British cycling fans were left stunned by the recent announcement that, from the end of last month, the cost of live coverage will more than quadruple. From 28 February, Eurosport in the UK – a staple for cycling coverage since 1989 – was merged with TNT Sports, hiking the monthly subscription fee from £6.99 to £30.99. That’s a 343% increase, with the annual cost soaring to £371.88. Adding to the pain, 2025 marks the final year of free-to-air Tour de France coverage after more than 25 years.
The decision by Warner Bros Discovery, TNT’s parent company, impacted viewers in both the UK and Ireland, including those with Sky and Virgin Media packages. Viewers have reacted to the move with frustration, disbelief and outright fury as they have begun to ponder the implications to their finances and whether they will have to forgo watching their favourite sport.
Keen to find out how this would affect your viewing, we ran a survey on our site, which yielded nearly 1,000 responses. Just 2.5% of you indicated a willingness to sign up for the TNT Sports subscription, with 9% currently undecided.
“It’s a disgrace,” said one respondent, James Ashberry. “In our house, we recently went through all our subscriptions and services to see what we could cut back on and made some significant savings. We even cancelled the milkman because it’s more expensive than walking to the shop. I just can’t justify this.”
Almost 90% of those polled were categorical that they would not sign up to the new £30.99 per month offering. “My interest in road cycling was sparked by casually watching the TdF and Olympics in 2012,” said respondent Simon Arnot. “No free-to-air or low-cost coverage is going to push people away.”
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Watching cycling on TV is where it all begins for many riders – including many top pros. Picnic PostNL’s Oscar Onley recently told Cycling Weekly that watching, as a 10-year-old, the Olympic and Tour successes of Bradley Wiggins was a key factor that inspired him to take up bike racing.
Former pro David Millar put it bluntly: “a whole generation is going to lose the Tour because they’re not going to buy a subscription.” Meanwhile, Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart took to Instagram to express his consternation: “Let’s be clear, the sport going behind such a large paywall is a huge problem. Professional sports are all competing for the same audience. Cycling is completely reliant on this audience… I find it hard to believe many fans will be able to justify this increase in costs.”
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Speaking on condition of anonymity, broadcast media insider Ian Foulds (not his real name) shared his concern that, without any WorldTour races available to watch for free, young people looking to get active will overlook cycling. “It’s going to have a devastating impact from all sorts of angles,” said Foulds.
“What is going to inspire the next generation to attempt to become the pros of tomorrow? There are about 34 British pros this year – why has that happened? Because of free-to-air ITV [Tour de France coverage], and because of the GCN app.”
Increased costs
WBD acquired Play Sports Network, the parent company of GCN, in 2019, and subsequently bundled live cycling into its GCN+ offering. The GCN+ app was discontinued in 2023, with most of its broadcast rights absorbed into Discovery+ and Eurosport. Over the course of 2023, £6.99 per month bought fans a bumper 1,500 hours of live cycling coverage.
The sudden change has come as a shock. Why such a sharp and sudden rise, and why close Eurosport in Britain and Ireland? One possible reason is financial pressures: company accounts reveal that WBD wrote off more than £33m in debt after selling Play Sports Network back to its founder last year, representing a massive loss on investment.
Other ways to watch
TNT Sports can be accessed as part of some phone, internet and TV packages. TNT is included by EE as part of some mobile phone contracts, while the channel can also be added to some Virgin packages for £15 per month. BT users may find that they can incorporate TNT into their existing package for between £20-25 a month and some Sky customers may find they can also get the channel at a discounted rate.
It is always worth checking with your provider, as there may be an option to add TNT Sports to your existing package for less than the standard £30.99 per month.
TNT has also said it will be airing cycling on Quest, a free to view channel available via a set-top box. Details of how that is going to look during the Tour de France and other big races remains to be seen. Last week TNT announced it was launching The Ultimate Cycling Show, presented by Orla Chennaoui and Adam Blythe. There are 15 episodes planned with the first going out tonight at 10pm. The show will focus on the upcoming Classics and will feature a Team of the Week.
The other question to ponder is the size of the cycling audience in the UK. WBD does not reveal audience figures, but the BBC recorded that an average of 632,000 viewers (with a peak of 800,000) tuned in to watch the men’s World Champs road race from Glasgow in 2023.
