The self destruction of Professional cycling

The current format of professional cycling is not sustainable because there is no commercial benefit to be realised by owning a professional cycling team.

The only way to recover a fraction of the investment by the license owner is to resell his UCI license to a potential buyer but at best that leads to a recovery of the initial investment.

Currently the owner of the license is in many cases also the main sponsor of the team which means that the yearly budget spent ( we can not talk of investment here) by the owner/license holder is a total loss. Obviously one can argue that the ROI lies in the branding and other media exposure that the team collects over the season. Yet, that would also be the case when a profitable format would be introduced.

Professional cycling is the only professional sport where the main protagonists, the teams and the players have a zero share in the tv rights. On top of that the tv rights are undervalued and sold far below the actual value except for the Tour de France, owned by ASO company. It has to be kept in mind that the tv rights buyers are also producing the tv feed and that the production of these images is expensive seeing the captation involves fixed cameras as the point of arrival and departure and 2 to 4 mobile camera crews on Motorbikes ( depending on the race), helicopters for the relay of the images, satellite time and other heavy and expensive equipment.