The Fight to Reinvent Pro Cycling

From One Cycling to Collective Cycling Group — the battle to fix cycling’s broken business model

Professional cycling has rarely looked stronger. Team budgets are reaching unprecedented levels, the biggest riders have become global sports personalities, women’s cycling is expanding rapidly, and the Tour de France remains one of the world’s most powerful annual sporting events. Yet behind that apparent strength sits an economic model that has changed remarkably little. Teams still rely overwhelmingly on sponsorship, race organisers control most of the sport’s valuable event and media assets, and cycling still lacks the central commercial engine found in most major professional sports.

This contradiction has driven almost every recent attempt to reform the sport. Velon tried to give teams a stronger collective voice. One Cycling went much further, exploring a restructuring reportedly backed by around €250 million of potential investment. Neither fundamentally changed the economics of the peloton. Now comes Collective Cycling Group (CCG), and this time the approach is different.

Rather than starting with the almost impossible task of redesigning professional cycling from the top down, CCG is attempting to build a commercial asset around something the teams can actually control: themselves. According to reporting around the project, 15 of the 18 men’s WorldTeams are expected to become shareholders, alongside three ProTeams and three standalone women’s teams. That would give CCG an unprecedented level of representation on the team side of professional cycling. But the numbers alone do not explain why the project matters. Behind CCG sits a potentially deeper shift in cycling economics. The objective is no longer simply to negotiate a larger share of existing revenues. It is to aggregate rights, create new commercial products, develop direct relationships with fans, generate recurring revenues and ultimately build an asset owned largely by the teams themselves.

If it works, CCG could begin to address three of professional cycling’s longest-standing weaknesses at once: its dependence on sponsorship, its fragmented commercial rights and the limited negotiating power of individual teams against the organisations controlling the sport’s biggest events.

A sophisticated sport built on fragile foundations

The paradox at the centre of professional cycling is that teams have evolved into increasingly sophisticated organisations without developing an equally sophisticated revenue model. A modern WorldTour operation can employ well over 100 people across riders, coaches, mechanics, medical staff, nutritionists, analysts, logistics and administration. It races across continents, maintains fleets of cars, buses and trucks, invests heavily in equipment, altitude camps, aerodynamics and performance technology, and can pay several million euros per year to its leading riders.

The largest WorldTour budgets have moved well beyond €40 million, while the wealthiest projects are generally estimated around or above €50 million per season. Across the 18 WorldTeams alone, annual expenditure can therefore reasonably be measured in several hundred million euros before Women’s WorldTour teams, ProTeams and the rest of the professional ecosystem are included.

The problem is not that cycling lacks money. It is where that money comes from, where it goes and what remains once it has been spent.

For many professional teams, sponsors still provide roughly 80–90% of operating income. Ticketing is virtually nonexistent. Merchandising remains relatively small. Teams own no stadiums and receive little direct income from the broadcasting rights generated by the races in which they compete. In many cases, they do not even permanently own their public identity. A football club can lose its shirt sponsor and remain Real Madrid, Arsenal or Bayern Munich. A cycling organisation losing its title partner can lose its name, colours, budget and potentially its existence.

That creates an unusual economic contradiction. Professional cycling is becoming richer, more technological and more expensive, while the organisations employing its athletes remain structurally fragile. A company can finance a €30 million team, win some of the world’s biggest races and then decide several years later that cycling no longer fits its marketing strategy. The sporting organisation may then have only months to replace most of its income. The history of the sport shows repeatedly that sporting success does not automatically create enterprise value.

This is the fundamental problem CCG needs to address. Not by replacing sponsorship — which will remain central to cycling for the foreseeable future — but by creating revenue streams and potentially asset value that survive beyond the next sponsorship contract.

From a €250 million revolution to a €25 million business

One Cycling approached the same problem from almost the opposite direction. Strongly associated with several leading team managers, including Richard Plugge, the project explored a much more ambitious restructuring of professional cycling. Reports surrounding the initiative referred to approximately €250 million of potential investment, with Saudi Arabia’s SURJ Sports Investment among the parties linked to discussions.

