues take pity on us? It shouldn’t take a handful of streaming services, many hundreds of dollars, and a color-coded spreadsheet to be a fan.”

This past weekend was the annual Rouleur Live event in London, which is quickly overtaking Belgium’s Velofollies as road cycling’s premier trade show, media event, and live forum combine. Beyond serving as a potential business model for the type of diversity needed for a cycling media company to survive in today’s competitive landscape, the event generated interesting conversations around the present and future of the sport. For example, three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond lamented the paucity of professional-level road racing in the U.S., amplifying the fact that it is simply too hard to create a sustainable and viable financial structure. He also offered a candid view on motor-doping, saying that today’s UCI testing makes motor-doping effectively impossible, while still suggesting that the extremely high-cadence styles we saw roughly ten years ago in the sport should warrant suspicion and keep the governing bodies on their toes.

In terms of the financial viability of the sport, EF General Manager Jonathan Vaughters and Flanders Classics CEO Tomas Van Den Spiegel offered differing perspectives on the sport’s complex challenges. Vaughters argued that outside the Tour de France the calendar remains very confusing to casual fans driving the point home with an anecdote about (prior sponsor) Garmin’s then-CEO not knowing the existence of Liège–Bastogne–Liège, even when his own rider Dan Martin won it in 2013. That story highlights cycling’s outsized dependence on the Tour for sponsor visibility, as we have pointed out numerous times in the past. The other topic was the massive salary discrepancies between teams in professional cycling, and the need for some kind of controls or cap. According to Vaughters, Team UAE has an annual budget of as much as three times the size of most mid-level teams. Of course, it is difficult for all teams to compete in all races when this is the case, and Vaughters suggested that this may eventually cause further declines in popularity for the sport. The evidence from other major sports is mixed: baseball’s popularity is on the increase even though it doesn’t have a formal salary cap, while the NBA – with its tighter controls – is struggling to keep fans tuned in.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the discussion was a comparison between the business models of professional cycling and Formula 1. Vaughters noted that while cycling spreads its total money generated in a season across a wide range of race organizers, teams, and nearly 540 WorldTour riders, F1 sends its revenue into a tightly unified commercial model, with just a very small number of teams and riders lucky enough to be in the topflight collecting nearly all of the financial reward. While ideas such as budget caps and a defined racing pyramid with a franchised first division and top-tier races were discussed, Van Den Spiegel countered with the reminder that to accomplish this in cycling, difficult decisions and cuts would have to be made. Additionally, he pointed out that TV revenues are currently so low and fragmented that revenue sharing is more of a dream than a reality. And critically, the UCI is disincentivized from trimming the bulky and unwieldy calendar because race-sanctioning fees are one of its biggest income sources. All of it underscores the same point: cycling’s future health will depend on its ability to simplify, package, and modernize, without abandoning the complexity and variety that make it compelling in the first place.

The past few days saw reporting that the Israel-Premier Tech team was looking to change their country of registration to Switzerland, not Canada, as was expected. This suggests that the team has either found an incoming Swiss sponsor, or that it simply thinks Switzerland would be a more business-friendly domicile. In all of the flurry of news about the controversial team over the last few months, almost forgotten now is the five-year deal they penned back in 2020 with Chris Froome, the premier Grand Tour winner of his generation. That contract is now weeks away from expiring. And with Froome not officially announcing any retirement plans while IPT has simultaneously confirmed that he won’t be returning, it sets up the surreal sight of a four-time Tour de France winner potentially failing to find a contract while still wanting to race. But, at 40, not having won a race in almost eight years, and still carrying the physical limitations from various crashes, the current reality is stark: the sport Froome dominated has long passed. Modern teams are increasingly intolerant of veteran riders with legacy salaries that don’t generate results, and the modern talent pipeline is churning out lighter, younger, more versatile riders at a rate the previous era simply didn’t face. It’s remarkable that a champion of his stature could simply age out of the sport without a clear send-off, but it’s also a sign of where WorldTour economics and performance expectations now sit.

