'It's not possible to double the budget' - 15 Tour de France teams need a new sponsor, so is cycling close to bankrupting itself?

With so many Tour de France teams – big and small – searching for substantial investment, Chris Marshall-Bell asks why and ponders the question if ever-increasing budgets are sustainable.

Tour de France
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Look around the Tour de France and you’ll see 38 sponsors – some huge international companies – lending their name to the 23 competing teams. The collective annual budget of the teams is, according to an official UCI document seen by Cycling Weekly, in excess of €600m. Top-tier cycling, on the face of it, looks richer, healthier and more financially sustainable than ever before.

But those headline figures don’t tell the full story. One team manager at the race told Cycling Weekly that 15 of those teams are currently searching for new title sponsors who will invest significant seven-figure sums, and no one else who CW spoke to disputed or was surprised by that number.

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Chris Marshall-Bell

A freelance sports journalist and podcaster, you'll mostly find Chris's byline attached to news scoops, profile interviews and long reads across a variety of different publications. He has been writing regularly for Cycling Weekly since 2013. In 2024 he released a seven-part podcast documentary, Ghost in the Machine, about motor doping in cycling.


Previously a ski, hiking and cycling guide in the Canadian Rockies and Spanish Pyrenees, he almost certainly holds the record for the most number of interviews conducted from snowy mountains. He lives in Valencia, Spain.

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