"The response has been really, really good": Jonathan Vaughters launches a search for new title sponsor

There's no secret that EF Education-EasyPost have far to compete with the largest budgets in WorldTour. But the team of Jonathan Vaughters plays their part with honor, proving day after day that they still know how to pull off a trick or two. They have done that in the past with the 2012 Giro d'Italia win of Ryder Hesjedal, and they're style of racing remains uniquely rewarding even now, more than a decade later.

We have witnessed that more than enough during 2025 as Neilson Powless rose to an untimely Dwars door Vlaanderen victory, or Ben Healy's Tour de France yellow jersey stint which was rewarded with a top-10 overall. And Richard Carapaz came within a hand's reach of winning the Giro d'Italia to ultimately finish 3rd. A more than modest season for a team that is reported to operate on a budget as much as three times smaller than that of world's best team UAE Team Emirates - XRG (Reuters reported EF roughly at €21 million with UAE over €60 million).

And despite the important fact that many riders keep choosing the American team over more lucrative offers, such as Ben Healy with his contract extension through 2029, the financial pressure is felt by Vaughters and EF Education stakeholders alike. That's why the team put out a public announcement that it is looking for a new titular sponsor to provide a much-needed injection to the team's budget.

Even if EF refused to admit the situation for a while, hoping the team can somehow win a Tour de France on one of tightest budgets, the reality eventually caught up to them: "For a while they just said, 'Well, you’ll figure out a way to win it without a whole lot of money,'" Vaughters tells Domestique. "And I kept saying, no, it won’t. I mean, thank you for having the faith in me, but no, that’s not going to happen."

Of course, EF can hardly compete with the financial options of UAE, Red Bull or Lidl. Thus their reluctance to further invest in the project is logical. But the facts were ruthless, which is why the American company eventually agreed to launch search for a "strategic partner" willing to pay for the media exposure that comes with the privilege of being titular sponsor.

"They basically said, 'We’re an education company, not a petro nation or a fracking entity or whatever. We have to be responsible with our marketing budget. We can’t blow out big numbers just to win races,'" Vaughters explains EF's point of view. And then the idea came around; to sell naming rights.

"I told them it didn’t mean they wouldn’t retain ownership of the team or that there wouldn’t be giant EF logos all over the uniform, but the most valuable asset that we hold is the name and the naming rights. Now at first, they didn’t like that at all. They said they were paying for the brand exposure, and if they weren’t the name of the team, then all of that would decrease pretty considerably."

Although all negotiations are still very much in their early phases, Vaughters notes that their project generated a great wave of interest among potential partners: "The response has been really, really good, but we are early, and we knew that – people aren’t at the decision-making points for their 2027 budgets yet," he says.

"There’s not a set price, there’s a number of different ways we can go about it," Vaughters explains the selection procedure. "It just depends on what somebody wants. They might be very price sensitive and say they just want to be the second name after EF, or they might say they want the whole name, and they want to change the colour of the uniform to blue. If that happens – blue would be pretty boring – but if that happens, that price tag is much larger. So it depends on what they want."

The ambitions are not small at all. The end-goal is to win a Tour de France with both women's a men's teams. The ladies should do so within the timeframe of next 3 years with Cédrine Kerbaol or Magdeleine Vallieres. Men's project will take a bit more time, but 2030s could be a turning point for the American squad also on this front.