I agree!!! Buying fitness is so much easier!!! What else am I going to do with all this extra money I have laying around.
I’m late to the discussion but I think this could make cycling more exciting. If the tour was more exciting maybe the casual viewer would watch more races during the year.
I agree on the comments about revenue sharing.
Or…if we can get 300,000 new sign ups, we could fund team sky at 40 million US! That’s a lot of referrals!
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QS have 50% more victories with 50% less money than Sky.
Things that make you go hmmmm… 
They also have zero Grand Tour GC victories for an annual budget of 18 million euros, I can do that for way less money 
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out of interest, I grabbed this from the cycling weekly website - estimated figures are for 2016
Tour de France team budgets (estimated)
Team Sky – €35m
Katusha – €32m
BMC – €28m
Tinkoff – €25m
Astana – €20m
Etixx-Quick Step – €18m
Movistar – €15m
Lotto-Soudal – €14m
LottoNL-Jumbo – €14m
Dimension Data – €13.5m
Orica-BikeExchange – €13m
Giant-Alpecin – €12.5m
Trek-Segafredo – €12m
Ag2r La Mondiale – €12m
Cofidis – €11m
IAM Cycling – €10.5m
FDJ – €10m
Cannondale – €10m
Lampre-Merida – €7m
Direct Energie – €6m
Bora-Argon 18 – €4.5m
Fortuneo-Vital Concept – €3.5m
Read more at Which Tour de France team has the largest budget? | Cycling Weekly
This is very interesting. Looks a lot closer than people are making it seem to be. I mean Katusha is only a few million off.
Hmm Sunweb doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article, would be interesting to see what their budget was.
Seeing as they could compete with sky in the giro and the tour
I wonder if any entrepeneuring middle eastern countries are looking for a used cycling team (lightly soiled) with one previous owner.
They were Giant-Alpecin in 2016
Ah sorry, misread the article/post, thought it was 2018 budget estimates. Thanks for the correction
Though I feel like their budget is probably higher now with Dumoulin winning the Giro and TT worlds and two 2nds at the Giro and Tour.
The problem is that the World Tour teams don’t own the rights to the biggest revenue stream in cycling: the ASO television rights. I just don’t know how you convince them to give that up?
I know, that’s exactly what I said. You also have RSA being very profitable across several races.
I have no idea how to solve it, the pissing contest where the Tour was off the WT for a year was part of the last attempt.
True, I think Sunweb also has some technical strategic deals with Samsung and with a university in The Netherlands.
I believe they were able to test all the possible team pursuit combinations in a windtunnel and they could then change their strategy.
What the order should be of swapping riders
Well I actually just looked into this and ASO shows a profit of like €45.9 million per year. That’s not really that much once you start splitting it up 15 or 20 ways.
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If you went to a revenue sharing model, then most of the team sponsors would become league sponsors, like the NFL, EPL and such. You are talking several hundred million in revenue, and a more stable form of revenue.
But as you say, convincing the race owners is the hard part. I truly don’t know how to get around it.
Maybe the only way to do it would be to get 15 teams/investors together to buy out ASO and the other race organizers. If being in the World Tour guarantees you 1/15th or whatever of the revenue stream in perpetuity, then you can actually start to build some equity and encourage long term investment.
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I actually don’t think they’ll have trouble finding new sponsors if the owners of Team Sky do want to move forward. With Froome, Thomas and Bernal, you’ve got enough TDF GC pedigree there that someone will pay for that exposure. I think they’ll have to learn to live with a smaller team budget more in line with their other rivals. Might be interesting to see how Froomey does without 2 or 3 superdomestiques guiding him up every climb.
I think same is true for other cyclists. I think Froome has gotten a little too much flak over the past 5 years. He’s a great cyclist. I was in awe watching his performance this year on Finestre. I don’t think I’ve seen something like that for a long time.
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Interesting point made in The Cycling podcast - Sky are the title sponsors :and: owners which complicates matters somewhat.
Any compan(y/ies) looking to get the whole deal would potentially have to buy out the assets/contracts etc as well as fronting up for the on-going costs.
I guess someone with deep pockets could buy out the team and then seek sponsors in the way most other teams function.