ANPRonde winners Sepp Kuss and Jonas Vingegaard extend their contracts with Visma – Lease a Bike
NOS Wielrennen•vandaag, 07:05
It is September 1 and Richard Plugge is apparently deep in thought at Oslo airport. The director’s bag, with the Jumbo-Visma logo on it, is wedged between his legs. What would his team look like in the future, he ponders. Where should the money come from now that Jumbo wants to stop being the main sponsor?
Would there actually still be a team after 2024?
Answers to all these questions were given yesterday in Amsterdam at the presentation of ‘Visma – Lease a Bike’. Plugge’s Dutch cycling formation will listen to the names of those two companies, which will commit themselves to the team for an indefinite period from 2024.
With, again, a notice period of two years. In short: once again a mega deal has been closed.
Visma – Lease a Bike remains in yellow and black: ‘We are not a new team’
At the beginning of September in Norway, all this had not yet been set in stone. Jumbo would then stop as namesake, but what about Visma?
Plugge had to find that out. Traveling with him was Sander Kruis, the team’s commercial manager. The man who is responsible for sponsorship, partnerships and hospitality – English terms that sound a bit woolly to the outsider, but all things that, if they are properly arranged, will bring in extra money. With which “that one extra training camp can be booked”, says Kruis, “or that one rider can be recruited.”
He was closely involved in all conversations and negotiations, after Jumbo announced its intention to stop as main sponsor at the end of 2022. And he looks back to the NOS on the year in which he and the team management faced the challenge of replacing the supermarket chain.
If you want to line up with the All Blacks, FC Barcelona and Chicago Bulls, it is not useful if you keep changing colors
Cross over the image a team can build
“Did we feel pressure? Of course. But not in the sense that we were ever in a hurry. We still had until the end of 2024 and there were so many conversations that you quickly knew: this was going to work out fine. The pressure was more that we wanted the perfect outcome for our team.”
The meeting in Norway on September 1 was important in this regard. “That was one of the conversations where the deal was essentially finalized.”
Evenepoel, Amazon?
But more options were considered. “Fine lines were explored” and a merger was considered, one that kept the cycling world in its grip for weeks. “The Belgian market was an interesting option to investigate, because the sport is very popular there. We already had that experience with Wout van Aert in our team.”
In retrospect, it was just one of many options on the table, but it was widely reported in the media. “A lot of messages were written that were far too premature. Sometimes wrong connections were made. As if that process with Soudal-QuickStep would only revolve around Remco Evenepoel for us.”
‘We can stick to yellow as our house colour, no other team has that’
An American sponsor was also reviewed. “I’m not going to deny that we talked to Amazon. That could have been interesting.”
The team currently receives most orders for merchandise from the US. “We noticed this shortly after the Netflix documentary of the Tour de France, but especially after winning the Vuelta with Sepp Kuss. We supply more to the US than to our home markets in the Netherlands and Belgium.”
Lotto balls and Jumbo
After all the discussions, it turned out that the best choice lay with the parties that were already on board. Pon had already indicated at an early stage that he wanted to contribute ideas and possibly take a step higher. And when Visma became the main sponsor and Plugge sat down with Pon again, Lease a Bike, a company that is part of Pon and is looking for more brand awareness, emerged as the logical second sponsor.
And Kruis also had the following trump card in mind: if possible, identity had to be guaranteed. The yellow-black therefore had to remain. The same colors that the team once embraced because of the yellow-black Lotto balls and because of the yellow house color of Jumbo.
ANPWout van Aert and Riejanne Markus in familiar colors at the Visma team presentation – Lease a Bike
Especially in the year in which 69 victories were achieved and the team rode prominently in all the major tours, it was important to hold on to those colors and that identity. “We strongly believe that we are also our own brand. And that there is value in building that up. Recognizability towards fans, towards companies. That revenue models can be built around it.”
“In the absence of our own stadium, to make a comparison with football, and in the absence of fixed income through tickets, this is important. As a cycling team you are currently still 95 percent dependent on sponsorship, but we are working hard to ensure that to be less significant in the future.”
In the cycling world, it is generally customary to adapt the uniforms to the corporate identity of those backers when new sponsors arrive. “But then people quickly think: who are they again?”
Sports history
It also fits in with the big goal that came from the team after 2022, after winning the Tour had been ticked off. “We asked ourselves: what do we want now? And the answer to that question was that we want to write sports history. That goal inspires us.”
It was up to Kruis and marketing man Jasper Saeijs to figure out that “if you have a legacy wants to build up and if you want to be in the same league as teams such as the All Blacks, FC Barcelona and Chicago Bulls, it is not useful if you are first green for three years, then yellow for years and then red again for seven years.”
Forty million
According to information from NOS, the budget of the three Visma teams – Lease a Bike (men, women and training team) will increase by ten percent to almost forty million euros.
This does not yet bring the team close to other major teams such as UAE and Ineos, whose budgets are said to be around fifty million euros or more, but the team is one of the five richest teams in the peloton.
The question to the Norwegian software company and also to the Dutch Pon was clear: “Whether we could keep our corporate identity.”
Both lenders agreed. “It could also have been the case that they had said: it is our demand that the team becomes purple. Then I would not have put my hand in the fire that we had not done that. Because we have to be realistic: it is still the case that 95 percent of the budget comes from sponsorship.”
The category of recognizability also included an adjustment to the legal name of the team. “Our company is no longer called Blanco Pro Cycling, but Yellow B. With this we want to anchor our colors yellow and black. That B stands for both blackblanco, bicycling as for ‘bees‘, our nickname in the peloton. That’s how the name came about. We are not going to use that name as a team name, it is only the name of the license holder.”
“Who knows if we will ever be able to be a cycling team with our own name, without sponsor names, in ten years’ time. But until that happens, there are still many steps to be taken.”
2023-12-22 06:05:38
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