{"id":199684,"date":"2025-10-14T15:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/199684\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T15:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:33:09","slug":"the-inner-ring-merger-of-unequals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/199684\/","title":{"rendered":"The Inner Ring | Merger of Unequals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n

The Lotto and Intermarch\u00e9 teams are supposed to be merging. Tomorrow is the deadline to submit registration papers to the UCI. It\u2019s reported that Lotto plans to race on, with Intermarch\u00e9 coming over as co-sponsor and bringing some riders and management along too.<\/p>\n

With this the Intermarch\u00e9 licence would wither and it\u2019s here that some problems arise because the team has big debts. Can it drop these by swapping the licence over to another team?<\/p>\n

Loyal readers will remember last year\u2019s Halloween piece about the Intermarch\u00e9-Wanty team\u2019s significant, repeated losses<\/a>. The team has been racking up big losses. The 2022 accounts pledged to fix this only come 2023 this hadn\u2019t been resolved. The good news was the near \u20ac2 million loss was halved but still that meant losing a further million Euros in 2023 and that\u2019s unsustainable.<\/p>\n

Accounts from 2023 \u2013 the last set available, 2024 should appear soon \u2013 showed \u20ac500,000 injected by unnamed shareholders and a two million Euro loan from one of the team\u2019s sponsors \u2013 presumably one of either Wanty or Intermarch\u00e9 but lender is not named \u2013 was needed keep them on the road.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The screengrab above shows part of the balance sheet with 2022 in the left column and 2023 on the right. Pro cycling teams typically have small balance sheets because they have few assets and liabilities but this is notable for the large debts.<\/p>\n

All this is from 2023. But it doesn\u2019t seem to be old news because these debts are an issue that still exists according to reports in the Belgian media, see Het Laatse Nieuws<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In simple terms can Lotto come along and pick up the assets of the Intermarch\u00e9 team such the riders it wants and Intermarch\u00e9 as a new co-sponsor, while ditching the things it doesn\u2019t want like debts? Similarly from the Intermarch\u00e9 team\u2019s side if the lender is Wanty (or bike supplier Cube etc), will it want the current team to vanish and leave unpaid debts; or if the lender is Intermarch\u00e9, will it roll over sponsorship to the new team but say goodbye to getting repaid or insist Lotto takes on the debt?<\/p>\n

To further complicate things the screengrab above showed the team had extra unpaid debts in wages, taxes and social security payments, also running to over a million Euros. Now some of this could just be par for the course, sums due to be paid in the future that were logged in the accounts at the due date and have since been paid.<\/p>\n

This is where the politics come in because Lotto is the Belgian state lottery. The company is under close tutelage of politicians to the point where they keep a close eye on the cycling team\u2019s operations. So it could be tricky to let the Intermarch\u00e9 licence drop and waive any unpaid social security contributions, or other unpaid debts. Or similarly to agree to fund the team only to find a chunk of the budget is going out the door on loan repayments for what was another team. It\u2019s potentially political.<\/p>\n

Conclusion
Both teams have incentives to conclude the merger so they can race in 2026 and beyond. Each needs the other\u2019s co-sponsor as alone they\u2019ll struggle. Lotto doesn\u2019t have the funding to support a return to the World Tour with only one title sponsor, while Intermarch\u00e9 has debts to repay and each have had a weak season. So the overhang of debts of two million Euros or more is a real issue to square.<\/p>\n

With reports of the outstanding debt, revisiting the accounts lets us see it was a loan from a sponsor. Whoever lent the Intermarch\u00e9 team this still has around two million reasons to intervene and seek some kind of repayment or roll-over but this is the last thing Lotto needs, it would be the biggest claim on the new budget, more than Arnaud De Lie\u2019s seven figure salary.<\/p>\n

With one day left before the UCI\u2019s soft deadline of 15 October there\u2019s no news on a resolution. It can be solved but there potentially wider issues than this merger for the future when another a team with debts wants to ride on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Embed from Getty Images The Lotto and Intermarch\u00e9 teams are supposed to be merging. Tomorrow is the deadline…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-199684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}