Bjarne Riis questions financial strength Visma | Lease a Bike

With victories in the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana and a second place in the Tour de France, 2025 was another successful season for Visma | Lease a Bike. Ex-rider and former team manager Bjarne Riis does think the Dutch team is boxing in too high a weight class in terms of budgets with those results.

In an opinion piece at the Danish Feltet, Riis shares his opinion. He sees that Visma | Lease a Bike still manages to approach UAE's wins qualitatively, but that quantitatively there is nothing to be done against the team from the Emirates.

'I no longer believe that Visma | Lease a Bike is even close to the number two or three in the field in terms of finances. They are far from the three biggest (UAE Emirates-XRG, Lidl-Trek and Red Bull - BORA- Hansgrohe, ed.), I suspect,' stated the 1996 Tour winner.

'In my opinion, it is a team that is financially short because many of their strong riders are leaving. Not because they don't want to keep them,' Riis points out. 'They have chosen to invest heavily in Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard, and the riders just below them are leaving because the team simply cannot afford to keep them.'

By this he is referring to Olav Kooij, Tiesj Benoot and Dylan van Baarle, among others. Riis is looking for a reason. 'The people behind the team have a lot of their own sponsors attached to the team: Lease a Bike, owned by Pon.Bike-group, and they ride bikes from one of their brands: Cervélo. It seems to me that they are not as strong financially as they would like to be.'

Yet it is not purely about the pennies, the Dane believes. 'One thing is that they have a lot of money at UAE, but another and more important thing is that they are good at their job. Big teams like UAE and Lidl-Trek play by the rules and have been good at attracting talented people and finding young riders with a lot of potential. That's not because the others don't have money.'

'Many people find it so terrible that these budgets differ so much,' Riis observes. 'Especially with the French teams it is very present. They think it's unfair. No, it's not. The other teams just have to get better. There is no financial constraint at the moment. Address it instead of complaining about it,' he advised.