For the sort of people that enjoy sports like F1 or Moto GP where you have the same people going against each other for a certain number of races, a super league would be ideal however for me part of the beauty of cycling has always been different top riders having different schedules and only meeting a couple of times.
However despite the increase in profits, I fear that this super league would lead to a smaller racing calendar which would mean smaller or less teams which in turn would mean, a smaller sport which is something negative and I obviously dislike the idea of Saudi money buying most of the sport.
The other thing about F1 and MotoGP that cycling simply cannot fit is that those sports have a uniform package; each race is approximately the same in length, duration or both. There is no longer (there once upon a time was) any aspect of "this event suits this team/driver/rider, this event suits this other one" which is an essential element of road cycling the sport. One-day races have different characteristics from stage races, and then each have multiple subdivisions of lengths and styles suiting different riders that a uniform package cannot offer. We've seen a few proposals over the years of a uniform stage race format including one TT, one mountain stage, one hilly stage, one sprint, and some variations thereof, and the problem is that the needs of pro cycling freezes out certain locations. The Dutch and Belgians could never provide a "mountain stage", but they're among the most passionately supportive cycling nations and racing in those countries brings its own unique challenges that the uniform format could never replicate elsewhere.
That's actually always been one of the most underrated elements of cycling. The most underappreciated contributor to the success that is the Tour de France every year is
France itself, the vineyards, the châteaux, the gorges, the colourful displays as each town and village celebrates their national institution coming by. Too many races that have collapsed (the Deutschlandtour and the Tour of California as two prominent examples) have fallen foul of trying to be a mini-Tour de France, rather than using what is at their disposal to give their races their own unique local flavour. A race like the Coors Classic or the Peace Race are still remembered fondly to this day because they gave a unique, different feeling of racing. The Coors Classic with its crit stages, its use of the altitude, its use of the grid system to create technical and up-and-down stages in hilly towns without real climbs, truly felt like North American cycling, rather than the Tour of California feeling more like generic racing, but on American roads. This proposal goes the exact reverse and wishes to destroy all uniqueness to any race.
So half the WT wants to shut out every non-WT team from every important race (i.e. kill all of them off) and sell their soul to the devil... for 2 to 3 million euros per year per team. Good to know how little money is needed for people in this sport to give up any pretense of not being a self-serving piece of ***.
Also, really weird that the only team with a Saudi sponsor seemingly aren't on board.
Of course. The top teams' bigwigs want to share the pie with fewer people so they can continue to get fat (after all, they can already beat the field they have in front of them, so let's just restrict the field to the one that we know we can beat, and then we'll always win), and the smaller WT teams have FOMO because they know that if they don't get to join in, they'll be killed off by the proposal, so they're like... well, imagine if the Premier League proposed getting rid of relegation. Do you think Nottingham Forest, Luton Town or Burnley vote 'no'?
The French don't own a sport.
They do, though, own a race which is pretty much bigger than the sport to the casual audience. Just as the Indy 500 is bigger than the Indycar Series (and proved as much when IRL beat CART in the AOWR war in the 90s and early 2000s despite being the new startup and having worse cars, drivers, teams and less money... because a lot of casual fans watched AOWR once a year, and that was for the Indy 500), and the 24h du Mans is bigger than the World Endurance Championship (and we have seen a few occasions where FIA's sportscar regulations have been complete failures because ACO have not agreed with them and have kept their own rules for Le Mans, and too many teams decided that if you can't race at Le Mans, what's the point in having a car in one of those prototype or GT categories - causing FIA to scurry home with its tail between its legs and let ACO call the shots.
The Tour de France has a similar role within cycling. Back in the late 2000s, when the UCI started handing out ProTour licences to start-up teams like Radioshack and Leopard-Trek, they made room by demoting some of the weaker performing PT teams. Which, at the time, because we were deep in the
péloton à deux vitesses era, largely meant French teams, to ASO's dissatisfaction. ASO fought against this, arguing that they only agreed to give automatic invites to the
original ProTour teams, and any new teams therefore would still need wildcards. They were helped at that juncture because the Italian ProConti scene was really strong at the time with lots of high quality riders on ProConti teams - many thanks to the informal quarantine issue of course - and so RCS fell in line, because if they backed the same argument (especially knowing that a couple of PT teams like FDJ and Euskaltel might not take up their invites at the Giro as happened a couple of times in that era) they'd have more flexibility for wildcards. Eventually ASO and RCS won, teams like Bbox and Cofidis got reinvited to the big races, and Johan Bruyneel threw his toys out the pram spectacularly when the Vuelta chose not to invite Radioshack despite their PT status.
Now, of course, with the French teams having been favoured by the UCI's points system and an abject dearth of depth in the Italian pro péloton, this is no longer an issue that ASO or RCS face, but it does show that the authorities had to back down and acquiesce to the demands of ASO because who goes to the Tour de France is a much bigger deal than who has an automatic invite for the Tour of the UAE and the Tour of Guangxi.
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