Mathieu van der Poel Is Selling You German Shampoo

How cycling's team structure is better (and/or worse) than what we're used to.

The easiest way to get involved in a sport is to follow the local team. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, so when I discovered baseball, I followed the Phillies; when I got into football, the Eagles, and so on.

Cycling is different. There are no localities, no stadia to speak of, just a traveling circus of a few dozen teams that take over public roads for a day, then pick up and move to the next town. There can be no New York Yankees, because no cycling team is meaningfully tied to a city.

That’s true in motorsports as well, where teams are named after the company that makes the car (Ferrari, most famously) or after the person or syndicate who owns the team: Williams in F1, Andretti or Penske in IndyCar, Hendrick in NASCAR.

There are engineering considerations in road cycling, but it’s not a manufacturer’s sport in the way auto racing is. Occasionally a bike manufacturer will dip into the sport and launch a team of its own: Bianchi tried it in the early 2000s, Trek and Cervélo in the years after. Nowadays, most manufacturers are content to work on equipment supply deals or secondary sponsorships. Of the 33 teams that race in the men’s and women’s World Tours, only one has a bicycle company as its primary title sponsor.

But for the most part, teams are named after sponsors, which pay millions of dollars to have cycling teams adopt their names and branding. And it makes sense; millions of people across the world watch the Tour de France, both in person and on TV. Turning each rider into a billboard puts the sponsor in front of a huge audience.

Most of these sponsors have nothing to do with cycling. The most successful team on the men’s World Tour is named after a business software company. The most successful team on the women’s World Tour? Named after a different business software company.

Occasionally, these team-sponsor relationships are pretty stable. The French Cofidis team was founded in 1997, and has been sponsored by the same bank for its entire existence. The oldest team in the peloton, Movistar, has been sponsored by the Spanish telecom company since 2011; before that, it changed title sponsors about once a decade, dating back to the team’s founding in 1980.

But that’s the exception, rather than the rule. Not only to teams change title sponsors all the time, without warning, sometimes in midseason, the reverse is true too. Sponsors change teams.

Mathieu van der Poel, winner of two monuments and the world road race championship in 2023, races for the Belgian Alpecin-Deceuninck team. Alpecin is a German shampoo company that, for three years before sponsoring van der Poel’s team, was cosponsor of the now-defunct Russian Katusha-Alpecin team. (Alepcin claims to stimulate hair growth by lacing its shampoo with caffeine. Is that a thing? Would I not be thinning at the top if I dumped a Red Bull on my head every morning?)

Deceuninck, a Belgian company that makes windows and doors, used to sponsor the team that’s now Soudal-Quick Step. Quick Step makes vinyl laminate flooring, and has sponsored that team dating back to its inception, some 20 years ago.

Soudal, a producer of polyurethane and building supplies, jumped to its current team after eight seasons cosponsoring the team that’s currently called Lotto-Dstny. Lotto is the Belgian national lottery, but is not to be confused with LottoNL, the Dutch national lottery, which used to sponsor what is now Team Visma-Lease a Bike. So for a while there were two teams called Lotto in the peloton, plus FDJ, which is sponsored by the French national lottery.

And Soudal is actually the third company to be a title sponsor of both the Lotto team and the Quick Step team at one time or other. We used to have Quick Step-Davitamon, then Davitamon-Lotto. Then we had Omega Pharma-Lotto for a couple years, before Omega Pharma jumped ship and sponsored Omega Pharma-Quick Step.

If you’re not already confused to the point of tearing your hair out, it gets worse. (If you are, fear not, Alpecin will grow it back!) Because teams will just rip up their entire brand identities on a whim. For the first decade of its existence, the team that’s now EF Education-Easy Post had blue and white jerseys with an argyle pattern. It was their thing. Their Twitter handle was Ride Argyle. Then they merged with Cannondale and changed their colors to green, while retaining the argyle branding. But when EF Education First took over as the title sponsor in 2018, the team went pink and ditched its signature look. (They still have the best uniforms in the peloton by an enormous margin, but I’m pissed about losing the argyle.)

There aren’t a lot of entities out there with both the money to burn on sponsoring a cycling team, and the will to do so. So you get this odd mix of very localized, mundane sponsors from cycling-mad countries in western Europe—supermarkets, consumer goods companies, banks—and highfallutin’ sponsors who can get, well, a little sportswashy.

One of the richest teams, Ineos Grenadiers, is named after a ridiculous vanity project SUV built by a British billionaire, Jim Ratcliffe, who made his money in chemicals and is really into fracking. You’ve got multiple teams sponsored by repressive governments in western and central Asia. It’s a miracle that we never got a cryptocurrency team.

