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Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Grenadiers cycling team will be renamed and rebranded with a new lead sponsor and new kit before the start of this year’s Tour de France in Barcelona on 4 July.
The Guardian understands that while Ratcliffe and Ineos head of sport, Dave Brailsford, will retain ownership and management of the team, the new title sponsor of the World Tour cycling team will be the Danish IT supplier Netcompany.
It is believed that the Copenhagen-based company will, over five years, invest around €100m (£86m) in the team, which is enjoying renewed success this spring, under the stewardship of Brailsford and the recently retired Tour de France winner, Geraint Thomas.
However, Ineos and fellow sponsor Total Energies will also continue to support the team. The additional investment will mean Ineos relinquishing naming rights, but will allow Ratcliffe’s team to compete more effectively at the highest level in Europe’s Grand Tours.
The billionaire has long coveted further success in the Tour de France and the injection of the £86m , spread over five years, would elevate his World Tour cycling team closer to the annual £51m budget levels of four-time Tour winner, Tadej Pogacar and his dominant UAE Emirates team. The British team have struggled to compete with the all-conquering Pogacar, partly due to a diminished budget and the inability to secure the peloton’s top talent.
“We have had a rough couple of years, but we’re on the way back,” Thomas, currently with the team at Paris-Nice, said this week. “There’s still a long way to go, but we’ve got a great team of riders, of staff, and everyone’s motivated, pushing forward.”
A spate of recent multimillion euro buyouts of the peloton’s top talents, including Scotland’s Oscar Onley, now with Ineos Grenadiers, double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, and the highly rated Spaniard, Juan Ayuso, have also increased the pressures on budgets as sponsors seek riders capable of competing with Pogacar.
Although as Team Sky, Brailsford enjoyed multiple Grand Tour wins, Ineos Grenadiers last won the Tour de France in 2019, with Egan Bernal. The Colombian also recorded the team’s most recent Grand Tour success, in the 2021 Giro d’Italia.
Brailsford and Thomas have high hopes for 23-year-old Onley, who finished fourth in last year’s Tour de France, but last summer the team were also connected to the Danish rider, Jonas Vingegaard, a double winner of the Tour de France, and one of Pogacar’s most enduring rivals.
Netcompany has just signed an agreement with Heathrow to become the airport’s primary digital operations partner and is keen to expand its business relationships throughout Europe, and particularly in the UK, which will host the Grand Départ of the men’s Tour de France in July 2027.
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