It is one of cycling’s great modern mysteries and recurring conversations: how committed is Sir Jim Ratcliffe to Ineos Grenadiers? And how long will the British team continue being one of the sport’s richest teams, if indeed it continues at all?
When the British billionaire – the richest man in the UK until 2022 – replaced Sky as the WorldTour team’s title sponsor in the spring of 2019, he did so promising much of the same as before: regular and dominant Grand Tour success.
That, as has been extensively documented, hasn’t quite happened. Egan Bernal won the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia in 2019 and 2021, respectively, and Teo Geoghegan Hart also claimed the maglia rosa in 2020, but since then, Ineos has been left chasing the new dominant teams – UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma-Lease a Bike. There have been Grand Tour podiums – four from Geraint Thomas and two from Richard Carapaz – but nothing like the heady days of the Sky era.
Set against the backdrop of the chemical company reporting huge losses and lamenting a shrinking chemical industry in Europe, many have pondered whether Ratcliffe will keep funding the cycling team. The arrival of TotalEnergies as jersey sponsor before the 2025 Tour de France prompted even more speculation that Ratcliffe was looking for a managed long-term exit. So what does the future hold for Britain’s first and only WorldTour team?
Ineos Sport’s portfolio
Ineos’ 2019 investment into cycling was the company’s third major foray into the sporting landscape. It bought the Swiss football club FC Lausanne-Sport in 2017, and a year later invested in the British sailing team for the subsequent two America’s Cups.
Since then, Ineos has poured millions into athletics, Formula One, rugby and most famously into two more football clubs: OGC Nice in France and Manchester United in England. The investment in the latter has been reported to be in excess of £1.3 billion.
In an era of multi-club ownership models in football (interconnected networks of various clubs all owned or partly owned by the same entity), Ineos Sport operates as a similar concept but with a notable twist: it brings together not just three football clubs, but six sports, connecting each of them with one another. For many years, until his recent return to the cycling team, Sir Dave Brailsford was the head of Ineos Sport.
Ben Williams was Ineos Grenadiers’ head of performance, support and innovation between October 2021 and October 2023, joining the cycling team from the Ineos-funded Britannia sailing team. He told Escape Collective last year that there were monthly meetings between all sports, with Ineos Grenadiers adopting cooling and nutritional methods first used by Britannia.
“There was a very clear collaboration between the two sports,” he said. “There was a lot of crossover between aerodynamics, hydraulics, fluids, electronics, and engineering. All teams across the [Ineos Sport] group made sure we were at the forefront of sports science, medicine and also from a tactical perspective. We had a strategy in place where we could have peers review our work to enable us to learn and challenge one another and pick up what other sports were doing.”
A sell off
The year 2025, however, has seen Ineos Sport shrink. The sponsorship agreement with New Zealand rugby ended early and acrimoniously, as did its funding of the America’s Cup sailing team. Ratcliffe is also reportedly looking to sell OGC Nice. These decisions have led many observers to assert that Ineos is pulling back from its various sporting projects, fuelled by turmoil and heavy losses for the parent company.
Financial accounts for 2024 detailed that total debts for Ineos amounted to almost £10bn, with leading credit rating companies all expressing concern about the company’s long-term health, noting that those debts were between five and six times bigger than Ineos’ annual revenues.
Though the company is building a €4 billion sustainable ethane cracker plant in the Belgian city of Antwerp, it has shut down a number of its chemical plants across Europe in recent years, with the loss of hundreds of jobs. A smaller chemical industry in Europe is what Ineos has blamed. “We’re at the eleventh hour,” Ratcliffe said in October, calling on governments to scrap green and carbon taxes.
Financial worries have seeped into other areas of the business, too. In August, Ineos sold the fashion brand Belstaff to Castore; the company had lost money every year since it was bought by Ratcliffe in 2017. A few months earlier, Ineos sold Ineos Hygienics, a further streamlining of the business. Meanwhile, its automotive industry – centred on the 4×4 Grenadiers, the car the cycling team is named after – hasn’t been as successful as the company had wished.
Seventy-three-year-old Ratcliffe’s own finances have also taken a heavy hit – according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2025, his personal worth dropped a whopping £6.5bn last year, to now put his total amount at £17.05bn.
Yet despite those dark clouds, there appears to be an unwavering commitment to what remains of Ineos Sport. Alongside its funding of the cycling team, Ineos continues to invest heavily in Manchester United and the highly profitable Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, where it has a 33% stake.
Outside of sport, Ineos has spent £100 million funding the Ineos Oxford Institute for antimicrobial research at the University of Oxford, for which Ratcliffe was awarded the Sheldon Medal, the university’s highest recognition for philanthropy.
In its latest annual financial accounts posted to Companies House, Ineos Racing Limited – the subsidiary company behind Ineos Sport – noted a loss of £153.4m, almost the exact same figure as the year before. The 2024 report stated that the “directors have received confirmation that the parent company, Ineos Industries Limited, will continue to support the Company [Ineos Racing] for at least the 12 months from signing of these financial statements.”
That is a financial commitment written down on legal papers, but it’s also true that Ineos does not want to increase its investment in the cycling team.
TotalEnergies’ involvement
Last winter, when Ineos Grenadiers announced a search for new financial partners, its CEO John Allert issued an honest assessment of Ratcliffe’s investment. Confirming that he had received reassurances that the team would exist until at least the end of 2028, he said that Ineos “have had numerous opportunities if they didn’t want to be in the sport, to make that clear, but they do want to be in the sport.” In the same breath, however, Allert also said that “it’s fair to say that Ineos don’t want to spend more money.”
