The cycling team Team Jumbo-Visma has shown tremendous dominance this season by winning the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, a historic feat that, however, ends the adventure of a family supermarket business from the ashes of Rabobank .
Never before has the same team won the three “big ones” in the same year, as Jumbo-Visma did in 2023 with the Slovenian Primoz Roglic, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard and the American Sepp Kuss.
Furthermore, three finished on the podium of this edition of the Vuelta, something achieved only in 1966 by KAS, along with Spaniards Francisco Gabica, Eusebio Vélez and Carlos Echeverría.
Sports fans are familiar with the Jumbo riders, but even stranger to the general public are names like Karel van Eerd or his son Frits van Eerd, architects of the main sponsor’s business success.
The first, who died in 2022 at the age of 84, was the father of the project: an entrepreneur from a family linked to food who in 1984 bought a supermarket business in the Dutch city of Tilburg with an elephant as its symbol, Jumbo, and transformed into an emporium. The second, his son, was for decades the executor of his father’s strategy, until last year he fell from grace.
The Van Eerd Company
The business philosophy is to “turn customers into fans”, it is based on a method of cheap prices without offers – like the American Walmart – and is committed to innovation.
This year, for example, it plans to open “slow checkout” in 200 establishments where people who feel lonely, especially the elderly, can chat briefly with clerks while paying. them for their purchases.
Jumbo has grown rapidly to become the second largest food chain in the Netherlands, with a 22% market share in 2022 and 762 supermarkets, with another 27 in neighboring Belgium, 69 restaurants and other lines of business such as golf shops .
As the business grew, Jumbo entered sports sponsorships, associating itself with concepts such as healthy food and wellness. It allocates around 20 million euros a year to men’s, women’s and youth cycling teams, but also to ice skating, hockey, motorsport or PSV Eindhoven.
The holding company has a workforce of 41,000 employees without counting its franchises and in 2022 it had a turnover of 10,276 million euros.
The cycling team
2013 has been key to Jumbo’s sponsorship strategy, as the brand has partnered with a 15-year-old kart driver who is now a double Formula 1 world champion: Max Verstappen.
After several scandals related to doping, Rabobank abandoned its sponsorship of the emblematic cycling team with Michael Rasmussen, Denis Menchov, Óscar Freire, Luis León Sánchez and almost all the Dutch at the time, such as Bauke Mollema , Michael Boogerd and Erik, . Decker.
The Dutch formation trembled. He started 2013 without a sponsor, wearing the Blanco brand on his jersey, but in the middle of the year the American technology company Belkin helped, a patch until 2015 when the Dutch national lottery and the supermarket chain landed on the team. Lotto-Jumbo was born, with a budget of between 15 and 17 million euros.
The victory
It wasn’t long before the results arrived, thanks to Roglic and the Dutchman Dylan Groenewegen, and in 2019 Lotto-Jumbo changed its name. Lotto disappeared from the binomial, Jumbo became the leading sponsor and a Norwegian software company appeared that wanted to open a market beyond the Nordic countries. The result was Jumbo-Visma, which that year signed two pearls, the Belgian Wout van Aert and the Norwegian VIngegaard.
In addition to money, Visma brings innovations to the squad such as an artificial intelligence system to optimize runners’ nutrition.
The company estimates that during the 2022 Tour de France, Vingegaard’s first, its logo was seen by 150 million television viewers and another 650 million people on social networks. In that year, Visma had a turnover of 2.1 billion euros, 19% more than in 2021.
There is no official data, but specialized websites or media such as the newspaper L’Equipe estimate that Jumbo-Visma’s annual budget is around 25-30 million euros, which would be third in the pack after Ineos’ 43-50 million and the 35 million from the UEA.
In addition to Jumbo and Visma, and many other brands such as Skoda or Hema, the team has secondary sponsors such as the Canadian bicycle manufacturer Cervélo.
Likewise with German food delivery startup Gorillas, which had a team deal from 2022 to 2024 but stopped paying sponsorships after being absorbed by its Turkish competitor Getir in December last year.
This leaves a hole of 5 million euros for 2023-2024 in a team with a contract with Roglic until 2025, with Van Aert until 2026 and with Vingegaard until 2027.
Problems
The departure of Gorillas is just one of the threats that threaten the team. Six months ago, the Jumbo supermarket group sacrificed its top executive, Frits van Eerd, the son of the founder, a collector of historic F1 jewels and at the same time a novice driver in the World Endurance Championship and participant in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
His head is in turmoil after police searched his home and detained him for a week in September 2022, weeks before his father’s death, in an investigation into alleged money laundering related to real estate transactions. , car sales, cash deposits and motocross sponsorships.
The company was not directly involved, but commissioned its own investigation from KPMG which found “weaknesses”, which is why Jumbo withdrew its sponsorships from motor sports. In other words, it will no longer be linked to Verstappen from 2024.
Half a year after the scandal, the company promoted the CEO to Ton van Veenwhich operates under the supervision of Colette Cloosterman-van Eerd, brother of the fallen Frits. And Jumbo’s new manager has new plans.
“The sponsorship contract of Jumbo-Visma runs until the end of 2024, but I have already said that we are ready to withdraw if a major international player appears and is ready to pay more. Therefore, it is possible that we stop being the main sponsors earlier,” Van Veen told Belgian newspaper HLN this week.
“The cycling team has had a lot of success around the world with international talent, while we continue to be a Dutch supermarket, with a Belgian branch,” reasoned the manager, who is now considering the transfer of funds that in areas like “health and sustainability. ” .
Meanwhile, Jumbo-Visma still had to deal with other unpleasant news, such as the precautionary suspension of its German rider Michel Hessmann, 22, after testing positive on June 14 for the banned mask, or the accusations of “”mechanical doping”” reported – without evidence – by former French cyclist, former director and sports commentator Jérôme Pineau.
He suspects the whole team, but in particular Sepp Kuss, a 29-year-old who has stood up to the Vuelta this year. Pineau was careful with an acceleration in the thirteenth stage of the Vuelta, in the Tourmalet, where he climbed “10 km/h faster than the group. They pedaled four times and advanced 10 meters. How do they do it? ”, launched the French.
The team treated the comment as a delusion, ensuring that the bikes passed the controls and that their success was based on a “very sophisticated system of nutrition and training at altitude”, and the rider responded that “on TV is you can’t see where. the wind is blowing from” or “what slope is there.”
Saudi Arabia
Now it is suspected that the financial future of Jumbo-Visma may still go through Saudi Arabia, because according to the Dutch newspaper Wielerflits, Riyadh is negotiating its entry into the Dutch team in 2024 with the NEOM City brand, a future mega city of 26,500 square kilometers (more than half the area of the Netherlands).
The director of Jumbo-Visma, Richard Pluggewho joined the team in 2013 after the departure of Rabobank, described as “interesting” the possibility of mixing with Saudi investors, following the path of other teams financed by petrodollars such as the UAE Emirates and Bahrain Victorious.
“We are in serious discussions with several international parties, but nothing concrete yet,” Plugge said in an interview with the Flemish press before the start of the Vuelta a España, the one where Jumbo-Visma took the podium.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Robert Maynard, and I am a passionate journalist with experience in sports writing. For the last few years, I have been writing for Today Times Live. My main focus has been on sports-related stories and features. With my strong background in journalism and extensive knowledge of the industry, I am able to provide readers with well-crafted pieces that are both informative and engaging.
