Growth in Women's Sports; Tennis and Cycling - Similarities in Athlete's Rights; Trends in Sponsorship; Sports Diplomacy vs. Sportswashing; Ineos Struggles ...
Key Takeaways:
● Growth in Women’s Sports
● Tennis Players Association – Similar Challenges to Cycling
● Trends and Concerns in Cycling Sponsorship
● Sportswashing or Sports Diplomacy?
● Changes and Challenges at Ineos
● New Cycling Broadcast Distribution Opportunities
A recently published women’s sports advocacy report detailed market developments during the first half of 2025 – and the results provide new insights into fan behavior and shifting markets with implications for the UCI Women’s WorldTour. The Women’s Sport Trust (WST) Visibility Report analyzed consumer interaction based on two key measures: fan engagement with broadcast content for three minutes or longer, and streaming content views on a variety of digital platforms. The report focused mostly on U.K. sports, but provided several broader findings. Broadcast content consumption was down overall for the first time in several years, which may reflect the lack of major tournaments (such as FIFA events) during the timeframe. However, digital content consumption accelerated across every sports genre, including smaller niche leagues like Netball and women’s rugby, while cross-analysis with other national leagues like the WNBA, cricket’s India Women’s Premier League, and Women’s Tennis Association shows that there is a voracious appetite for both general women’s sports content as well as the athletes’ personal posts. But tucked away on slide 9 in the report was a reference to women’s pro cycling, which saw a 23% drop in total broadcast hours – a fact which bears further examination. Unfortunately, it highlights the inconsistencies of race organizers to provide live broadcast content, but also the WWT’s struggles to increase broadcast reach in a highly competitive media rights marketplace. We hope the WST publishes an end-of-year update to see if coverage of the Tour de France Femmes can tip the scales back, or, if the sport needs a more comprehensive re-think of its broadcast strategy.
An antitrust lawsuit filed by the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) against the men’s and women’s professional tours was amended last week to include the International Tennis Federation (ITF) – which includes the four Grand Slam tournaments. Several aspects of this case closely mirror the challenges also faced by pro cycling’s rider associations. Central to the players’ grievances is the collusion between tournament organizers and the governing bodies to exert artificial controls over compensation, playing opportunities and personal branding, and to conduct “invasions of privacy” – doping controls and personal corruption investigations – to protect the integrity of the game. And at a surface glance, those issues closely resemble key issues professional cyclists face in their careers, too.
A legal analysis of the tennis law suit, which was simultaneously filed on multiple continents, highlighted some key advantages and disadvantages faced by athletes in tournament or “event” structured sports. On one hand, the described monopolistic behaviors and collusions are well understood when framed against other sports leagues, many of which have now undergone transformations due to player-initiated collective bargaining. On the other hand, pro tennis has a player-tournament-governance structure in which the athletes are defined as “contractors” which by definition limits their grievances to arbitration or specifically defined courts like the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). This disadvantage is exactly like the one faced by pro cycling, in which the rider agreements are structured by the UCI in a similar independent contractor model – albeit one in which the individual is paid by the sponsors of a team and indirectly by the races themselves. Riders can collectivize in “associations” that aren’t truly unions, and much like the tennis pros, often face an uphill battle to resolve even the simplest of complaints (like cycling’s perpetual safety impasse). It will be instructive to cycling’s CPA and TCA stakeholders if the PTPA actions are successful in any way; those precedents could set the stage for further rider-initiated reforms in professional cycling.
The puzzling move by TotalEnergies to co-sponsor the Ineos team has some curious and potentially troubling implications for pro cycling. To our knowledge, this represents the first time that a brand has entered into two simultaneous team sponsorships at the sport’s highest tier; previously, the UCI upheld a rule that put guardrails on such arrangements, such that multiple teams would not collude in races to the detriment of other individual teams, due to sponsorship arrangements or sponsor expectations. Most notably, Bodysol was the sponsor of a second-tier Spanish-based team in 2004, but the brand itself was a derivative of Quick-Step’s co-sponsor (Davitamon) parent company, Omega Pharma; that led to controversy when both teams competed that year’s Vuelta a Espana. Competitive questions aside, the move is emblematic of pro cycling’s softening sponsorship economics: quite simply, the reach of the sport is becoming constrained without a meaningful media rights and distribution model, and large sponsor brands are hesitant to pen multi-year commitments to a men’s WorldTour team.
