Don't Let the Goddamn Visigoths In

Richard Plugge wants cycling to be more like Formula 1, so he's determined to repeat all of Formula 1's mistakes.

Photo credit: Charly Lopez, ASO

Late last year, I decided to start writing seriously about cycling, after having covered other sports, mostly baseball, for more than a decade.

One of the things I love most about cycling—and the thing about the sport that’s probably most alien to the American audience I had set out to court—is the structure of its top-tier competitions. Race organization is decentralized, and both events and teams come and go at the whims of the free market. This was literally the first thing I wrote about when I started the newsletter. And as much heartburn as this precarity causes people who actually work in the sport, cycling is more interesting and vibrant because it lacks the security of the American professional franchise model.

The people who actually run cycling teams, quite understandably, disagree. Last October, Reuters reported that a handful of top professional men’s teams were considering breaking away from the UCI World Tour in order to start a cycling super league called One Cycling. The ringleaders were Ineos Grenadiers, the team that dominated the Tour de France in the 2010s, and Visma-Lease a Bike, the team that dominated the Tour de France in the 2020s.

This week, Visma-LAB managing director Richard Plugge detailed some of the goals for a potential breakaway league.

Plugge frames decentralized race organization as a genuine threat to the long-term health of the sport, and worried that cycling was at risk of falling behind. Every 10 years or so, someone like Plugge comes along with the idea of centralizing all of cycling into one big league, and it never goes anywhere. I expect that One Cycling is a similarly doomed enterprise.

But I want to engage with the idea for two reasons: First, mixed in among the greed and the idiocy, Plugge set out a few good suggestions. Second, there’s a reason he wants to do this, and it’s important to understand. Because Formula 1 has already followed this path. Soccer is trying to as well. And we’re already seeing, in both cases, how the pursuit of American-style structure can do irreparable damage to a sport.

Let’s start with the only idea of Plugge’s that I was truly lukewarm on: The idea of a unified Formula 1-type racing calendar with no overlaps in the schedule.

As it stands, World Tour races overlap each other constantly. Classics races happen simultaneously with stage races; even some of the most prestigious one-week stage races go head-to-head. That’s before you even take into account second-tier races that are routinely attended by World Tour teams. The only sacred cow is the Tour de France; the Giro d’Italia currently has a three-week monopoly on the World Tour calendar, but that has only been true since the Tour of California went bust in 2020.

I like being able to follow Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico at the same time, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they took place consecutively, rather than concurrently. But there’s a reason it looks like two huge one-week stage races are counterprogramming each other: They are.

In order to put together a calendar that would be accepted by cycling fans as top-tier, you need—at a minimum—eight races: The three grand tours and the five monuments. Those eight races—plus most of the rest of the top classics and stage races—are organized by one of three companies:

• Amaury Sports Organization: Tour de France, Vuelta a España, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Paris-Roubaix

• RCS Sport: Giro d’Italia, Milan-San Remo, Il Lombardia

• Flanders Classics: Tour of Flanders

Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico go head-to-head, in short, because the former is an ASO race and the latter is an RCS race.

Right now, the race organizers sell the TV and sponsorship rights to the races they own, and they keep every cent. Or every Euro, I guess. Since most of the races take place on public roads, anything but a grandstand finish on a sprint stage is impossible to charge admission for. So there is no gate revenue worth splitting, and the teams don’t see a cut of the TV rights, subsisting (sometimes quite precariously) on their own sponsorship deals.

One Cycling would cut teams in on the TV money, and Plugge cites Flanders Classics as already being on board.

Which, of course Flanders Classics is on board; they control just one of the eight most important races. The reason this won’t go any further is that, for commercial purposes, there is no legitimacy without the Tour de France.

So One Cycling would go to ASO, which controls not just the biggest grand tour but the biggest monument, and ask for a cut of TV revenue. In that situation, ASO would tell One Cycling to go to hell. End of discussion. If Visma-LAB or Ineos wants to boycott the Tour, ASO would have no shortage of teams champing at the bit to fill out the startlist. And good luck selling a boycott to the riders, some of whom have spent their entire lives building up to racing the Tour, for a cash grab by management.

