According to figures published by Domestique Cycling, the average Men’s WorldTour budget for 2026 has climbed to €33 million – a 4.5% increase on 2025 – while the median salary for a self-employed rider now sits at €350,000, up 5.6%. Domestique’s analysis, drawing on information from La Gazzetta dello Sport and newly released UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) accounts, suggests total WorldTour spend will exceed €663 million next season, with the biggest teams nudging €45–50 million a year.
These are extraordinary numbers. Small by football standards, perhaps, but eye-watering in the world of cycling.
At the same time, the price of a so-called “WorldTour-level” bike continues its steady, unapologetic march upwards. £15,000 bikes, £350 helmets, £500 shoes, bib shorts that cost a week’s wages. That’s a tough sell, even before you get to the cost-of-living crisis most of us are living through.
According to UCI rules, everything raced in the WorldTour peloton must be made commercially available to the public. Yet the bikes are designed for conditions and speeds you and I will never see. That disconnect only grows with every passing season, but the sport’s governing body continues to insist on this model.
Brands like Specialized understand the tension and don’t even try to hide it. The Aethos exists precisely because of it. It’s not raced at the WorldTour level, yet it’s a better bike for more of us, and fit data from its own customers supports that assertion. Still, the UCI requires brands to sell the WorldTour bike as well, effectively locking them into marketing narratives that insist the pro bike is “better,” even when it often isn’t.
None of this matters much if you’re choosing between a $13,500 S-Works Tarmac SL8 and an equally expensive S-Works Aethos. That’s a rarefied problem. At the grassroots level, however, the mismatch between pro bikes and real-world riding becomes impossible to ignore.
At the grassroots end of the sport, if entry into the sport doesn’t already feel pretty difficult for most people, the unsustainable nature of the situation will kill it eventually.
And that is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of professional cycling’s funding model: pro racing is funded by selling extremely expensive, increasingly irrelevant products to ordinary riders.
Once seen as a working-class pursuit, cycling now sits culturally alongside golf, a sport associated with expense and status. On any given club ride, you’ll see bikes that cost more than my current car. If you don’t believe the problem is real, call your local club and ask what gear you need to get started. In some corners of the sport, we’ve completely lost our minds with the perception of what a good road bike is.
And yes, we, the media, are culpable, too. A quick glance at my own reviews from the past year reveals how troublesome our role in all this is: most of the kit I’ve praised is equipment I couldn’t afford on my journalist’s wage. Not now. Probably not ever.
The thirst for cash from all corners of the cycling world is exponential at this point. The technological demands of WorldTour teams with access to these budgets are insatiable. The best teams will always find the money. But the funding model – where brands like Specialized or ENVE, sponsor teams in the hope of recouping that investment through bike and component sales – is, truly, the only game in town.
If a sponsorship deal doesn’t sell product, it doesn’t pay for itself. And when that happens, brands have only three options: raise prices, reduce support or walk away. None of those outcomes are healthy for the sport.
We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. Pro-level development is funded by consumers buying the same bikes and components. But those consumers aren’t blue-collar workers anymore; they’re bankers, consultants and hedge-fund managers; and even that market has limits.
Road racing still hasn’t defined what it actually delivers commercially.
(Image credit: Unknown)
This is where a recent LinkedIn post by Peter Coyle (Peter C. on Linked In), an independent sports marketing and brand management consultant, is worth paying attention to. Building on Domestique Cycling’s budget analysis, Coyle makes a simple but uncomfortable point: road racing still hasn’t defined what it actually delivers commercially.
He notes that cycling remains overwhelmingly dependent on sponsorship, with teams receiving nothing from media rights, limited collective commercialisation and very little insulation from cost pressures.
For decades, the sport justified this through product trickle-down, or the idea that what the pros rode would filter into showroom bikes and drive consumer demand.
Formula 1 ran this experiment years ago but abandoned it, as it admitted: modern race technology doesn’t actually, meaningfully, trickle down. As a result, F1 is no longer a product R&D platform. It’s a brand play. Racing builds brand value, not road cars, and it’s never been more popular.
Cycling, Coyle argues, is drifting the same way, whether it likes it or not. But that’s where the conversation gets really interesting.
What if the pro cycling model shifted?
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The fundamental difference between F1 and WorldTour cycling is the scale of technology. An F1 car is so far removed from a consumer car that no one seriously expects to buy one and drive one around town. A top-spec race bike, however, still sits awkwardly close to the consumer market. They are usually the exact same thing.
