Sponsorship makes the wheels go round

The Cycling Podcast is looking for commercial partners for our 2025 coverage

A small selection of companies that have sponsored The Cycling Podcast.

Sponsorship makes the wheels of professional cycling go round, and has done since the earliest days of the sport. It’s also a vital component of The Cycling Podcast’s business model, enabling us to cover the three grand tours and the biggest women’s stage race with journalists on the ground every season.

Regular listeners will have noticed that The Cycling Podcast has been without a title sponsor since our two-year deal with Supersapiens expired in May 2023.

In this edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino, Lionel Birnie writes about renewing the search for title sponsorship to secure the next phase of the podcast’s future.

If you are interested in finding out more about our 2025 sponsorship packages, email contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

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When Richard, Daniel and I started The Cycling Podcast in 2013, I don’t think any of us were dreaming of running a business. It was the immediacy, intimacy and flexibility of the audio medium that excited us and we saw an opportunity to broaden beyond our written journalism. You could say that it was a side-hustle for all of us in those early days.

We started with nothing more than Richard’s iPhone and a small, but significant, sponsorship deal from the electronics giant Sharp and their content partners Humans Invent, which gave us a tiny production budget – enough to pay Jon Moonie to edit the Tour de France episodes. We didn’t have a big company behind us, or any investors, just our combined experience as journalists and a desire to learn while the red recording light was on.

I can’t speak for Richard and Daniel but for me The Cycling Podcast and that sponsorship from Sharp was the difference between going to the 2013 Tour de France and staying home. I had recently resigned a regular retainer agreement with a magazine and the newspaper I’d worked for in 2012 had told me they were sending their chief sports correspondent to cover the 2013 race, which was understandable from their point of view with no Olympic Games or football tournament that summer, but it meant a lot less income for me. However, it did mean I’d have more time for the podcast.

One of the magazines I worked for offered to contribute towards my expenses, covering around a fifth of what it cost to travel round France. When I added up everything I earned from the work and subtracted everything I spent, I just about broke even, which was a relief but also not sustainable in the long-term.

By the end of that Tour we had a modest but growing audience and once we’d signed off with our final episode from the Champs-Élysées enough people on social media asked us to carry on to persuade Sharp and Humans Invent to extend their support to a weekly show.

Step by step, a business model emerged. In 2014, our Tour de France coverage was sponsored by Jaguar and we forged unpaid media partnerships with The Telegraph newspaper and US magazine VeloNews, which broadened our audience.

In 2015 we created our Friends of the Podcast subscription programme, offering additional episodes for listeners prepared to support us financially at a time when few of the major podcast platforms were even facilitating paid-for content.

Next came sponsorship from Eurosport and Trainer Road, the latter culminating in the Trainer Road Challenge campaign which saw Richard, Rob Hatch and I race head-to-head in a 4km pursuit competition at Manchester velodrome after following a four-month training programme.

In 2016, Stephen Moon, the CEO of Science In Sport asked what it would take for us to provide daily coverage of the Giro d’Italia along the same lines as our Tour de France episodes, and so began a long-running sponsorship deal that would last just over seven years.

Then Rapha came on board as title sponsors, which finally gave us the foundation to commit to daily, on-the-ground coverage from all three grand tours, plus the biggest stage race on the women’s calendar, which at the time was the Women’s Tour.

By now the podcast landscape had developed dramatically and our audio hosts, Audioboom, were selling in-show advertising for a range of different companies, most of whom had no links to cycling but wanted to reach our large, engaged audience on a regular basis.

Organically, and without really planning it, a business model had formed with three key revenue streams – sponsorship, in-show advertising, and listener subscriptions. Although none of them was enough on its own, each source of income was vital and together they ensured we could deliver the episodes we wanted.

Some of the companies that have sponsored our podcast along the way include Skoda, The Economist, Wattbike, Laka, Allpress Espresso, Hansgrohe, Nederburg, Zwift and Hammerhead, who sponsored the award-winning Tour d’Écosse series. Many of these, but not all, had existing interests in cycling. When Rapha’s title sponsorship deal ended after three-and-a-half years we attracted the financial tech company Iwoca, who stood firmly alongside us throughout the uncertainty of the pandemic. They, in turn, were succeeded by Supersapiens, whose two-year deal ended in May 2023. We have also had a clothing partnership with MAAP since 2022.

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Regular listeners may have noticed that since our contract with Supersapiens expired just before the 2023 Giro d’Italia we have been without a title sponsor – the equivalent of a WorldTour team riding in plain jerseys. Beautiful MAAP-made jerseys, of course, but without a logo in the prime position, so to speak.

Like most commercial podcasts, our in-show advertising sold by Audioboom and the radio-style adverts that have become more common across the podscape in recent years, have held up well, as have Friends of the Podcast subscriptions. Around 12% of our regular free-to-air audience support us financially by subscribing as a Friend, and that support is hugely appreciated because it is the difference between us committing to travelling to the grand tours or not. We’ve never been purely a studio-based show, not even in the early days when Richard, Daniel and I would meet up in a noisy cafe or bar to record. During the grand tours, a key part of our identity is taking our listeners to the heart of the action, capturing the sounds and atmosphere of the biggest races, and creating a show that is as much a travelogue as a sports podcast. It goes without saying that it costs money to do that – increasingly so as the cost of travel, hotels, food and fuel have all risen significantly since the pandemic.

With one of our key three revenue streams – title sponsorship – switched off for the best part of 18 months we are now at a point where we need to replace it one way or other. We have been incredibly fortunate over the years to have forged long-term partnerships with companies. Rapha’s title sponsorship lasted three-and-half years. Iwoca and Supersapiens sponsored us for two years apiece. Science In Sport’s backing, though not a title sponsorship-scale deal, ran for more than seven years – an extraordinary commitment. And our clothing partnership with MAAP has lasted for three seasons. The legacy of those long-term partnerships has enabled us to survive a difficult couple of years while we’ve worked out where to go next.

We have seen the podcast market change with big players backed by massive media companies now dominating the charts – although we still more than hold our own. Since the pandemic, we have experienced the commercial turbulence that has affected cycling and especially the cycling media.

The conclusion we have come to is that lots of potential opportunities are slipping by while we wait for a longer-term sponsor. The market has changed and we are changing with it.

So we have divided The Cycling Podcast’s year into what we hope will be appealing blocks of episodes covering different parts of the season, with sponsorship packages to suit different objectives and budgets. The three men’s grand tours and the women’s Tour de France Femmes are our flagship packages, of course, but there are also packages covering the early season, the spring Classics, and the end-of-season episodes. We’ve particularly recognised that the end-of-season package might appeal to companies who have marketing objectives focusing on Black Friday and Christmas, for example.

For the first time in a few years we are actively looking for companies that would like to reach our large, engaged audience of passionate cycling fans, benefit from being associated with one of the longest-running independent sports podcasts in Britain, and enable The Cycling Podcast to report from the heart of the world’s biggest races.

If you are interested in finding out more about The Cycling Podcast’s 2025 sponsorship opportunities, email contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

Thank you for reading. There will be a regular edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino at the end of the week.