Riding the Red Bull Wave: Breaking Down How Bora-Hansgrohe's New Owners Will, and Won't, Alter the Team's Trajectory
Taking careful stock of Red Bull's blockbuster acquisition of the Bora-Hansgrohe team and what it does, and doesn't, mean for the team and sport of cycling in the near future
While the Spring road season is ramping up in earnest this weekend, and preparing to take up all of the cycling bandwidth here at BTP (Key Takeaways breaking down this weekend’s action coming early next week), I wanted to take one final breath to circle back to briefly break down a major piece of off-season news and lay out what it means for the team/riders involved and the sport as a whole. The news in question is the sports drink and performance optimization behemoth Red Bull acquiring a majority of the Bora-Hansgrohe cycling team through an ‘indirect acquisition’ of a controlling interest (51%) in RD pro cycling GmbH & Co KG and RD Beteiligungs GmbH (aka the Bora-Hansgrohe team) from the team’s founder, and now minority owner, Ralph Denk.
The acquisition, which sees a top-tier global brand enter the sport, not as a title sponsor, but as a team owner, was shocking and massively significant for the team and the sport.
On a macro level, the significance for the greater cycling world lies in the fact that after years of struggling to attract major global brands as sponsors and relying on deep-pocketed owners to subsidize the teams, which have traditionally acted more as money pits than wealth-creating vehicles, professional road cycling now has a brand-name company coming on board not just to rent advertising space but put some serious skin the game via team ownership.
On a micro level, this is massive for the Bora-Hansgrohe team since, outside of being a best-in-class content house that is second to none when it comes to promoting its sponsored athletes, Red Bull invests significant resources into creating winning projects whenever it decides to hit a club with their laser beam of optimized performance culture.
Their investments in soccer (football), hockey, and motorsport teams have seen them consistently create supremely efficient clubs that bleed performance out of every last drop of money investment.
Why is this happening?
The most interesting and perhaps most significant trait of Red Bull’s sporting endeavors is that they tend to expect a return on their investments and don’t simply throw money at a project for the sake of doing so. While I don’t have any transparency into Red Bull’s decision-making on this deal, the obvious answer is that they must see some value in taking control of the Bora team.
If we look at the other sports franchises they own (i.e., F1 and Soccer (Football) teams), they appear only to take on equity in organizations when those assets can produce positive cash flow.
With this in mind, perhaps the more interesting question isn’t why Red Bull is doing this, but why are they doing this now?
Do they potentially sense something is afoot in terms of impending changes in the structure of WorldTour team ownership due to the One Cycling project, which aims to create a framework for teams to generate real revenue?
Even if they don’t foresee any significant changes in the landscape of cycling team ownership, the Bora-Hansgrohe team presents an interesting acquisition target since they have two quality title sponsors (Bora and Hansgrohe), a deep-pocketed and premier bike sponsor (Specialized), and a team with a somewhat surprising amount of talent and quality staff.
The presence of existing sponsors means that, unless they want to get extremely aggressive in the transfer market (more on that below), Red Bull won’t be stuck bridging the financial gap at the end of the year.
Additionally, now that they own the team, they can leverage the strong roster (which improved significantly over the off-season) to promote their image as a top-tier sporting brand for just the cost of acquiring 51% of the team.
And, due to their role as team co-owners, they could likely get access to sponsor space on the team’s jersey as an in-kind benefit since just being associated with the Red Bull brand, especially having access to their media production expertise, is beneficial for the team, the riders, and their existing sponsors.
Red Bull’s relationship with the team is slightly more complex, and potentially subdued, than initial headlines may lead you to believe
While Red Bull’s reasons for taking control of the Bora team are incredibly interesting and relevant, it is difficult to do so without wading into the waters of blind speculation. To stay on solid ground, let's take a look at how this could affect the team in the upcoming seasons:
As mentioned above, the team’s existing sponsors, mainly Bora, Hansgrohe, and Specialized, must be thrilled to be partnered with a company that has a proven track record of deploying their best-in-class sports science department to improve the team’s performance (judging by their ability to produce results that generally outstrip their spend across their entire sporting portfolio, the Red Bull performance bump appears to more legitimate value add than marketing fluff), as well as an ability to add an instant ‘cool’ factor and amplify this message due to having the most effective content creation studio in sports under its roof (Red Bull Media House).
