Bookmakers to sponsor cycling teams? First reaction

Last week I wrote a piece about new possible sponsors for the cycling teams. First up was the betting industry, which I claimed was likely to be a new sponsor for a WorldTour team in a couple a years. Unfortunately one of the biggest operators on the market right now, Betfair, won’t be one of them.

I talked with Betfair’s Head of Northern Europe, Jacob Weinreich, and he made it very clear that Betfair has no intentions on moving in on the cycling market.

”My personal opinion is that cycling can be a tough sell to the gaming market. As an operator you have to be in the awareness game to enter into cycling sponsorships. For a market place like Betfair you need a high number of punters to get attractive markets going. Cycling is a small sport with few high profile races hence you don’t have many hard core punters following it”, he tells me.

As I wrote in my earlier piece, one of the main reasons why the bookmakers could end up staying away is the limited in-play action compared to football and tennis. Jacob Weinreich explains:

“The nature of gaming and bookmakers is that the more events the better. Football and tennis are great examples of this where you have more or less constant action around the calendar year. You can bet in-play and the odds are changing every second. In cycling it takes 5-6 hours from the stage starts till it ends and you can make a profit. That’s too much waiting without any - or very limited – action”.

Unfortunately that leaves us with only a few reasons why a bookmaker would step in to the cycling world.

“The only way I can see a bookmaker sponsor a cycling team is if they really want to create some awareness around themselves and show they cover all types of sports. Or if they want to make an impact on a specific market, ex. the Spanish market, and then go in and sponsor one of the teams in the Vuelta. You have seen this in the past with Unibet coming into cycling. Unibet had at this time a significant interest in France and the sponsorship could possibly be justified this way”, Jacob Weinreich says.

As you can imagine this was not exactly the scenario I was hoping for, still I totally understand Betfair’s point of view. I just hope that other bookmakers, like Unibet, want to move in on ex. the Spanish, French or Italian market now when the gambling monopolies are coming to an end. Time will tell…

Possible new cycling sponsors - part I

In the light of HTC’s and GEOX’ goodbye to cycling and the fusion between Radioshack and Leopard, I’ve taken a look at some new potential sponsors who all bring a big bag of money to the table.

Two of the most sold jerseys worldwide, sponsored by Bwin.

First up is the betting industry. Bookmakers all over the world are making tons of money every day on poker, casino and sports betting and are all looking for potential sports to sponsor. Bwin has been sponsoring the entire best Portuguese football league for years and are currently on the chest of worldwide known players like Ronaldo and Kaka. The financial details of the Portuguese league sponsorship haven’t been disclosed, but we do know that that the price for the coveted sponsor deal with Real Madrid gives the Spanish club €20 million a year. And this is only a visual deal. Have you ever mentioned Bwin when you are talking about Real Madrid? I know I haven’t… Imagine if they put just half of that amount into a cycling team where they will get the rights to the entire team name. €10 million is more or less the budget Team Sky (Bradley Wiggins & Mark Cavendish) and Liquigas (Ivan Basso & Vincenzo Nibali) have and a few millions more than Team Saxo Bank (Alberto Contador) and Lampre (Alessandro Petacchi & Damiano Cunego) have.

Team? Unibet weren't allowed shown on the tricot.

It’s a known fact that the bookmakers have plenty of money to spend on marketing so why aren’t any of them throwing their love (and money) at cycling? Well, as you might remember; Swedish bookmaker Unibet tried just that back in 2006. Unibet paid €6-8 million a year for their ProTour team sponsorship but ended up abandoning the sport again after only two years. The different countries’ gambling monopoly prevented Unibet to take part in any of the three Grand Tours and therefore they decided to leave. ”It's too bad that cycling has been troubling a sponsor that invests no less than €25,000,000 in the sport”, team manager Hilaire Van der Schueren said in 2007.

So why should the bookmakers come back and spend €8-10 million on a WorldTour team sponsorship? First of all, it’s important to remember that the very same gambling monopolies that ended up killing Team Unibet now are about to disappear thanks to the EU-wide legalizations on the gambling markets. Denmark, France, Spain etc. will all legalize gambling and public sports betting advertizing in 2012 and that means that the fear of being excluded from ex. the Tour de France due to a bookmaker sponsor is now gone.

Denmark was the first country to legalize gambling and that has had an immediate effect on the best football league which, in 2012, will be co-sponsored by the Scandinavian bookmaker Betsafe while the 2nd division will be renamed to “The Betsafe League”. According to my information Betsafe pays around €1 million for this sponsorship. The thing is that Betsafe is already a well known brand in Denmark. Wouldn’t it be great if they decided to spend their money on the Danish Team Saxo Bank and help securing one of those big names (Thor Husvhod, Tony Martin etc.) that Bjarne Riis didn’t have the money for as well?

