"It's all about pride": Ex-team manager analyzes why teams often dismiss merge proposals

The end of a three-year UCI ranking cycle will bring many more or less significant changes to the structure of top cycling. The less happy news are that two traditional Belgian projects Lotto and Intermarché - Wanty will merge into a single team, closing a WorldTour formation alongside its under-23 subsidiary. Although merger rumours aren't as rare these days (Quick-Step + Bora rumours in 2024, for example), for them to actually materialize is a whole different story.

And that's even in cases where both parties involved could profit from such a decision. Atypically, the two Belgian teams were able to find common ground in their negotations to carry through with the new project.

The 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis knows the business side of cycling well from his own experience. From 2001 to 2013, he owned a WorldTour team under names like CSC, Saxo Bank and SunGard, before selling it to Oleg Tinkoff. According to him, the financial demands to run big professional teams have grown considerably in recent years.

"When we had the most employees on my team, there were 85," he recounts in an interview for Feltet. "Now most of the big teams have up to 120 employees. It just takes more to run a team, so for many it would make sense to merge,” he says.

Besides the merger of Lotto-Intermarché, we will also see Arkéa - B&B Hotels entirely disappear from the cycling map. In recent years, this is a second large blow to French cycling as ProTeam B&B Hotels - KTM ceased to exist at the end of 2022 with the title sponsor moving over to join Arkéa. The question is whether Arkéa could not join forces with another French ProTeam, either Cofidis or TotalEnergies, to potentially build a team with financial power to return to WorldTour in 2029.

"I don’t understand why there are not even more teams that merge," Riis wonders. "It requires more and more to make it at the top of international cycling. But as a team owner you will go very far before you merge."

But the Dane continues by providing an explanation for why it's the case that so few mergers actually go through successfully from his manager perspective: "It is difficult to let go of control, even though it makes sense for the organization. It’s about giving up power, just like in all big companies that need to be streamlined. Cycling teams often cling tightly to the idea that they can still compete at the top."

When asked if smaller teams avoid merging out of pride rather than what’s best for them, Riis doesn’t hesitate: "Oh yes. All this is very much about pride."