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All of this takes some getting used to. Imagine if the biggest rivalry in baseball wasn’t between the Yankees and the Red Sox, but between Wegman’s and Raytheon, and one day in August you turn on ESPN and Raytheon is now Booz Allen Hamilton and the color scheme is completely different. Eventually it stops being funny, I promise.

For sports fans who are used to the team-as-civic-institution model, I’m sure this seems a little farcical. We don’t blink at baseball and soccer teams that are pushing 150 years old. Even the well-established pro cycling teams only date back a couple decades. Teams like Astana, Ineos, and EF were founded after Lance Armstrong’s first retirement and (in the latter two cases) have undergone numerous rebranding efforts; yet they’re basically old money now.

Because in addition to changing names and colors, these teams go bust all the time. Even Quick Step and Jumbo-Visma (now Team Visma-Rent a Bike)—two big-money outfits that in the past two seasons combined to win five grand tours, two monuments, and three world championships—were in such dire financial straits after last season that they almost merged.

Having teams go out of business might seem like a bad thing, and it is. Riders don’t get paid, staff get put out of work, the race calendar gets destabilized. But American sports could use more of it for two reasons.

First, it frees the teams from the corrosive complacency of the American franchise model. Basically, in North America, owners assume that their teams should be profitable almost as a divine right of billionaires. Enormous leaguewide media deals line all owners’ pockets, and salary caps keep costs down. If you can’t make money off owning a professional sports team, you’re too stupid to be rich.

And even if that’s the case, the scarcity of franchises in a closed system—no promotion or relegation, no expansion without the consent of the existing owners—guarantees that the value of a team will only go up. So even if you’re too stupid to be rich, you can still sell the team and walk away with billions. Between the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, it’s been more than 40 years since a team went out of business. MLB hasn’t lost a franchise since the two-league system was founded in 1901.

These franchises are a profanation of the American capitalist system. There is no market competition, no risk of losing everything by putting out a product that nobody wants to buy. The league will prop up the most indifferent owner, and if all else fails, the team can always be sold for a profit.

Because this model is so profitable, American sports bigwigs have started exporting it to Europe, where soccer’s Super League came very close to fencing off the commons. Liberty Media, the owners of MLB’s Atlanta Braves, turned Formula 1 from a cycling-type open shop to an MLB-type cartel, and the team owners have embraced this model with a zealotry you only find in converts. I am convinced this change will make the team owners very rich, but on a longer timeline it will be the ruination of the sport.

Cycling teams run on comparative shoestring budgets. They play their game on open roads; gate receipts don’t drive profits. They don’t sell very much merch. Cycling teams don’t own arenas they can rent out for concerts or use as an excuse to get local governments to subsidize real estate speculation. They make money from sponsorship.

In cycling, if you’re not good, or at least interesting, you go out of business.

That is as it should be. Sports are sacred; if the money men don’t treat the game with sufficient respect, they deserve to go home with nothing.

Cycling teams aren’t always run well, or responsibly, but by and large they try to win. That’s more than you can say for the big four American leagues, or most high-level auto racing championships.

The open model of pro cycling has an additional advantage: It frees fans from the tyranny of the team.

Some teams are wrapped up in a national identity, but it’s rare. Lidl-Trek is nominally an American team, but it has a German title sponsor and its GM and a significant portion of its roster is Italian. The French teams generate plenty of national pride—I don’t know what French fans will do now that the perpetually cursed Groupama-FDJ leader Thibaut Pinot has retired—and Ineos was founded basically as a vehicle to advance British cycling. (A task at which it has been enormously successful.)

But even teams named after countries have little connection to geography. UAE Team Emirates is run by a Swiss GM and built around a Slovenian leader. Its 28-man roster features riders from 19 countries, but none from the UAE.

As a result, fans get attached to the people who actually make the sport worth watching: the athletes. The complaints about inflated salaries and perceived disloyalty that plague American sports fandom are less intense in cycling, because if your favorite rider leaves his or her team as a free agent, the fans can go along with them.

It makes sense to be moved to the point of fanaticism by Wout van Aert or Richard Carapaz or Peter Sagan. These are incredible athletes. But to say you’re a fan of a software company? A chain of gas stations?

You’d feel like an idiot, rooting for a business. Which, of course, cycling teams are. But unlike in other sports, they give us the courtesy of being honest about it. And everyone involved—except maybe the owners, but screw them—is better off for it.