Odds on the Tour de France 2012 at Betsafe.

There is one big bridge to cross though and that is the fact that cycling still is an absolute niche sport for the bookmakers. Most bookmakers are making red numbers on their cycling bets and the amount of money placed on the cycling markets are microscopically small compared to big sports like football and tennis. Still we must remember that despite this fact Unibet did think it was a good idea to sponsor a cycling team in the best league.

It might look like a dead end, but personally I believe that we will see bookmakers entering top cycling within the next couple of years. It might be too early – after the end of the gambling monopolies – in 2012 already, but I feel quite confident saying that the Tour de France 2014 will have a least one team sponsored by an online bookmaker on the start list, except for Lotto and FDJ of course.

Follow the money

Who is going to win the race today? Maybe you need to update your manager team, maybe you are planning to put down a little money on the race or maybe you are just generally interesting in cycling. Whatever your reasons are to ask this question, the answer is very simple; follow the money - and then you will see.


Some people like to follow the expert’s picks – as you have been doing at this very site during the Tour and the Vuelta – while some prefers to follow their favorite tipster. You can get good picks this way, but if you want the great tips, you have to pay close attention to the bookmakers. Not on who the bookmakers think will win – let’s face it, they don’t really know more than you anyway – but pay attention to the riders whose odds suddenly start to drop heavily. It takes some time see it, but when you get the hang of it, it’s easy to see who the real favorites are.

Let me show you a couple of examples.

Giro d’Italia, stage 17 - May 25th.
On paper a typical breakaway stage. One of those stages where half of the peloton wants to give a shot and see what happens. As those of you who follow cycling closely know, this stage had names like Giovanni Visconti & Pablo Lastras written all over it and just like that both riders managed to get into the right breakaway. A coincident? No. These riders are experts in hitting the right breaks and therefore the odds on Visconti & Lastras aren’t very high at the start of the stage (around odds 10-20). The odds on a guy like Diego Ulissi are on the other hand much, much higher. Starting in around 200 or 300.

So, you might ask, how are you supposed to know that Ulissi is a good pick for this specific stage when the odds are so much higher on him than on ‘favorites’ like Visconti and Lastras? Well, this is where my thesis from before comes in handy – follow the money! It’s no secret that most bets on the cycling are placed in the final hours before the race starts. Therefore it’s a good idea to keep an open eye on the odds at this time. If you did back then, you would have had witness something very interesting. Suddenly the odds on Ulissi started to drop, from 300 to 200. From 200 to 100 and from 100 down to 40. It’s true that odds 40 still is a very high odds, but with the money placed on Ulissi it was easy to see that someone knew he was on fire that day.

6 hours later Diego Ulissi had won the stage. It’s true that he won because Visconti got disqualified in the sprint, but if you had bought Ulissi at odds 300 (or just 100) you would have been able to lay him on betting exchanges such as Betfair at odds 2 during the stage. In other words you would have been able to make a huge profit no matter what would have happen in the final sprint if you had followed the money and placed a bet on Ulissi when the odds on him started to drop.

Another example is from Paris-Tours last Sunday.
Usually the markets on cycling are very low at this point of the season. Meaning that the list of 20+ bookmakers with odds on the Tour de France is reduced to only a very few for Paris-Tours. One of these bookmakers is Betfair, but as always with these late season races, the liquidity is very low. That means that when the total amount of euro placed isn’t higher than a few thousands (many, many, many times lower than during the Tour) and then suddenly a rider at odds 100+ starting to get 20% of money it raises a few eyebrows. Or at least it should do!

The rider I’m talking about is Marco Marcato from Vacansoleil-DCM. Marcato sure seemed to be in the shape of his life, doing top10 in both of the Canadian races and winning Tour de Vendée just a week before, but to drop all the way down to odds 30 did seem a little off. Riders like Philippe Gilbert, Oscar Freire, Robbie McEwen, Sylvain Chavanel and the new World Champion Mark Cavendish were all to be considered as the big favorites for the race, and therefore it stands out when the few money on the race suddenly go to Marcato at such a high odds.

But just as the case with Diego Ulissi, Marco Marcato turned out to be the smart bet ending 2nd in the race behind Greg Van Avermaet. Starting at odds 100+ to win and odds 25 for a top3 spot, the Italian Vacansoleil-DCM rider sure made a few punters go to sleep happy that Sunday.

I could give a lot of examples like these two, but I think you got the basic idea now. So remember, if you want to get best picks for a race, always follow the money!

The Experts' Tour Picks - Stage 2

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Thomas Löfkvist : HTC-Highroad

Mauro Gianetti : Leopard-Trek

David Etxebarria : HTC-Highroad

Laura Meseguer : HTC-Highroad

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Bookmaker's favorite : Garmin-Cervélo