While cutting teams in on TV revenue might be just, and good for the sport in the long run, it’d be a tough sell to ASO, which already keeps all the money.

Plugge wants to increase the size of the pie by making cycling more visible, more marketable, and I’m with him here, to an extent. Unchained and other documentaries can help grow the sport’s profile and bring in new fans, just as Drive to Survive did for Formula 1.

One of Plugge’s key allies is EF Education-EasyPost general manager Jonathan Vaughters, the bespectacled former US Postal climber who’s the closest thing American road racing has to a face and voice. Vaughters almost lost his team to insolvency in 2017, and since clawing the team back from the brink has modeled a path to financial stability that other teams ought to follow.

The team’s original gimmick, if you want to call it that, was as a place for anti-doping crusaders and repentant former PED users like David Millar, and Vaughters himself. From 2011 to 2014 they won a grand tour and three monuments, but have only won a single monument since.

Nevertheless, EF is a hipster favorite in the peloton because it’s the coolest team in the sport. Thanks to a sponsorship deal with Rapha, they have the prettiest uniforms. They have the slickest video production and social media teams. Put them together, and you get a sizzle reel for a kit release that looks like an M83 music video.

A few years ago, EF pulled Australian pro Lachlan Morton off the main squad and had him ride a so-called alternative calendar of grassroots races and cross-country challenges, all documented lovingly for YouTube and Instagram. This drew more eyeballs and positive impressions for sponsors than winning the Tour de Langkawi ever would.

Plugge says his for cycling, however, is “a 24-hour media factory.” I suggest, humbly, that he doesn’t know what he wants.

He compared the attention that two-time Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard attracts to the attention that YouTuber-turned semipro boxer Jake Paul attracts. And while he’s got a point that World Tour riders and teams would do well to be more media-savvy, that’s not a well-advised comparison. Paul isn’t an athlete, he’s a media personality, and the draw to his matches is baked into his previously existing popularity.

Unless Plugge has a plan for getting KSI up the Alto de L’Angliru as quickly as Vingegaard, it’d be more productive to look at realistic ways to make the existing cycling calendar more exciting.

What Vaughters and EF have done is a good start, and additional media access and team-produced content would go a long way. A Formula 1-style laser focus just isn’t possible. There are only 20 F1 drivers, every single one of whom speaks English well enough to do interviews in the sport’s lingua franca. There are more than 500 riders on the men’s World Tour, and no consensus over what that official language of the sport would even be: French, English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch? German, even, in a few cases, or Russian? It varies by team and by race.

And while the same drivers tend to be the stars on every F1 track, the same isn’t true in cycling. Riders wouldn’t hold up to the same every-other-weekend whirlwind F1 drivers have to live through, and even if they could, different riders would be competitive on different parcours. And as physically demanding as auto racing can be, spending all day on media commitments would only reduce a cyclist’s chances of actually winning the race.

I’ll give Plugge more credit than I did with the Jake Paul comparison and say he probably knows all this. And if what he really means is that cycling needs to identify and market its stars better, to lean in on big racers’ personalities, I couldn’t agree more.

But the whole point of this exercise isn’t to grow the sport. It isn’t to make cycling a better in-person viewing experience by adding circuit finishes to certain races, rather than going point-to-point. (To be honest, you’d have to be a an absolute fool to look at cyclocross’s explosion in popularity and draw any other conclusion.) The point is not to give cycling a better reach by recruiting a bigger broadcast partner, though with the collapse of GCN+ I for one would welcome a single, easy-to-access broadcast home for the World Tour.

The point of all these little reforms, insightful or foolhardy, big or small, is to make money for team owners.

I’ve written about this more times than I can count in some form or other, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The short version is that American men’s professional sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS) are closed systems, while European professional sports (soccer, F1, cycling) are traditionally open systems. In a closed system, new teams must be vetted by existing teams. A salary cap can be instituted. There’s promotion to allow newcomers a shot at the glory and riches of top-flight competition, nor any relegation to take uncompetitive teams out of the system.

In short, there’s no incentive to compete.