In 2016, ITV4 was attracting between 500,000 and 1.3m viewers a day for its Tour de France highlights show in the evening. Of course, these are prime time, high-profile races on free-to-view channels. We can assume that off-peak coverage of smaller, paywalled races attracts only a tiny fraction of the audience. Given commercial pressures, the broadcasting decisions around eyeballs versus outlay must be complex at best.
Could it be that we had it too good, that cycling coverage was unsustainably cheap? Other sports such as football and rugby have already gone through the ructions of steep increases in viewing costs. Former pro Dan Martin, a multi Grand Tour stage winner, empathises with fans but underscores the increased costs of broadcasting.
“Gone are the days of just a commentator sitting in a box,” he says. “We’ve now got all this pre-show and post-show analysis, which all costs money – because cycling is becoming a bigger sport with a bigger audience, and people want that analysis and extra detail now.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Poor timing
The TNT Sports subscription includes coverage of a wide variety of other sports – something most bike racing fans won’t appreciate, Martin suspects. “On the whole, cycling fans are quite committed to cycling only,” he says. “That’s been overlooked by TNT, who are clearly aiming for the general sports fan with this. I guess their theory is that if a football fan sees cycling is on after the match, they might end up watching it.”
Martin doesn’t completely dismiss this possibility. “You never know, it might end up bringing in more people who become fans. You have to try and look at it positively if you can.”
Other sports have been through similar and even worse price rise upheavals in recent years. Rugby is a prime example, with coverage fragmented across four different broadcasters. “It’s a mess,” said Joe Robinson, editor of Rugby World. “If you want to watch all live rugby in the UK, the cheapest you can get it for is about £80 a month.” How have rugby fans responded?
“People have moaned, of course,” said Robinson, “and more and more are using VPN to stream free overseas coverage, but it’s been a more gradual fragmentation in rugby, with more time to adapt.” In terms of justifying the cost, Robinson did highlight one possible sweetener. “TNT Sports have done a really good job with on-screen graphics and broadcasting – the presentation and style are a cut above.”
WBD declined to comment when approached for this feature, so all we have to go on is the company’s statement that it is hoping to attract “an entire new audience” to cycling from among its TNT Sports subscription base.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Foulds suggests an incremental increase over several years may have been a better approach. “Making that enormous leap in one go [amid] a cost of living crisis in the UK, to me, is a very surprising move,” he said. “Either it’s a decision that has not been taken at UK boardroom level – i.e. it’s a global strategy and the economics of what’s going on in the UK right now haven’t been taken into consideration – or it’s just a case of going for the painful option because they have to.”
Other options Foulds feels should have been considered by WBD include one-day passes for individual major races. “If I decide I want to watch Masters Golf, I can go onto my TV and buy one month of Sky Golf,” he said. “It might cost me 20 quid, but the point is I can watch it, and then decide when I want to opt out.” CW understands that there will be no option to buy cycling coverage on a pay-per-event or pay-as-you-go basis.
No going back
So what now? How many fans will stump up £30.99 a month for live coverage? “It’s going to push people to illegal streaming sites or other platforms,” said Arnot, and fellow survey respondent Ashberry agrees: “Authorities want to crack down on illegal streams and ‘dodgy boxes’, but when subscription fees cost this much, it’s difficult not to consider the illegal alternatives, as bad as that sounds.”
Even so, some of those polled indicated that they would end up paying. “It’s a shocking increase,” commented Ian George, “but I will probably end up paying, as I don’t want to miss out on all the great cycling coverage, especially the Classics… This is probably a realistic market price to watch it all.”
If the 90% drop-out rate of subscribers indicated by CW’s survey is borne out, will WBD be forced to rethink? Unfortunately for the fans, media insider Foulds suspects not. “Once you’ve taken that step [of increasing prices], you don’t go backwards,” he said. “You’re not going to reduce the price once you’ve set it.”
It remains to be seen whether WBD is eyeing an exclusivity deal on Tour de France rights, but a big drop in cycling viewers won’t sweeten the appeal of such investment. “If they just see a tail-off in their [cycling] viewing figures – and that’s what they are going to see,” adds Foulds, “then where do they invest their money as rights deals come to an end? That’s the other big question.”