The comparison with Formula 1 was inevitable. F1’s extraordinary commercial development did not result simply from attracting more spectators. The championship became much better at packaging what it already had: centralised commercial rights, global sponsorship, direct fan relationships, digital products, sophisticated storytelling and, crucially, a structure through which teams participate in the growing economics of the championship.

Cycling appears to possess many of the same raw ingredients. It has global stars, spectacular locations, iconic century-old events, enormous television exposure and more than 100 days of premium racing each year. What it does not have is Formula 1’s ownership structure.

ASO owns the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. RCS Sport owns the Giro d’Italia, Milan-San Remo and Il Lombardia. Flanders Classics has developed a valuable portfolio around the Flemish spring races. Other organisers control their respective events. The UCI controls licences, regulations and the WorldTour calendar. Teams employ the athletes and increasingly build their own digital audiences, while the riders themselves represent another layer of image and commercial rights. There is no obvious equivalent of a league sitting above all these assets with the authority to package and sell them collectively.

That meant One Cycling had to answer cycling’s hardest question before it could properly build its business: who would give up control? Teams could argue that they finance the athletes and infrastructure producing the spectacle. Organisers could respond that they have spent decades — sometimes more than a century — building the events that make those athletes commercially valuable. The UCI had its own regulatory interests. What began as an economic reform project inevitably became a governance battle.

CCG reverses the sequence. Instead of starting by asking organisers and governing bodies to transfer value into a new structure, it begins with assets the teams may already be able to control: their brands, riders, digital channels, sponsorship inventory, content, data and fan relationships.

The strategic difference is fundamental: One Cycling tried to redesign the ecosystem. CCG is trying first to build a business within it.

There is even direct corporate continuity between the projects. OneCycling Limited was incorporated in the UK in December 2024 with nominal capital of just €0.01. In May 2026, Richard Plugge stepped down as a director and Oliver Ciesla was appointed. On 2 June, the same company formally changed its name to Collective Cycling Group Ltd, before Plugge subsequently ceased to be a person with significant control. CCG is therefore not simply an unrelated successor that emerged after One Cycling disappeared. The corporate vehicle survived while the leadership, financing and strategic logic evolved.

Why 15 out of 18 changes the equation

The scale of the coalition is remarkable. Fifteen of the eighteen men’s WorldTeams are expected to participate, equivalent to 83% of cycling’s top tier. Pinarello-Q36.5, Tudor Pro Cycling and Unibet Rose Rockets broaden the project beyond the WorldTour, while FDJ United-Suez, Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto and SD Worx-Protime add three leading standalone women’s organisations. Several participating men’s structures also operate women’s teams, meaning CCG’s effective footprint across elite women’s cycling could be considerably larger than those three direct shareholders suggest.

Commercially, scale changes the proposition. Professional teams have historically behaved as fragmented sellers. Every organisation sells its own jersey, riders, digital reach, content and sponsorship inventory, often approaching the same multinational brands for the same marketing budgets. Individually, even a €40 million WorldTour organisation remains a relatively small media property. Collectively, fifteen WorldTeams potentially offer access to hundreds of riders, dozens of nationalities and almost the entire elite racing calendar.

That creates opportunities where individual teams struggle to generate sufficient scale: cross-team sponsorship packages, behind-the-scenes media, fan databases, technology partnerships, gaming, fantasy products, collectibles and aggregated data. It could also address one of cycling’s great commercial paradoxes. The sport regularly communicates enormous television audiences, millions of roadside spectators and vast digital reach, but remains comparatively poor at converting that audience into identifiable, monetisable fan relationships.

A roadside Tour spectator effectively belongs to nobody. A television viewer belongs primarily to the broadcaster and organiser. A fan following riders across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok is fragmented across platforms. Cycling has enormous reach, but surprisingly little ownership of its audience.

Aggregating fifteen teams begins to change that. But there is another reason why 15/18 matters, and it may ultimately prove more important than the immediate revenue opportunity: bargaining power.

