Arkéa-B&B Hotels manager Emanuel Hubert has made an impassioned final plea for a new sponsor, even as the October 15 deadline to present the UCI with documentation that guarantees the WorldTour team's future looms fast on the horizon.
As reported by Cyclingnews earlier this week, the riders and staff of Arkéa-B&B Hotels have been free to sign elsewhere for months, with Hubert being open about the difficult search for new backers.
The initial October 1 deadline for team registration has now been passed, leaving Hubert and his 20-year-old squad in the last of the last-chance saloons.
"The UCI's first deadline is the bank guarantees, which must be provided by October 2, and I haven't met this condition," Hubert told Ouest-France on Thursday.
"So I can't say it's over, but it's almost over. Now we're looking at October 15th, the final date for submitting our application."
When it was put to him that on October 15, "it could all be over." Hubert responded that it was indeed the case, despite last-minute calls from potential sponsors.
However, he pointed out that if there had been no affirmative response from new commercial backers in the last year while he had been looking, it made little sense to hope for something to come through in the last 15 days.
"I've been shouting 'Fire! Fire!' for the last ten months, why should that change now? So right now, I'm seeing the glass much more half-empty than I did before when I thought it was three-quarters full."
Should no sponsor appear in the next two weeks, current estimates are that 20 elite men WorldTour riders, 20 from the women's team, and 12 devo' squad riders would find themselves on the market, as well as 95 management staff.
It would also mean the end of one of France's four World Tour teams, in existence since 2005, as well as the loss of a second top squad from the country's cycling heartland, Brittany, three years after the B&B Hotels-KTM squad folded at the end of 2022.
This year, Arkéa-B&B Hotels men's team have had nine wins, none at WorldTour or HC level, although in 2024 they took a spectacular Tour de France stage win in the first week, thanks to Kévin Vauquelin. Then, in 2025, Arkéa were the best-placed French squad in the Tour de France teams ranking.
Meanwhile, Arkéa-B&B Hotels women's team have had just two wins this season, but one of them, the Omloop Nieuwsblad, could hardly have been more high profile.
Hubert told Ouest-France that of 25 potential offers, he believed six could have really worked out, but all of them - so far - had fallen through.
"All the latest leads have been foreign. Of the six where it really came close to moving in the right direction, half of them were from outside France. We know the money is in the Middle East or Asia. But you know, anything that cost ten [euros] ten years ago, today you need twenty."
More than results, as he eyed an all-but-certain end to the squad, Hubert's main preoccupation, he said, was how this would affect the staff and riders in one of the longest-standing WorldTour squads.
"What upsets me the most is [what this means] on a social level. You live more with your employees than with your own family. You live through real human dramas too - one day, in the back of a team track, I witnessed how a mechanic found out that his son had died. And all of that will end."
"I must have spent 25 nights [a year] at home, because I was chasing down every chance there was [for the team to continue]. If they asked me to go to Bruges, I went to Bruges; if they asked me to go to Berlin, I'd go to Berlin."
When it came to whether he could lose his job if new sponsors came in, Hubert insisted that was not what mattered at all, and he'd be happy to stand aside if that was what it cost to keep the team going.
"This isn't about anybody in particular. I can move on, I'm no megalomaniac. What makes me happy is when I see my employees smile. And right now I'm seeing that less and less."
