Groupama-FDJ manager Marc Madiot has made an all-out appeal for budget caps in the men's WorldTour as four of the 18 teams continue to dominate the racing.
An in-depth report by Belgian newspaper Dernière Heure pointed out that 73 percent of WorldTour races so far this season have been won by four teams: UAE Team Emirates, Jumbo-Visma, Alpecin-Deceuninck and Soudal-QuickStep.
In contrast, five teams have yet to score a single victory at WorldTour level this season: AG2R-Citroën, Groupama-FDJ, Arkea-Samsic, Astana Qazaqstan and Intermarché-Circus-Wanty.
Dernière Heure interviewed the three managers of WorldTour teams struggling for success, as well as the Lotto-Dstny team, relegated from the Worldtour to ProTeam level after a three-year battle for results and ranking points, to analyse the reasons for the difference between the 'Big Four' and everyone else.
“Look at the budgets and look at the classification,” Madiot told Dernière Heure, “They can have six or seven leaders on each race. We can’t do that.”
“If we don’t cap the budgets, we will remain in a situation where the giant teams can control everything. But it’s very difficult to change things.”
“These teams can choose the day, the time and the place where they blow things apart, and they do that. In Groupama-FDJ; we are up there in the stage races and in the Classics. But we haven’t won and we won’t win.”
“To have the right to be on the podium of a WorldTour race” - as happened with David Gaudu in Paris-Nice, for example - “I can tell you we’re giving 100 percent of ourselves down to every last detail.”
In the same article, other managers highlighted the grouping together of top names in the top teams.
Jumbo-Visma have Primoz Roglic, Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard, Christophe Laporte and Wout Van Aert, four of the most successful WorldTour riders this season. They have taken 14 wins, of the team’s total of 18.
However AG2R-Citroen manager Vincent suggested the difference is about more than just hard cash and team budgets.
“Obviously, money brings a certain power, but we see that armadas like Bora or Bahrain do not play in the same court as the others,” AG2R-Citroen manager Vincent Lavenu argued.
“You have to know how to use a budget, and even our team, which is rather well off, does not meet expectations for the moment."
A purely financial analysis does not fully explain how Ineos Grenadiers, one of the biggest-budget WorldTour squads, has only won three WorldTour races in 2023, albeit one of them in the so-called ‘Sixth Monument’, Strade Bianche.
The question of budget caps is far from new. In an interview with Wielerflits in 2022, UCI President David Lappartient said it was a question his organisation was discussing.
Team budgets are not easy to obtain, but estimates for teams participating in the 2021 Tour de France, ranged from 50 million euros to 8 million euros to the lowest, according to research by Statista.
Other teams interviewed by Dernière Heure were critical of some squads’ race strategies, which they saw as helping rival ‘big names’ to take the wins.
The races are prepared down to the last detail by all the teams,” Maxime Monfort, sports director at Lotto-Dstny, observed, “so there’s not much room for surprises.
"In the last few weeks, we’ve seen teams like Ineos ride on the front all day, only for the big shots to get the win.”
Madiot said that French teams were particularly penalised regarding how they spend budget on rider salaries. French employment law legislation deems that riders have to be full-time employees and pay higher taxes and contributions, rather than riders being self-employed contractors to teams.
“When you negotiate with a rider you have to spend a lot more money than our competitors to offer him an equivalent income,” Madiot explained.
The French manager also pointed to steadily increasing costs and fines from the UCI.
Madiot claimed teams face an extra 50,000 euro outlay as anti-doping contributions, and an increased outlay on rising travel and accommodation prices.
Groupama-FDJ cut races such as Brabantse Pijl from their calendar, despite having riders ready and willing to take part. He also claimed that payments from Grand Tours to teams for their participation had not risen since 2009.
While expressing pride that his team was currently ranked in the UCI’s top 10, he concluded: “I am at a point where I count every Euro.”