For decades, the major organisers have negotiated with a peloton that is economically fragmented. An individual WorldTour team has little leverage against the owner of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia or Tour of Flanders. The organiser owns the event, television product, hospitality platform and most of the commercial rights surrounding the race. An individual team, however prestigious, remains largely replaceable.

A coordinated group representing most of the WorldTour changes the equation. CCG would still not control the races, and it would be unrealistic to suggest that fifteen teams could dictate terms to ASO, RCS Sport or Flanders Classics. The Tour de France in particular remains an extraordinary global asset whose economic power exceeds that of any individual team. But the asymmetry becomes smaller if the teams can negotiate through a structure representing most of the peloton and controlling a meaningful share of rider access, team-generated content, digital inventory, commercial data and other assets surrounding the racing product.

This matters because the next layer of cycling revenues may not come primarily from traditional television rights. The more interesting battleground could involve data, onboard content, rider access, documentary rights, gaming, fantasy, digital products, first-party fan data and new sponsorship categories. Ownership in many of these areas is less established than ownership of a race’s television rights.

CCG therefore does not necessarily need ASO to surrender part of the Tour de France’s existing revenue. It can first build assets of its own and then negotiate how those assets interact with the organiser’s product. That is strategically very different from simply asking for redistribution. CCG’s value may consequently lie not only in what it can sell independently, but in what fifteen teams can negotiate collectively that none of them could realistically negotiate alone.

This is perhaps the project’s most underappreciated dimension. Previous team alliances provided a collective voice. CCG is attempting to attach rights, revenues, capital and equity to that voice. Negotiating power becomes considerably more credible when the organisation across the table owns assets of its own.

There is, however, an important weakness hidden behind the impressive 15/18 headline. The three WorldTeams expected to remain outside CCG are UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Alpecin-Premier Tech and Jayco AlUla. The first two contain Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel, two of cycling’s most valuable individual sporting assets. This produces an important distinction: 83% of WorldTour teams does not necessarily equal 83% of the peloton’s commercial value.

Entertainment economics are not distributed evenly. A coalition can have almost every licence and still miss some of the personalities driving disproportionate fan engagement. CCG’s long-term power will therefore depend not simply on how many teams sign up, but on which rights they contribute and how consistently they agree to act collectively.

€25 million for 5%: what the financing tells us

The reported financing proposals provide perhaps the clearest indication that CCG is more than another political coalition. Draft TeamCo documents from March 2026 reportedly envisaged seven seed investors contributing exactly €3,571,429 each, producing approximately €25 million of initial capital. Under those draft terms, the seed investors would collectively receive only around 5% of the company’s equity.

These numbers require caution. The documents were drafts, the investment had not been completed at that stage and the final terms may differ materially. They should not be presented as a completed funding round. But analytically, they are fascinating.

If €25 million represented 5% of the equity, straightforward arithmetic implies a theoretical €500 million post-money valuation. That does not mean CCG is currently worth €500 million.

No publicly confirmed transaction establishes such a valuation. But the implied figure embedded in the draft structure reveals something more important than the headline number itself.

The people supplying the cash were apparently never intended to own most of CCG. The teams were.

Why? Because cash is not the principal asset being contributed. The teams provide the product: riders, brands, digital channels, content, sponsorship categories, commercial rights, data, audiences and access to the professional peloton. The seed investors provide capital to build the infrastructure capable of aggregating and monetising those assets.

In startup language, investors provide the funding; the teams provide the inventory.

This is where CCG moves far beyond the traditional discussion about revenue sharing. Teams are not simply asking to receive more money from cycling. They are attempting to own the company that creates the new revenue. And that distinction could eventually be worth much more than the revenue itself.

From annual budgets to permanent asset value

Consider a simplified WorldTour organisation operating on a €30 million annual budget. If 85% comes from sponsors, approximately €25.5 million of its revenue effectively has to be recreated through commercial partnerships. At the end of each season, surprisingly little permanent economic value may remain. Riders are contracted for limited periods. Vehicles depreciate. The title sponsor may control the team’s public identity. WorldTour participation ultimately depends on sporting and licensing rules. And most of the media value created when the team races belongs elsewhere.

