2024 was a bumper year for the Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale team. Sports retailer Decathlon joined as title sponsor: out went the brown shorts and in came new kit including bikes. The team had a roaring start to the season but fell short in the Tour de France and then finished with a podium at the Vuelta thanks to Ben O’Connor and finished sixth on the UCI rankings. Now we can see the budget for the year.

2024
The entity behind the team is France Cyclisme SAS, during the year it changed legal status a SARL to a SAS company, the difference is too small to matter for a sports blog. These are the published accounts for the year ending 31 December 2024.

Le budget

The headline budget from the cropped screengrab is €31.1 million, up €6.4 million on the previous year.

Year-by-year

As one of the rare teams to consistently publish accounts we can track the numbers annually. 2024 saw the budget leap and we’ll explore why in a moment (for sticklers: the chart uses the net number of €31.340 million which differs from the headline number cited above as this works better for comparison over the years).

The wage bill

The budget might have jumped by €6.4 million but this is not down to a corresponding increase in wages. As you can see the salary bill for 2024 was €13.7 million, up from €11.8 million the previous year. But we can go back to the 2022 accounts to see the salary bill was €12.3 million that year so these costs have not soared. Notes to the accounts show the team has gone from 71 employees in 2022 to 102 in 2024.

As ever for French teams there payroll taxes to pay, here amounting to 35% of the wage bill. Other teams don’t pay this, either because they’re in different jurisdictions with lighter taxes or they don’t have the same regulations that require French teams to take on riders as full-time employees. It’s a real headwind for French teams as recruiting a rider at the market or net rate comes with a mark-up on top or using these numbers it costs €18.5 million to hire €13.7 million’s worth of riders.

What is the wage bill? It’s complicated as there are salaries and also other expenses. A footnote to the accounts shows the UCI bank guarantee of €3.9 million. Normally this is 25% of the gross salary for the team so multiply this by four and we get a total of €16 million. There’s no guide to the differences so one guess is at the start of the year the forecast gross wage bill was €16 million but by the end of the year with bonuses paid out it climbed to €18.5 million but again that’s speculating.

Costs
There are “other purchases and external charges” of €11 million and these are not specified. These are so hefty you’d think them linked to wages as these make up the bulk of every outfit’s costs, typically paying riders uses up 70-80% of a team’s budget… but there’s no mention of this so we’re left in the dark.

Actual “purchases of raw materials and other supplies” is listed as €625k so here think of fuel, food, training camp hotels and such like but it’s not broken down into details.

All this meant the team ran a loss of €846k for the year which goes on the books for 2025.

Internal issues
For all the success on the road it was a fraught time inside the team HQ. The squad was founded by Vincent Lavenu but he was ejected during the course of the year. Earlier in 2022 he’d been forced to sell his stake in the team to Ag2r La Mondiale as a condition of the insurer continuing to sponsor the team and now as a mere employee his contract was terminated.

The accounts show €847,000 put aside for “litigation” but this is towards the general reorganisation of the team with the junior and U23 development teams being brought into the team and reorganisation costs associated with this. The team used to work with a club in Chambéry as its feeder team but now has its own in-house squads and with these added costs and staff on the books.

These provisions are only ones, marking an end to the long saga with Factor and Merckx bikes that loyal readers might remember for the claims of missing payments.

There is also a €300,000 transfer payment to another team. Which rider, which team? It is not stated but we can wager it’s for Johannes Staune-Mittet’s move from Visma-LAB with the Norwegian switching teams by breaking his contract early and both teams agreeing to settle this.

À fonds la forme
Decathlon joined as a title sponsor. Sales managers were purring from all the talk of how the team’s new Van Rysel RCR Pro bike was a factor in the success and anecdotally sales of the bike thrived. How much did this cost? Well Decathlon paid as a title sponsor but the accounts include a separate mention of the company’s bike brand Van Rysel

Here you can see €3.5 million for the bike and clothing supplier. That’s a lot for World Tour bike sponsorship although the going rate is seven figures this days. Notes in the account show some of the €3.5 million is also for 2025.

Balance sheet
Teams often have tiny balance sheets because they hold few assets, just a fleet of vehicles – which can be leased sometimes – and some tools from laptops to tools. But this team has more with €21.3 million of assets and liabilities. It’s mainly down to unpaid debts like the social security payments on the wage bill, unpaid as in the team simply had not made the payment at the time of the accounts so the impending sum is sitting there, as opposed to anything overdue. Similarly on 31 December 2024 the team was waiting for suppliers to bill them for €4.8 million in total.

In terms of assets the vehicle fleet is valued at €2.3 million, IT products at €0.4 million and €0.6m on unspecified plant and layouts.

Conclusion
As ever this is one of the rare teams to publish a full set of accounts. Every year estimates for World Tour team budgets appear online, often during the Tour de France, but they always seem to the numbers wrong for the teams that publish accounts so the figures for those that don’t must be even more off.

This team’s longevity lets us compare year after year. It’s only one dataset rather than the story of every team but illustrates how budgets have jumped. Here the team budget has doubled in this decade alone while qualitatively the team has stayed as a mid-table squad. Looking into the 2024 accounts the increase is only partly explained by soaring rider wages, there are other internal factors like taking on board development teams to expand the workforce and putting money aside for litigation risks.

Teams are meant to break even so the annual loss of €846k is significant but given Decathlon are satisfied and now CMA-CGM is joining, with talk of the budget going to €40 million this sum isn’t existential in the way recurring losses on this scale torpedoed the Intermarché team.