06/06/2023

"Compared to Jumbo, Lidl is a giant" - while one supermarket leaves cycling, another steps in

Supermarket chain Jumbo has indicated that it will stop working with the cycling team in its current form after 2024. Yet Richard Plugge is not worried at all. Where one supermarket leaves, the other will re-enter next month. Yet Lidl and Jumbo are not comparable at all.

The main cause of this consequence is the arrest of former Jumbo CEO Frits van Eerd. He is still a co-defendant in a major money laundering case. In the meantime, the new CEO Ton van Veen is trying to clean up at Jumbo and one of the measures he has taken is to stop sponsoring Max Verstappen and also the skating and cycling team. If the latter succeeds in finding a new main sponsor before 2024, Jumbo is even prepared to say goodbye after this season.

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The Norwegian co-sponsor Visma is willing to take over from Jumbo. "If Visma does its homework, everything is in place to achieve a good result with cycling sponsorship," said Philiep Caryn, specialist in sports marketing, to the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws. "They have the riders and they have the results. A cycling sponsor gets two thirds of its publicity return from the Tour. Jumbo-Visma has been very decisive in this over the past two or three years."

"Compared to Jumbo, Lidl is a giant," says Caryn. "They are active in many European countries, their turnover is more than 100 billion euros. Then a sponsorship of 20 to 30 million euros for a cycling team is feasible."

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The sports marketer states that Jumbo Supermarket has a turnover of ten billion euros, one tenth compared to the German multinational. According to Van Veen, Jumbo now has a sponsorship contract for more than twenty million euros with the combined skating and cycling team.

Caryn says that this amount weighs heavily on the profit of the supermarket chain, because there are few profit margins and prices are under pressure. "In addition, Jumbo is only active in the Netherlands and a little bit of Belgium. I have never understood, if you are only active in a country and a half, why you would sponsor a sport that is becoming more and more global," the sports marketer expresses his opinion.