Essentially, the existing named sponsors bought a housing asset in a generic landlocked city that has suddenly transformed into exclusive beachfront property.
But, besides acting as the team’s co-owner, sports science knowledge-sharing partner, content creator, and potentially a minor jersey sponsor, Red Bull’s influence on the team and the sport is less clear right now.
For example, despite most outside observers expecting Red Bull to suddenly take control of the team’s brand (i.e., naming the team 'Red Bull Racing’) and finances (i.e., opening the pocketbook to sign the sport’s biggest stars), in reality, the relationship will most likely be far more nuanced and reserved, at least in its early phase.
After all, the team already has contracts with Bora and Hansgrohe to be their title sponsors through the 2027 season, and sources I’ve spoken with at Hansgrohe have already indicated, in addition to being thrilled with the arrival of Red Bull as a partner, that they plan will remain a title sponsor of the team through the remainder of their contract.
These agreements significantly limit Red Bull’s ability to take over the team's naming rights and, as a result, likely decrease their appetite to break the budget in the transfer market (they also were likely part of the appeal of purchasing the team since it keeps Red Bull’s initial costs of operation low).
Additionally, coming in and breaking the bank with big-name transfers hasn’t been Red Bull’s MO in their other sporting endeavors, which decreases the chances of us suddenly seeing them practice unregulated spending with Bora.
Red Bull’s sports performance expertise, not their spending power, is more important in Bora-Hansgrohe’s quest to join the sport’s elite tier
There has been plenty of chatter about how the Red Bull-revamped Bora team is aggressively hunting the signatures of the sport’s biggest stars, but executing this is far more difficult than it appears and doesn’t have the automatic success one might imagine.
The superstars of the Men’s side of the road scene that they already have sponsorship agreements with, Tom Pidcock and Wout van Aert, and already pay what are likely hefty annual fees to, would be the obvious transfer targets since it would strengthen the roster, and bring the team into the Super Team conversation while creating synergies due to rolling their all of their cycling sponsorship costs into a single entity.
However, while this may look great on paper, both riders are already under contract through the next few seasons (Van Aert through 2026 and Pidcock through 2027) and would need to be bought out of their current contracts with the consent of their teams, who would presumably expect massive buy-out fees to let them go.
Another hurdle to Bora simply flipping a switch and hovering up top talent is their ability to pitch the riders themselves on these transfers.
For example, while they have a feasible path of signing Remco Evenepoel despite his current deal running through 2026, due to financial issues and messy fallout from the failed Visma merger at his current Soudal-QuickStep team, the fact that Evenepoel is a major GC rival of Bora’s new star signing Primož Roglič.
With Roglič likely planning to remain a team leader for at least two more seasons, he also is unlikely to be thrilled at the idea of sharing leadership at the Tour de France anytime in the near future, since he left his former team for outright leadership at Bora.
Even if they are successful in signing Evenepoel, it is difficult to imagine Van Aert leaving the sport’s most successful team, Visma, to share the Tour de France spotlight with Evenepoel, whom he has had difficulty racing with just a few teams a year on the Belgian National Team.
After all, Bora’s signing of Roglič and the presence of outside GC contender Aleksandr Vlasov appeared to directly cause their loss of coveted young rider Cian Uijtdebroeks, who decamped for Roglič’s former Visma team before the 2024 season.
Of course, other factors may have influenced Uijtdebroeks’s decision to leave, but it shows the difficulties of simply aggregating top stars onto the same team.
These potential issues highlight why the sport’s current superteams (UAE and Visma) were constructed by either growing their own superstars in-house (Primož Roglič, Jonas Vingegaard), signing them at an incredibly young age (Tadej Pogačar, Wout van Aert, Juan Ayuso, Isaac del Toro), or significantly improve mid-career pickups (Christophe Laporte).
At the end of the day, going ‘big game hunting’ by attempting to sign a handful of the sport’s biggest stars is neither easy, nor a slam dunk from a performance perspective, as the BMC project of the early 2010s and late-stage Ineos showed us.
This is where Red Bull’s sports science expertise and financial heft could come in handy since they will be able to assist Bora-Hansgrohe with recruitment (since they could be viewed as a ‘cooler’ spot to land for star teenage riders) and developing talented riders that failed to develop into stars at previous teams (the Visma model).