Now add ownership of a successful collective rights company. The organisation continues to operate its racing team and sell sponsorship as before, but it also owns equity in CCG. If CCG builds recurring commercial revenues and grows in value, the team possesses an asset capable of surviving sponsor changes.

The threshold required to make a difference is not necessarily enormous. Imagine — purely as an analytical scenario, not a CCG forecast — that collective commercial activities eventually generated €2 million annually per participating WorldTeam. Across fifteen WorldTeams, that represents €30 million of additional economics. At €3 million each, the figure becomes €45 million. For a €30 million team, €3 million equals 10% of its annual budget. It would not replace the title sponsor, but it could meaningfully reduce dependency on that sponsor, finance shared infrastructure and provide a financial buffer when partnerships change.

The equity component goes further. A cycling team could increasingly be considered as two assets: an operating sports organisation and a shareholding in a collective commercial platform. That begins to resemble the economics of franchises and teams in other professional sports.

A broader transformation already taking place inside the peloton reinforces this idea. Lidl has moved from sponsor to majority shareholder in the structure behind Lidl-Trek. Red Bull controls a majority stake in the corporate entities behind Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. Quantum Pacific has taken a substantial minority stake in Abarca Sports, the organisation behind Movistar. Uno-X represents another model in which the wider corporate group owns and operates the sporting project. The exact structures differ, but the direction is noteworthy: professional cycling is gradually attracting stakeholders thinking not only as sponsors, but as owners of sports properties.

The distinction is fundamental. A sponsor asks what marketing return €20 million will generate this year. An owner can ask what the sporting asset itself might be worth in ten years.

CCG makes considerably more sense through the second lens.

The Rockets model: building the audience before monetising it

One of CCG’s expected shareholders offers an especially interesting glimpse of what that future could look like. Unibet Rose Rockets has effectively built its organisation in reverse. Instead of creating a professional cycling team first and then trying to build an audience around sporting results, the project grew out of Tour de Tietema, a media platform and cycling community created around Bas Tietema and his co-founders. The audience existed before the professional team reached its current sporting level.

That distinction is more important than it initially appears. Traditional cycling economics are built largely around borrowed audiences. Teams race the Tour de France because ASO has assembled the audience. Sponsors pay teams because broadcasters and organisers provide exposure. The team is an important part of the spectacle, but the relationship with the spectator is largely controlled elsewhere.

The Rockets model attempts to own more of that relationship.

The organisation increasingly behaves as both a sports team and a media company, producing its own content and distributing it directly to a community that follows the team rather than simply encountering it during race broadcasts. Its YouTube audience has passed 100,000 subscribers, and the team has invested in producing and publishing race content extremely quickly, including same-day formats. The commercial logic is important: a partner can receive value from the team’s owned media even on a day when the team does not win a race or dominate television coverage.

The branding strategy is equally significant. By establishing Rockets as the permanent identity, the organisation is attempting to create brand equity that can survive individual sponsorship cycles. Sponsors remain essential — Unibet and ROSE are prominently incorporated into the current name — but they sit around an identity that the organisation is trying to make durable.

That reverses one of professional cycling’s oldest conventions. Instead of the sponsor effectively being the team, the sponsor increasingly becomes a partner of a team with its own identity.

The Rockets remain dependent on commercial partners, and their model should not be mistaken for financial independence. Nor is a media-first strategy automatically replicable across every WorldTour organisation. But strategically, they demonstrate three principles sitting at the heart of CCG: build an identity the team controls, develop a direct relationship with fans and create commercial inventory beyond race exposure.

What Unibet Rose Rockets is attempting at team level, CCG could potentially attempt at peloton level.

One team can build a community, produce content and create its own sponsorship inventory. Fifteen WorldTeams and several additional organisations could aggregate those audiences and rights into something much larger. The logic moves from owned team media to collective peloton media.

In that sense, the Rockets are not simply another shareholder in CCG. They may be one of the clearest existing examples of the business model CCG ultimately wants to make possible across professional cycling.

