Peculiarities of Sponsorship in Professional Road Cycling

Abstract

Sport sponsorship is any commercial agreement by which a sponsor contractually provides financing or other support in order to establish an association between the sponsor’s image, brands or products and a sport sponsorship property in return for rights to promote this association and/or for granting certain agreed direct or indirect benefits. Since professional road cycling was one of the first sports to be practised commercially, sponsorship of cycling teams already started in the first editions of endurance races such as Bordeaux–Paris at the end of the nineteenth century and it has grown ever since. Today’s cycling teams are in fact financed almost exclusively through sponsorship. This chapter explains the business-to-business (B2B) characteristics of team cycling sponsorship and shows how the cycling sponsorship market can be very dynamic. The duration and termination of sponsorship of cycling teams as well as a company’s motives to invest in cycling sponsorship are discussed, and the importance of the integration of sponsorship into marketing communication is illustrated. We also analyse the return and effectiveness of cycling team sponsorship and conclude with some thoughts on the specific choice of the sponsorship of cycling races instead of cycling teams.