That shouldn’t necessarily be read as Ratcliffe wanting to pull out. More, it’s a reflection of the rising costs of running a WorldTour team. Official UCI documents seen by Cyclingnews show that budgets are increasing by 7.5% year on year, and many stakeholders – including the UCI, who are pushing for a budget cap – fear that that is simply unsustainable.
It can be reasonably assumed that Ratcliffe wants to keep financially supporting Ineos Grenadiers, but that he wants to cap that amount. Financial accounts from 2019 suggest that Ineos invested around £38 million (€43m) into the cycling team in 2019, and according to several insiders, that investment has since risen to £45m (just north of €50m).
In order to continue to compete with the best, Ratcliffe wanted help. Enter TotalEnergies. Ineos, the chemical company, and TotalEnergies, the petrochemical giant – France’s biggest company – have had a strategic and business partnership for several years, and thus the two teaming up to fund cycling’s sleeping giant was both a natural link-up and a marriage of convenience.
“This jersey sponsorship reflects the broader industrial cooperation between Ineos and TotalEnergies on a global scale, in particular in Europe and Saudi Arabia,” TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in June, tellingly referencing the shared business links.
A number of well-informed insiders told Cyclingnews that TotalEnergies’ investment into Ineos Grenadiers for the 2026 season will amount to around €15m – more or less what it has been investing into the eponymous French second division team that it will stop funding at the end of the 2026 season after eight years.
Those same insiders said that Ineos Grenadiers’ total budget for the 2026 season would be between €50 million and €55 million, placing it among the top four richest teams in the world. For comparison, UAE Team Emirates-XRG has a reported budget of close to €60m, while both Visma-Lease a Bike and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe are also thought to have a budget of around €50m.
TotalEnergies’ arrival has allowed the British team to remain one of the richest in the peloton, but permitted Ratcliffe to reduce his investment, albeit marginally. His estimated €35-40m investment still outweighs that of most other WorldTour benefactors, so to suggest that Ratcliffe has had enough of his cycling project would be premature.
Going forward, it is not yet known what TotalEnergies’ long-term ambition with Ineos is, but there are a few clues, and even more speculatory murmurs.
As part of the decision to become Ineos jersey sponsor, multiple sources told Cyclingnews that the British team would have to have a minimum of three French riders on its roster. Joining Axel Laurance – the sole French rider for Ineos in 2025 – for next season are French champion Dorian Godon and Kévin Vauquelin. The latter can possibly expect Tour leadership in the future after finishing seventh on GC this past summer.
At the moment, TotalEnergies is prohibited from becoming a co-title sponsor, as UCI regulations do not allow for a company to title sponsor two separate teams. But it is widely expected that from 2027, when its support to the French team ends, the British team will become Ineos-TotalEnergies. There are also rumours that the current plan is for the team to take on a French UCI licence from 2028 or 2029 – but Cyclingnews has been unable to verify that.
A future with Ineos?
Ineos’ and Ratcliffe’s commitment to the cycling team can be seen from opposing sides: the fact that the billionaire does not want to up his investment suggests that he is no longer as enamoured with the project as he once was. Additionally, by seeking out new partners he seems prepared to relinquish at least some control and is open to a changing of the team’s identity.
But recent sporting decisions would suggest the opposite: from next season, the team will finally have an under-23 development team – an owner who is no longer interested doesn’t commit to finding and developing the next best young talent. What’s more, Ratcliffe has brought Brailsford back into the fold as the team’s chief, and he is said to be personally excited by the expected arrival of Geraint Thomas into a newly-created management role.
Though Ratcliffe rarely attends races or training camps – sources said he last witnessed a race at the 2024 Tour de France when stage 21 started in Monaco, his place of residence – team insiders said that he still signs off on all new contracts and signings. He might not be physically present, but he’s involved in key decisions, guided by Brailsford, a man he trusts enormously.
Cyclingnews reached out to Ineos Grenadiers with a number of questions relating to Ineos’ commitment, but a team spokesperson declined to comment. Ultimately, no one knows how long Ratcliffe will stick around. He’s never said he wants to sell up, but nor has he publicly pledged to invest in the team for several more years.
When Ratcliffe invested in the team back in 2019, he said that “cycling continues to mushroom for the general public as it is seen to be good for fitness and health, together with easing congestion and pollution in city environments”. But it doesn’t appear that the Grenadiers is a passion project for Ratcliffe; unlike other billionaire owners of cycling teams, Ratcliffe is not known to be a keen cyclist himself.
It’s been suggested that owning a cycling team is attractive to Ratcliffe as it is an antidote to his chemical company, proof that, through his business ventures, he supports green causes. What’s more, his relationship with Brailsford, reportedly a genuine friend and trusted associate, probably keeps the cycling team somewhat immune to the axe he’s wielded in other sports. It’s not an impossible scenario that when Brailsford, 61, grows tired of cycling, Ratcliffe will too.
What is certain among all the uncertainty is that though Ineos Grenadiers has faded from the once all-conquering beast it once was, intrigue and speculation still follows the team around intensely. And though the team isn’t as successful as its glory days as Sky, Ineos and TotalEnergies jointly fund the team to be one of the richest in the world. Its riders really should be rewarding Ratcliffe (and now Pouyanné) with more success.