But what if they weren’t? Here’s an idea for the UCI: ban selling WorldTour bikes to the public. Imagine a WorldTour where cutting-edge technology is developed, raced, refined and deliberately kept out of the consumer market for a defined period. A technology lock.
Fans watch the best riders in the world push the limits, knowing they’re seeing something genuinely elite. Meanwhile, the bikes sold to the public are capped at a previous generation of technology – still brilliant, still fast, but no longer pulled upward by the increasingly irrelevant and otherworldly needs of the pro peloton.
Even brilliant bikes like the Cervelo R5 and Colnago V5RS – amazing road bikes if you can afford or fit on one – are irrelevant to the pros now, who are opting for faster, more aerodynamic models. You’ll still see them at a WorldTour race, but they currently live in the team truck, trotted out for the final stage, to claw back some of the money spent on their development through some sales.
In a couple of seasons’ time, the climbing bike won’t even make it to the race, yet its comparatively skinnier tubes make for a much better consumer offer. Still, the marketing will tell us it’s not the bike we need.
It’s a broken system.
Break the link and make it mean something again
(Image credit: Tyler Boucher)
Detaching the link between product and brand works in F1, but it also works in motorcycling. Moto GP bikes cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds. The same applies in Motocross. The bike you buy from the racing brand, the one you buy off the showroom floor, is not even nearly the same as the one the pros ride.
Instead, it’s designed as a product to be sold at scale and ridden by normal folk. It costs a fraction of the price, it’s better suited to that rider, and, crucially, it’s not updated every season.
Imagine this: as the changes bed in, your wealthy mate rolls up to the Sunday ride on a stunning new bike. It’s not Tadej’s machine — you still can’t buy that — but it is the best available. And for the first time in years, it’s no longer completely out of reach for you, either.
In this context, we could operate in a world where product lifecycles could be extended. Development costs could then be amortised over more years, just as they are in motorcycles and automotive.
Brands wouldn’t have to fight every season for more marginal gains that no consumer asked for. Prices in bike shops could stabilise, especially as competition from Asia ramps up. The “top-spec” bike of its era becomes more attainable over time, not less. The more people can afford to participate, the more level the playing field feels.
Central to all of this is that teams stop behaving like sales tools for manufacturers (the OEMs) and start behaving like their own brands. They sell access, story, identity and fandom.
The pro bike becomes the halo part of that ecosystem, not the cash cow. And we all ride around on very nice bicycles that carry our favourite brand marks, but that are instead designed for us.
Whats stopping us from doing all this? And what about brands outside of the WorldTour?
(Image credit: Future (Sam Gupta))
There’s an obvious hole in all of this. Pro-level technology is visible. Independent manufacturers, particularly in Asia, are already producing high-performance gear at lower prices. What’s to stop them from copying what they see in the WorldTour and selling it anyway?
Nothing. And that’s fine.
WorldTour brands would, understandably, argue that it isn’t fine at all, given the time, money and R&D they invest only to see ideas replicated. But that doesn’t make it impossible if manufacturers are willing. Intellectual property has always been vulnerable in any competitive industry.
But let’s be honest, ENVE isn’t struggling to sell premium wheels because Asian copycats exist. In the same way, Formula 1 hasn’t prevented hundreds of manufacturers with no connection to F1 from building fast hatchbacks or even other race cars, and MotoGP hasn’t stopped excellent sports bikes being made by brands outside elite racing.
What participation at the top end of sport really buys isn’t exclusive access to technology, it’s brand value. Prestige. Authenticity. The halo effect. WorldTour involvement is a marker of legitimacy, not a monopoly on performance. Others can enter the market, innovate and offer value. The teams and brands at the top retain the story of being there – and that story still sells.
The problem is that the entire system is funded by selling WorldTour bikes to ordinary riders. Now sold around the assumption that everyone wants, and can afford, a £15,000 bike.
That is illogical. It is unsustainable for teams to depend on OEMs (the equipment manufacturers) who depend on selling ever more expensive, increasingly irrelevant products to ever fewer people.
If that isn’t addressed, cycling will continue to drift further from its audience. And at some point, people will simply go and do something cheaper, easier and more welcoming instead. When that happens, who exactly is left to pay for Remco’s golden shoes?