The Women’s Sport Trust (WST) published the 2025 edition of its “visibility” report, highlighting the presence of women’s sports in the media and measuring related economic and social changes influenced by such activities. While primarily looking at data from the UK where WST is based, it also examines a host of globally consumed sporting championships including the women’s UEFA Cup and the Rugby World Cup, and presents excellent data framing points for trends seen in other well-understood and media-popular leagues such as the WNBA. Among the key observations found when looking at comparisons of 2025 performance against 2024 data was an increase of more than 10 million viewers of women’s sports this year to date across linear and free-to-air television as well as all streaming sources. Total viewing hours were up, with a commensurate time-per-view increase in the sports which were tracked. Confirming 2024 observations, athlete social media plays an outsized role in popularizing women’s sports, and there was a corresponding increase in a critical sponsorship metric – athlete trust – in which brands with female athlete-centered campaigns scored a 7% higher rating than those featuring men.

Buried deep in the report’s sporting analysis on page 111, the authors showed steep declines in 2025 Tour de France Femmes viewership despite an increase in dedicated coverage hours. The 45% drop in the cumulative average audience is not a good sign considering the UK market’s usual bellwether position for gauging pro cycling’s media commitment and fan engagement. On one hand, sporting content uptake by fans is often suppressed by paywall increases, which was a well-understood negative of TNT Sports after it subsumed most of the racing calendar rights last season. Yet the drop could be indicative of other problems, including poor differentiation and presentation of women’s racing as compared to men’s racing, the need to update the marketing formula, and the lack of cross-marketing to bring new eyes into the sport. Given the positive reception of the race upon its reinvention in 2022 and positive growth in 2023 and 2024, the downturn should give the sport pause to look at its options and explore what it might look like with a different template better suited to the trends and evolutionary changes the WST has charted in its comprehensive report data.

Setting aside the mixed news concerning the Tour de France Femmes, investment in women’s sport overall is accelerating and a new global basketball league, tentatively named Project B, has plans to start up in 2026. In general, investors are embracing myriad opportunities of marketing reach and innovation, lower cost of franchise ownership, and the socio-cultural impact of women’s sports. While calendar placement isn’t in direct conflict with the WNBA, the new league claims to be able to offer star players $2 million or higher contracts, well in excess of current WNBA standards and higher still than the lucrative payouts from the two other upstart U.S. women’s tournament leagues – Unrivaled, and Athletes Unlimited. Sports analysts note that the slow pace of salary reform and haphazard current collective bargaining situation in the WNBA may be opening the door wide open for Project B’s success, as players seek higher guaranteed remuneration with fewer annual playing days.

There are already multiple highly regarded women’s soccer leagues globally, and given the depth of the Euroleague and U.S. NCAA development systems, there is no shortage of players to fill Project B’s rosters. The one insight from this bold power-move in basketball is the interplay of investors and players: as the top players seek greater freedom and compensation, investors have stepped up to create properties to secure and showcase those talents to create new revenue opportunities. Could the same happen for women’s pro cycling as its popularity builds momentum? Perhaps not yet – the depth of the athlete development pipeline is barely mature enough to support the current WorldTour – but the factors of angel investing and market opportunities are ever-present and might catalyze that perfect storm in the future.

In another recent indication of just how challenging the bicycle industry is at the moment, the publicly-traded Giant Group announced that its revenue was down 17% over the first three quarters of the year, and almost 25% down vis-à-vis the third quarter last year. Nonetheless, the company also said that “while regional performance varied, the overall trend is stabilizing” and noted that “consumer sentiment remained cautious due to tariff policies and macroeconomic factors.” The company also said that e-bikes now represented about a quarter of total revenues – one of the bright spots and an important indicator of how important this sector has become during this prolonged period of industry stress.