The ‘Pidcock Dilemma’ highlights the inherent issues of being both a rider sponsor and team owner
In some ways, the theoretical challenges facing Red Bull’s cycling project are perfectly highlighted by their rumored target, Tom Pidcock. After all, signing the British rider makes some sense (outside of the fact that Pidcock is signed through 2027), since Red Bull already sponsors him and finds himself on a crowded team at Ineos (at this point, they already have three potential leaders on their 2024 Tour de France team).
However, upon closer examination, this decision is less clear. After all, Pidcock currently gets a massive degree of freedom to chase off-road pursuits (and, as a result, promote the Red Bull product to a wider range of audiences) at Ineos. There is no guarantee that the management at Bora would be willing to grant this same autonomy when it comes to race schedule since it undoubtedly diminishes his level of focus and performance on the road.
This leaves open a strange scenario in which Red Bull (the company) might be better off continuing to sponsor Tom Pidcock while he races on Ineos, which is currently essentially subsidizing his large salary while he drives value for the Red Bull brand, then actually bringing him into their Red Bull-owned team.
This counter-intuitive incentive structure highlights the conflict of interest of Red Bull owning a team while sponsoring individual riders on rival teams and why this is technically not allowed under the current UCI rules*.
*The wording in the UCI rulebook around this is intentionally vague, and I expect Red Bull to be able to continue its double-sponsored structure since the UCI likely sees it as a net positive.
Ironically, Bora-Hansgrohe was already on their way to elite team status
The irony of the speculation about the arrival of Red Bull into WorldTour team ownership is that even before the arrival of Red Bull as a team partner, they were already building one of the best teams in cycling (they are already third in the 2024 BTP NET Projections) and have a legitimate chance to win the Tour de France in 2024 due to the recent acquisition of Roglič (it is worth noting that while this technically happened before the arrival of Red Bull as the team’s co-owner, the looming partnership likely contributed to the signing).
If they perform even close to their 3rd place projection in the end-of-season standings, it would be an improvement from the past two seasons, which saw them finish 7th and 4th in the UCI Points Rankings and 9th and 6th in the team win rankings, which shows the team is already creeping back into the coveted 1st Tier, where it was as recently as the 2019 season.
Bora-Hansgrohe 2019-2023 Performance
PCS Points Rankings
2023: 7th
2022: 4th
2021: 6th
2020: 6th
2019: 2ndTeam Win Rankings
2023: 9th
2022: 6th
2021: 7th
2020: 4th
2019: 2nd
While the BTP NET jump and improved grand tour prospects are due to Primož Roglič's addition, incremental improvements, like the signings of Sam Welsford, Dani Martinez, and Matteo Sobrero, have also added significant firepower in the aggregate.
As mentioned above, one of the three keys to building a modern superteam is finding talented but underperforming mid-career riders and giving them a platform to level up, and Martinez, Welsford, and Sobrero all fit into that mold.
If we look at the team’s roster for 2024, ranked in terms of their PCS points generated in 2023, we can see that while Roglič, with 2.6x the number of points as the team’s next-best rider, is by far their most important component, but that they have a large number of extremely talented riders that could see major improvements in 2024.
Jai Hindley, Dani Martinez, and Max Schachmann could all significantly increase their output in the near future, and will all undoubtedly benefit from the increased focus on training and performance optimization that Red Bull can provide.
Bora-Hansgrohe 2024 roster in order of 2023 PCS Points
In short, don’t be surprised to see Bora-Hansgrohe pushing UAE and Visma at some of the sport’s biggest races in 2024 and beyond, but if they do, it likely won’t be due to unconstrained transfer spending and big-name acquisitions, but thoughtful incremental improvements.
Good to see Bora taking steps to challenge Visma and UAE at the top of the sport.
I would submit that the relationship RB has with WVA and TP is a conflict of interest! Given they will be a title and what 51% owner of the BH Red Bull team.
A scandal waiting to happen, imagine a phone call from a RB corner office executive to TP
during the TDF asking him to consider a large contract addition if he were to throw a race stage or help in a beneficial way ? UCI rules state you can not own two UCI teams?
RB has existing contracts with riders that race for other team not so cut and dry.