From managers to owners

The personalities now driving CCG reinforce the same change in philosophy. One Cycling was strongly associated with team managers, particularly Richard Plugge. The TeamCo/CCG iteration has increasingly been linked with owners and investors, with former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg playing a central role and long-standing Soudal Quick-Step shareholder Zdeněk Bakala also associated with the initiative.

Glasenberg is particularly interesting because his exposure to cycling extends well beyond one racing team. His interests connect professional racing with bicycle and equipment businesses, giving him an unusually broad view of the industry’s economics. Bakala has been involved with the structure behind Soudal Quick-Step for many years and was already associated with previous attempts to reform cycling’s business model.

The involvement of asset owners rather than only team managers changes the nature of the discussion. These are stakeholders accustomed to thinking about capital allocation, ownership and long-term asset appreciation rather than simply annual sporting budgets.

The appointment of Oliver Ciesla as director of CCG reinforces the shift. Ciesla’s background includes senior commercial leadership in international motorsport, notably WRC Promoter. That experience is particularly relevant to a project trying to turn a fragmented international sporting ecosystem into a more coherent commercial proposition.

The symbolism is significant. CCG increasingly looks less like a campaign for cycling reform and more like an attempt to build a sports-rights business.

The biggest opportunity may also be the biggest obstacle: rights

None of this means CCG has solved professional cycling’s structural problems. In fact, success would eventually push it directly into the hardest one: who owns what?

Imagine CCG wants to develop a global fantasy product containing rider names, images, performance data and Tour de France content. The commercial rights could involve the rider, his team, ASO, broadcasters, data providers and potentially the UCI. A documentary creates similar questions. So do collectibles, onboard footage, gaming licences, betting data and direct-to-fan subscription products.

Professional cycling does not have one intellectual-property layer. It has many overlapping ones.

This is precisely why copying Formula 1 is unrealistic. CCG cannot sell the Tour de France because it does not own the Tour de France. It cannot control the WorldTour because the UCI regulates it. It cannot automatically commercialise every rider because contractual and personal image rights vary — and some of the sport’s biggest stars sit on teams currently outside the coalition.

The more realistic opportunity is to build the commercial layer that has historically been missing between the teams and the fans. Team-generated content, rider access, aggregated digital audiences, first-party fan data, cross-team sponsorship, technology partnerships, fantasy, gaming, collectibles and perhaps eventually subscription products all offer ways to create value without initially challenging race organisers’ ownership of their core assets.

The Rockets example shows what this can look like at micro level: an organisation creates media and fan value around the race without owning the race itself. CCG’s challenge is to determine whether that principle can be scaled across most of the peloton.

This also explains why its bargaining strategy could prove more effective than One Cycling’s. Asking ASO or RCS Sport to surrender part of their existing revenues is difficult. Building a valuable commercial platform first changes the conversation. CCG could potentially arrive at future negotiations not simply demanding redistribution, but owning content, audiences, data and products that organisers themselves may want to access.

The strategy becomes build first, negotiate second.

That may ultimately be the project’s most important innovation.

Could women’s cycling become the laboratory?

Women’s cycling deserves particular attention in this context. Its commercial base remains much smaller than the men’s, but its growth trajectory is potentially faster. Television coverage has expanded, the Tour de France Femmes has provided a major global showcase and several leading organisations now operate integrated men’s, women’s and development programmes.

CCG’s footprint is consequently larger than the three standalone women’s shareholders suggest. Several participating men’s organisations also operate high-level women’s programmes, potentially giving the collective access to roughly ten leading women’s structures.

Paradoxically, the relative youth of women’s cycling’s commercial infrastructure could become an advantage. The men’s sport carries more than a century of history — but also more than a century of independent organisers, fragmented rights and entrenched commercial relationships. Many structures in women’s cycling are newer. Brands increasingly seek integrated men’s and women’s partnerships, audiences are growing and digital consumption is particularly important.

CCG could therefore find it easier to test new forms of collective commercialisation there: integrated sponsorship packages, common digital products, athlete-led content or direct fan relationships. Women’s cycling should not be treated simply as an additional inventory category. It could become CCG’s most flexible laboratory for building the commercial model it eventually wants to apply more broadly.