In MLB, as many as two-thirds of the 30 teams are indifferent to winning, despite structural factors—a draft, restrictions on international free agent recruitment, revenue sharing, a luxury tax, a highly restrictive free agency system that puts all the negotiating leverage in teams’ hands—that make it easier to do so in baseball than in soccer. So despite a plethora of rules designed to foster competitive balance, more than half the league finds it insufficiently profitable to take advantage.

In 2016, Liberty Media, an American company that owns the Atlanta Braves, bought the commercial rights to Formula 1. Since then, F1 has experienced a global commercial boom thanks to some clever marketing, and one of the greatest title fights in the history of any sport in 2021.

But now, as it’s trying to expand further, the sport is encountering turbulence. One team won 21 out of 22 races last year. So dominant were Red Bull and Max Verstappen that not only was the title fight decided before midseason, most individual races were a foregone conclusion before the teams even showed up to the track.

And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Thanks to a closed-shop franchise model instituted around the pandemic, no new teams can come in to try to take Red Bull down. Thanks to restrictive aerodynamic rules, none of the other teams can develop their cars quickly enough to catch up. Thanks to a freeze on engine development—instituted to cut costs—none of the other teams can find more power to make their cars faster. Thanks to a cost cap that put hundreds of engineers out of the sport, none of the other teams can afford to poach the geniuses who made Red Bull so dominant.

The spectacle sucks now, but it’s cheaper to run a team, and the teams themselves are worth more, so all the people with the power to reform the sport are happier than they’ve ever been.

I’m not going to keep singling out Plugge, because he’s not alone here. Around the time of the leak, Vaughters gave an interview in support of the One Cycling proposal, which was designed to attract funding from outside of the traditional sponsorship avenues: Venture capital, in a word.

"This is about stabilizing the economic underpinnings of the sport, which is good for everyone,” Vaughters said.

You can sell that line in Europe, where most sports fans haven’t heard of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and don’t know what a closed system actually does for competitive balance. Vaughters, an American, ought to know better.

The last thing venture capital wants, or will provide, is stability.

Venture capital wants growth.

The people who run venture capital firms are not sportsmen. They’re not engineers, or inventors, or artists, or idea people. They don’t care about nurturing sporting culture, or putting on a show, or inspiring loyalty. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know how. They only know how to turn big piles of money into bigger piles of money, over a short period of time.

They are the Visigoths, and once they’re inside your system, they will destroy it in order to enrich themselves. It’s what they’ve done in the United States with baseball, and music, and movies, and and a bunch of things that actually matter, like higher education, news media, medicine, homeownership.

If there’s a short-term injection of hundreds of millions of dollars into the sport of cycling, the Visigoths will want tens of billions back in short order.

And I don’t know where they’re going to get it. A unified media deal would probably bring in more money than having ASO, RCS, and Flanders Classics negotiate TV deals piecemeal, but if Plugge or Vaughters or Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe think that ends with a cycling team being worth $500 million, they’re fooling themselves.

Baseball teams are such good investments because they own their own ballparks, and local governments will fork over hundreds of millions to team owners in order to subsidize real estate development in the surrounding areas. There is no more naked scam in American politics, and nobody seems to want to stop it. Even Formula 1 teams have brand equity (names like Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams mean something) and factories worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cycling teams have none of that. Even old-money teams like EF, Visma-LAB, and Ineos have only been around for a couple decades and change their names and branding all the time. Their infrastructure amounts to a few buses and some office space. The only thing cycling teams own that’s actually worth anything is a UCI license and their riders’ contracts.

Even in baseball and Formula 1, venture capital’s inexhaustible pursuit of perpetual grown means the neglect of the sport. It means that workers, especially non-unionized workers who prop the sport up behind the scenes, get squeezed into more hours for less pay and less hope of advancement. What will that pursuit of growth mean for a sport with even less obvious upside?

I believe that cycling is on the upswing—the fact that I’m working on this newsletter instead of pursuing other freelance opportunities, or just sleeping more, is proof of that belief. I think that with better marketing, unified media deals, and smarter scheduling, it could become much more popular than it is now.

I don’t think it can grow exponentially, and sustain that growth forever. And that’s the bargain venture capital makes with sports. In ideal circumstances, you get a worse product that costs more. The downside for cycling, with its slow-burn sport and lack of physical infrastructure, is unfathomable.