Instead, cycling sponsors are apparently looking at saturation opportunities – backing multiple concurrent programs to increase the percentage of broadcast exposure during any particular event. Red Bull may have inadvertently knocked this door down through its model of sponsoring many of the sport’s most visible athletes independently of their respective team sponsors, and of course it now sponsors its own top-flight WT team. Similarly, and as discussed in the WST sports report above, those individual sponsorships are becoming more valuable as brands engage 1:1 through the athletes to their fans on social media platforms. This tendency may be changing how brands fundamentally engage with their markets, further diluting team-level sponsorships in pro cycling. No longer constrained to the racing and race outcomes on broadcast networks, sponsors may be shifting more of their focus on direct lifestyle and purchase decision influence outside of the racing action through digital channels. Nevertheless, TotalEnergies may have “jumped the shark” as pro cycling, even the Tour de France itself, struggles to make sense of a changing media marketplace and maintain appearances as a premier global sport.
Setting aside questions around TotalEnergies backing both their own team and Ineos, the fact that Jim Ratcliffe’s sporting empire has even accepted a co-sponsor of the cycling team at all speaks to just how much things have changed. When the richest person in the U.K. took over the team from the Murdoch family, it was assumed that the team’s budget, already the biggest in the sport at the time, would continue to climb higher. But, instead, over the past five years, the team's budget and its performances have been overshadowed by state-backed enterprises like UAE Team Emirates. And, across the wider Ineos sports universe, the same sporting underperformance and stagnation seems to now be standard – with budget and staff cuts also rocking Manchester United, the crown jewel in Ratcliffe's sporting empire. It is not surprising that Ratcliffe may be looking to decrease his financial liabilities on the cycling side, considering his highly-valued Manchester United asset is also financially struggling. When combined with reports of slow-to-materialize contract offers (which have seen the team miss out on multiple transfer-market targets in recent years), it would not be surprising if Ratcliffe looks to exit the sport entirely in the near future.
In one sign of just how far the team’s focus has shifted away from its one-time mission of developing British Tour de France winners, the team had no other riders finish yesterday’s U.K. National Road Race Championships despite winning via talented youngster Sam Watson. This stands in stark contrast to years like 2014, when half of the top ten would be from Team Sky. It also demonstrates just how much talented young British riders are avoiding or being pushed out of the team as it tries to chase top tier riders capable of matching Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard. For example, four young compatriots of Watson – Matthew Brennan, Ethan Vernon, Ethan Hayter, and Lewis Askey – have either chosen to ride for foreign teams, or, in the case of Hayter, left Ineos after struggling to find their place in the squad. While it would be somewhat acceptable to let these young homegrown riders slip through their grasp if Ineos were replacing them with grand tour-winning foreign talents, they have instead found themselves in the unfortunate position of having a roster full of expensive riders who seem unable to win the biggest races. Meanwhile, far cheaper British riders on other teams are outperforming them. Ironically, and as a sign of how desperate the situation has become, the 39-year-old Geraint Thomas, a homegrown member of the original 2010 squad, is probably their best hope for grand tour success.
Another more troubling recent sponsorship development is the football club AC Milan’s announcement of a “marketing partnership” with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although it is not clear if any money changed hands in this transaction, the deal makes the DRC a “Premium Partner” of the team “with the goal of promoting the country’s natural biodiversity and cultural identity to international audiences.” The relationship is expected to help promote the Congo and boost tourism. This is an interesting expansion of what some might call sportswashing or others might refer to as sports diplomacy – something which may depend on one’s point of view, in this case regarding the DRC’s position as “combatant” or “victim” in its ongoing conflict with Rwanda. The DRC’s Minister of Tourism was actually quoted in the press release as saying that “a National Soft Power Commission has been established for (the) purpose” of positioning the DRC on the world political stage.
The recent spin off of MAX Sports by Warner Bros-Discovery might not be a bad thing after all for fans of pro cycling who rely on the entity’s aggregated race portfolio for race coverage. A new analysis of the media giant’s shake-up highlights one of the major pitfalls we surmised from the brand split: the cost of maintaining and bidding for the rights of globally influential sports media rights is outstripping the pace of profitability for the rights-owners. It simply cost too much to keep up with the valuation of NBA content on TNT Sports’ distribution platform, which led to the brand giving up the rights to ESPN. Through a different lens, this could help to elevate the presence and reach of pro cycling on the new spinoff’s programming menu. While other sports media rights can cost billions of dollars to acquire and broadcast profitability is a years-long journey, pro cycling’s overall media rights are a relative pittance to acquire and present to viewers. Therefore, the long-term profitability is potentially lucrative but only if the new “Global Networks” arm of the business prominently markets the programming to a broader sports consumer base and provides an economically viable programming subscription model. One wonders if the cycling programming packages are realigned and cross-marketed to realize this opportunity – perhaps not this season, but hopefully for 2026 and beyond.