What would success actually look like?

The biggest mistake would be to judge CCG solely by whether it produces an immediate revenue-sharing agreement with the Tour de France. That would set the wrong benchmark.

A more realistic assessment would start with whether CCG can keep most of the teams aligned. Fifteen out of eighteen is impressive at launch, but collective bargaining only works if members resist the temptation to negotiate attractive categories individually. The organisation then needs to define exactly which rights the teams genuinely control and are prepared to contribute. Signing shareholders is easier than establishing which content, data, sponsorship categories, image rights and digital assets can legally and commercially be aggregated.

The next test is monetisation. €25 million of seed capital only matters if it helps create products that sponsors, media companies, technology businesses or fans are willing to pay for. The distinction between theoretical rights and commercially valuable rights will be crucial. A large aggregated audience is useful; an identifiable first-party audience that can be engaged repeatedly is much more valuable.

And finally comes bargaining power. Can the assets CCG builds translate into a stronger position with organisers, broadcasters and governing bodies?

This last point is fundamental. CCG does not need to replace ASO, RCS Sport, Flanders Classics or the UCI to succeed. It does not even need to weaken them. A healthier long-term model could ultimately benefit all parts of the ecosystem.

What CCG needs is to make ignoring the collective economic interests of the teams more difficult.

If it achieves that, the relationship between teams and organisers begins to move from dependency towards interdependency. The organiser still needs the best races, routes, broadcasting and event infrastructure. The teams still need the world's biggest events. But the teams collectively bring athletes, personalities, content, audiences and commercial assets that become harder to substitute.

That is a much stronger negotiating position than simply arguing that the existing distribution is unfair.

The peloton finally gets a valuation

Ultimately, the CCG story comes back to one deceptively simple question.

The UCI controls the regulatory framework. ASO, RCS Sport, Flanders Classics and other organisers own the races. Broadcasters own much of the viewing relationship. Sponsors finance most of the teams. Riders increasingly own powerful personal audiences.

What do the teams own?

Historically, the answer has been surprisingly little.

That is why €25 million is not the most important number in this story. Neither is 15 out of 18, nor even the theoretical €500 million implied by early draft financing terms.

The real asset CCG is trying to create does not yet properly exist: the collective commercial value of the professional peloton.

One Cycling tried to solve professional cycling by redesigning the ecosystem. CCG is taking a more incremental route: aggregate the teams, aggregate the rights they can control, build direct relationships with fans, create new revenues, establish asset value and then negotiate from a stronger position.

The sequence matters.

Instead of demanding a new balance of power first and trying to build the business afterwards, CCG is attempting to reverse the process: build the business, create the asset, then use that asset to rebalance the negotiations.

Unibet Rose Rockets provides a useful glimpse of that philosophy from the bottom up. Build an identity. Build an audience. Own more of the relationship. Create value beyond the race. Then make that value attractive to commercial partners. CCG is attempting something conceptually similar at a much larger scale: not one team owning more of its commercial destiny, but most of the professional peloton doing so collectively.

It sounds less revolutionary than a €250 million plan to restructure professional cycling. It may also be considerably more realistic.

The organisers would continue to own their races. The UCI would continue to regulate the sport. Sponsors would remain essential to team budgets. But the teams could finally become a coherent economic counterweight — not because they collectively complain about the existing system, but because they collectively own something valuable within it.

That distinction may determine whether CCG succeeds where previous reform attempts failed.

Professional cycling’s biggest economic problem has never really been its inability to create value. The Tour de France proves that value exists. The Classics prove it. Rising team budgets, global sponsors, increasingly sophisticated owners and millions of fans prove it.

The unresolved question has always been where that value accumulates, who owns it and therefore who has the leverage to capture the next layer of growth.

CCG is attempting to ensure that, for the first time, a meaningful part of that value accumulates in an asset the teams themselves own.

If fifteen of the world’s eighteen biggest teams can make that work, the most important outcome may not be another sponsorship category, another digital platform or even another €30 million of annual revenue.

It may be something professional cycling has never really had before:

a peloton with both a valuation and a collective balance of power.