“I have mine, and then you have yours, right?” Josh Hand said. The boss of elite British team Spectra Racing p/b DAS is comparing strategies to find sponsors with his team manager Gina Ball. “Yours tends to be more successful,” he admits. “I tend to use LinkedIn as a huge research platform and then it comes down to essentially cold emailing.”
Hand then looked to Ball and handed her the proverbial microphone. “The last few sponsors I brought on,” she begins, “I literally just DMed them on Instagram through the team account, and it fell into the right hands at the right time.” That’s really important, She reiterated: “It’s just about finding the right person at the right time.”
Cold emails, Linkedin posts and Instagram messages are just some of the ways in which British Cycling has secured a new sponsorship deal in what is proving to be an ongoing challenging race.
The struggle has left some of the top teams in the country in trouble. Next year, the British men’s continental team will be without a field for the first time since the collapse of Saint Piran and Trinity Racing in 2004, both of which collapsed due to sponsor issues. It’s a similar story on the women’s side with Lifeplus-Wahoo, who will be absent from the 2025 lineup due to an inability to find a naming rights partner.
At levels below Continental, elite racing teams have also stalled in their search for new deals.
“I wouldn’t say this year is more challenging than the past, but it’s always a level of incredible challenge,” Spectra owner Hand said. Established in 2021, the Hand team runs a multi-disciplinary schedule with road racing in the warmer months and cross-country racing in the winter. He said his ideal budget for the whole year would be around £60,000. But with just a few weeks left in the new season, he’s less than halfway to that goal. “To be honest, we’re probably closer to 30%,” he said.
(Image credit: Olly Hassell/SWpix)
Part of the problem facing Britain’s elite teams is visibility. The Spectra competes in the National Road and Track Series, Britain’s top level of racing, which has seen a dwindling number of events since the turn of the century. There will be seven women’s series and six open matches next season, but none will be televised. The Tour Series – the tour calendar that aired on ITV but ceased in 2023 – already feels like a distant memory.
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“[The Tour Series] It’s perfect for a team like ours because we have the ability to say we’re going to get TV time,” said Spectra manager Bauer. “When that goes away, our sales completely go down. “
The reduced number of games has also taken its toll. Andy Lyons, manager of the Richardsons Trek DAS men’s elite team, remembers a time when it took more than two hands to tally the numbers at Britain’s top races. There is now “very little publicity,” he said.
“If you want to market to sponsors, you have to have something to sell them,” Lyons said. “The British scene needs something we can shout about. It needs a big stage competition, not just competition [Tour of Britain] Where WorldTour teams meet. Team GB needed something worth pursuing. “
Next year will be the 16th anniversary of Richardsons Trek DAS. Lyons estimates that to run each season, his team of 10 drivers requires around £30,000 to £40,000, which is spent on equipment costs, entry fees, accommodation and transport to and from events. “That doesn’t include bicycles,” he added.
It’s a wonder why teams like Richardsons Trek DAS haven’t tried to reach Continental levels in nearly two decades. The financial leap proved huge. “You need at least £250,000 to even think about going to Conte,” explains Lyons – seven times his current budget – “When there’s no TV and there’s no television, trying to go to sponsors and try to get £250,000 What’s the point of the game?
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have some tournaments, but when you finish at six o’clock on a Sunday night in the middle of nowhere and the biggest tournament in the UK has no spectators, how about you sell it to sponsors? ?”
(Image credit: Olly Hassell/SWpix)
So how exactly do teams market themselves to sponsors? “We are no different than many sports,” said Christine White, chief sporting director of the women’s continental team Doltcini O’Shea. “When the economy is challenged, sports teams all chase the same weight, whether it’s rugby, football, cycling or cricket.”
Phoenix Collective rider and former co-manager of Team Boompods Hannah Farran-Rees said she typically starts conversations with potential sponsors around June, six months before the start of a new season . “Our goal is to sign the riders by August or September and have everything completed by November,” she said.
“In the seven years I have co-managed Boompods, we have found that it has become increasingly difficult to secure sponsorship opportunities. Traditionally, bike shops have played a key role in sponsorship, but the recent economic downturn has had a significant impact on them.”
The bike industry’s woes haven’t helped the process. Today, there are more bike shops closed than open. The ongoing post-pandemic downturn, coupled with excess inventory, has hit small and large businesses hard.
This means the team is looking for support from outside the industry. “The bike companies don’t have the money,” said Bauer, the Spectra manager. “It’s all in other industries. It’s about finding people in those industries that you can talk to and praying that they are bike fans.”
Sometimes this can be accidental. In August, faced with the threat of the team disbanding, Rick Lister, manager of the Continental Pro-Noctis-200° Coffee-Hargreaves Contracting team, emailed a company asking for sponsorship. The company’s name is seen on the side of a truck. “Eventually I got an email back from him and it turned out he was a cyclist,” Lister said. The agreement was happily reached.
Spectra boss Hand prefers to do research beforehand. “I try to find people who are interested in biking, and that’s usually stated somewhere in the profile,” he said, “even if it’s a profile photo of them riding a bike. That’s at least one.”
Hand said that for companies already involved in cycling, it has become a “dog eat dog world” among teams. “Everyone wants what everyone else has.” But there are some golden rules.
“We try not to go after people who sponsor other teams because it’s not fair to them,” the Spectra boss explained. “Or if they sponsor an event, we won’t go after them because we don’t want to take money away from an event that is clearly good for the sport.”
The same applies to companies that once sponsored defunct teams. Hand said people often assume this will lead to “free money,” but that assumption is wrong. Once the deal didn’t work out as they had hoped and the company lost faith in bike sponsorship, “the business was completely out of reach,” he said.
However, sometimes everything comes together. Sometimes, a cold email pays off, a Linkedin post piques curiosity, and an Instagram message lands in the right hands. The gray clouds quickly disappeared. Then, Richardsons Trek DAS boss Lyons said it was a matter of exploiting “loyalty and friendship”.
“What you’ll find is that most of these teams just rely on loyal sponsors, people who really love the sport and are willing to donate,” he said. “If you sponsor a British or any cycling team, there’s not much commercial return. They do it because they love the sport.”
It’s the love for the game that drives team managers and owners. Every year, the search for sponsors is the same. It shows no signs of getting easier. Nonetheless, they pursue this goal every year, driven by passion and determination and a desire to keep motorsport alive. “We do the best we can,” Lyons said. “We just need to restore the scene.”
