Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Grenadiers cycling team will be renamed and rebranded with a new lead sponsor and kit before the start of this year’s Tour de France in Barcelona on 4 July.
The Guardian understands that while Ratcliffe and the Ineos head of sport, Dave Brailsford, will retain ownership and management of the British team, the new title sponsor will be the Danish IT supplier Netcompany.
It is believed that the Copenhagen-based company will, over five years, invest about €100m (£86m) in the team, who are enjoying renewed success this spring under the stewardship of Brailsford and Geraint Thomas, the 2018 Tour de France winner who retired last year.
However, Ineos and fellow sponsor TotalEnergies will also continue to support the team. The additional investment will mean Ineos relinquishes naming rights, but it 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 the four-time Tour winner Tadej Pogacar and his dominant UAE Emirates team. Ineos Grenadiers have struggled to compete with the all-conquering Pogacar, partly because of a diminished budget and the inability to secure the peloton’s top talent.
“We’ve had a rough couple of years, but we’re on the way back,” Thomas, who is 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 multimillion‑euro buyouts of the peloton’s top talents – including Scotland’s Oscar Onley, now of Ineos Grenadiers, the 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.
As Team Sky, Brailsford enjoyed multiple Grand Tour wins, but 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 the Tour de France last year, 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.
