I struggle to think of a time when the top tier of the sport was more stable. So ... pony up the evidence, the names of these teams folding for a lack of sponsorship.
How much of this is to do with sponsorship at the top level, though, and how much of it is the lack of too much by way of viable alternative to the World Tour since the UCI made it harder to build from ProContinental to prevent teams from basically overriding the intention of the ProTour like Cervélo and BMC did? It's a two-sided coin.
How many World Tour teams have grown organically from the lower ranks in recent years? We've seen a few vanity projects that went straight in at the top thanks to big money, such as Leopard and Radioshack, but we've also lost some very traditional teams via mergers and acquisitions - and of course those two teams only survived through merger themselves. Elsewhere, Vaughters must be a demon negotiator, because he's managed to survive two mergers (and took on a sponsor of a ProConti team that was killed by that sponsor jumping across to Slipstream) whilst simultaneously twice making teams that resulted in less than the sum of their parts and nearly going to the wall a third time - yet he still manages to keep the overall control! How he's been able to do it is, no joke, really impressive, like one of those tenacious football managers that keeps getting hired by team after team to avoid relegation.
For the most part though, a lot of the teams at the very top are stable because they are mostly split between two categories: springing out from national projects or nationally-funded projects (Sky/Ineos, Katyusha, Astana, Mitchelton-Scott for national projects, Bahrain and UAE for nationally-funded projects), or long-term traditional teams who have been there since before the ProTour began, often with sponsors who also predate that (Movistar, Lotto, Quick Step, Groupama-FDJ, Ag2r, Jumbo-Visma). Some of which (Movistar and Jumbo most notably) have become sort of national projects by default, with the loss of or moving out of their main top level rivals, or their being swept aside to make room for the newer projects.
There are a few teams which have grown organically, but this has slowed to a trickle. Sunweb are the former Skil-Shimano team; Dimension Data grew from a Continental team; Bora-Hansgrohe likewise (although they needed a big, big injection of cash to get across the line). Meanwhile, other teams that have grown organically have either had to merge to survive (like Slipstream) or have died (Vacansoleil). But that's three teams in ten years that have grown from ProContinental and survived. Even BMC have now had to survive a merger. The problem is that now the number of spots available for them is limited, there's little incentive to start a big, ambitious project at the ProContinental level, as used to happen not infrequently, while the global financial crisis and its impact on domestic cycling (especially in Italy and Spain) has strangled some of the benefit of riding at this level as the domestic calendars are not as strong, meaning you need a sponsor willing to drop the cash to afford a World Tour calendar to get any kind of exposure beyond breakaway status unless you can guarantee a major invite like, say, Cofidis; smaller, regional hobby sponsors cannot sustain a calendar that is more international, and that is now absolutely required because many national calendars have suffered so that any ambitious riders will quickly outgrow the level, unlike a decade ago when wildcard teams - even discounting Cervélo and BMC - provided genuine threats to win major races with the likes of di Luca, Petacchi, Mosquera, Garzelli, Rujano, Pozzato, Visconti, Voeckler, Carrara, Hoogerland, Pozzovivo, Guardini, de Waele, Tondó, Scarponi and Simoni.
I see very few ProContinental teams with big ambition to develop to World Tour level at present, of the kind that used to put pressure on the lower ProTour/WorldTour spots and threatened some of the smaller World Tour teams; mostly they are teams who have settled in their niche or are well established teams who have been around the lower World Tour/higher ProConti level for years (Cofidis, Direct Energie), and only perhaps Israel Cycling Academy could be considered a candidate for organic growth to World Tour level - in which case is the stability of the top level the product of strong financial security of the top level? Or just the product of the changes to the calendar, and UCI's attempt to prevent teams like Cervélo and BMC from exploiting the ProConti level meaning that the disparity in income between the top levels mean that up-and-coming riders would rather be a middling domestique in a World Tour team than a leader in a ProConti team, meaning that there simply isn't any impetus for churn at the top level?
I know I've talked about this at length a few times recently, but I think that while it made sense in the short term - the success of Cervélo especially in bogarting wildcard invites from ProConti due to their rider strength while simultaneously retaining the 'opt out' of any flyaway race they didn't want to do - such as McQuaid's beloved 'globalisation' races like Beijing - threatened the very
raison d'être of the Pro Tour and ran the risk to the UCI of killing the concept entirely - the long term impact of the restricting of the ProConti level has been as negative as anything in promoting the now extreme disparity between the haves and have nots.
Not for nothing did I make my French football analogy earlier. Because from an audience perspective, entertainment is king and a close race that creates tension provides that. It's why this year's Tour saw audience figures rise across Europe, and last year's saw them go down. It's one of the main reasons why F1 viewing figures are in the toilet. Sky/Ineos have a big budgetary advantage, sure, but it's not THAT much more than BMC used to be, or Katyusha. But Sky/Ineos invested their money far more wisely, and shouldn't be punished for that. However, bogarting all the top talents and generating a one-sided, predictable spectacle is good for business - up until the point where it isn't. Paris Saint Germain can indeed count on more sponsorship money coming in than Nîmes Olympique. But if Ligue 1 remains such a one-sided and predictable spectacle, then Ligue 1 will never be able to draw the viewing figures outside of France that the EPL, or La Liga, where there is also a huge budget disparity but a greater level of close competition, or at least more teams who are able to operate at something approaching parity with the biggest budget team. Sky/Ineos may not create the level of antipathy that an internet forum may suggest (after all, contributors to an internet forum on the topic will always tend toward the more hardcore fans) but a predictable spectacle also serves as a limiter on the number of new fans drawn in, or drive some fans no longer attracted to the spectacle away. I was one of the people who walked away from Formula 1 during Schumacher's reign of terror, and there have been several years recently where I simply haven't bothered watching the Tour de France - any of it - because I'm simply not interested in watching it. With 20.000 posts on a cycling forum, I'm not a typical case, and I'm aware of that. But at the same time, the casual fan is, by definition, casual, and their support is often evanescent. The stats that did the rounds last year showing that the Tour's viewing figures were down across Europe - including the UK, by the way - point to a perception problem. It may be that for some the perception is not against Sky/Ineos per se, but simply against the sport for the spectacle lacking, and there are certainly lots of trends that contribute to that beyond the concentration of more money in the hands of a few - parcours trends, broadcasting flat stages start to finish, employment trends meaning less free time to watch the race, broadcast deals and available channels - but it seems like there is still some dissonance between
growing the sport's audience and
growing your position within the sport's existing audience in terms of ways to benefit, both from a business-as-a-team and a business-as-a-sponsor perspective.
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