Cycling fans in the United Kingdom and Ireland will no longer be watching races on Eurosport, as coverage is set to move over to TNT Sports as part of an integration between the two Warner Bros. Discovery-owned channels on February 28th — the move means those wanting to watch professional cycling will now have to pay for a "premium" £30.99-a-month subscription.
There will be no loss of rights as a result of the change and all races previously broadcast on Eurosport will be available on TNT Sports and streamed on discovery+. It means — aside from ITV's final year of Tour de France, Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Nice coverage before Warner Bros. Discovery becomes exclusive rights holder in 2026 — all men's and women's Grand Tours, plus in excess of 300 days of cycling action across the year will soon be broadcast on TNT Sports in the UK and Ireland.
Most notably, however, is the price hike. The discovery+ premium subscription with TNT Sports costs £30.99, significantly more than the previous £6.99 monthly subscription that cycling fans could pay to watch Eurosport. What's more, the premium subscription can only be paid monthly, at the £30.99 rate, meaning 12 months of cycling viewing will soon cost nearly £400 (£371.88).
When news broke in the autumn of Warner Bros. Discovery's deal for exclusive coverage of the Tour de France from 2026 until "at least 2030", it raised concerns the race would not be shown on free-to-air television in the UK for the first time since the 1980s, potentially closing an accessible route for new viewers to discover the sport.
> "The Tour is the only race that matters. And that's gone now": Ned Boulting on the end of free-to-air Tour de France coverage in the UK
With today's announcement, TNT Sports has insisted it will bring "a strong free-to-air offer" to "broaden reach and increase exposure for cycling", including daily free-to-air highlights on Quest for the Giro d'Italia, Vuelta a España, as well as Paris-Roubaix this season.
However, the broadcaster has not disclosed any plans for 2026 when ITV will no longer show live coverage. Speaking to figures at TNT Sports, road.cc was not told directly of any free-to-air plans for 2026 but the broadcaster did explain how a free-to-air "proposition" will be delivered sooner to the time. TNT Sports said it could not confirm yet what this may entail as it is still a way off and production plans are being worked out.
The broadcaster was keen to highlight its hope that it can create new cycling fans by airing races on channels adjacent to bigger sporting events, such as Premier League football matches, albeit those viewers would still need to have bought a subscription to see it.
While that may not allay concerns about one of the UK's most beloved televisual sporting traditions of the summer coming to an end this year, the "strong free-to-air package" TNT Sports is promising includes a new weekly cycling show on its free channel Quest. 'The Ultimate Cycling Show' will be hosted by Orla Chennaoui and Adam Blythe and launches on February 27th, promising to cover "key parts of the season" and editorially "designed to cater to the seasoned fan, plus attract and engage new audiences".
TNT Sports has also promised an "increase in free-to-air highlights across men's and women's major races" in 2025 and confirmed that Eurosport would be continuing elsewhere in Europe.
For the cycling fan already subscribed and watching races on Eurosport, not much will change in terms of the actual cycling content. There will be a few new additions, but the content watched previously on one channel will simply move across to TNT Sports, and it will still be streamable on discovery+.
TNT Sports will air in excess of 300 days of cycling coverage across the year and has added the women's Giro d'Italia to its rights, meaning 100 per cent of the UCI Men's and Women's WorldTour will be broadcast.
Of those races, TNT Sports has exclusive rights for 33 of 36, the three exceptions being the Tour de France, Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Nice, which will become exclusive after leaving ITV this summer.
Scott Young, Group SVP, Content, Production & Business Operations, for WBD Sports Europe, said: "Combining Eurosport and TNT Sports content in the UK and Ireland will enable us to offer a single, premium viewing experience for sports fans. This move in the UK and Ireland will also continue to best deliver value for our leagues and federation partners, as we continue our 35 years plus commitment to investment and championing of sport on our screens, which remains a fundamental part of the success of grassroots through to elite.
"TNT Sports will also continue to bring more content to fans on Warner Bros. Discovery's free-to-air channel Quest. In 2025, this will include broadcasting every MotoGP Sprint race, adding to existing live Bennetts British Superbikes coverage, a brand-new weekly cycling show covering all key moments of the season, continue highlights of the Giro d'Italia and La Vuelta a Espana, plus premiere a range of new sports documentaries."
All Eurosport's digital offering, on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms will continue, just rebranded as TNT Sports Cycling.
TNT Sports also says it will help grow grassroots cycling through a new cycling club competition that will see the winner receive financial investment after a public vote during the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes.
The announcement Eurosport, now TNT Sports, would be the exclusive broadcaster of the Tour de France from 2026 was met with disappointment in many quarters from those upset by the loss of free-to-air coverage of the world's biggest bike race.
ITV commentator Ned Boulting was one of those disappointed and told the road.cc Podcast the audience on free-to-air "completely eclipses subscription television" and bemoaning that "the Tour is going to go into a place where, in the UK media landscape, you normally find biathlon and hockey".
That last comment may no longer apply, the Tour de France and all other bike races to appear on TNT Sports channels adjacent to Premier League football, cricket, rugby and its other sports, but Boulting concluded nobody is to blame, just that "not enough of us cared".
"It's nobody's fault. The ASO have a right to monetise their event as they feel fit, and you cannot blame Warner Brothers for wanting exclusivity," he said. "That's their market. It seems quite strange to me that for a long time they were willing or contractually obliged to share the coverage with a much bigger broadcaster. Why would they allow that to persist?
"And from ITV's perspective, if they're losing money, they've got to get out. So none of these three parties, in my opinion, are to blame. But the primary reason why it’s gone is because not enough of us cared."
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Go brush up on (or learn) your French, Italian, Spanish and/or Dutch, and use a VPN to watch your cycling. Belgian telly - VRT.be - is particularly good for cycling, and NOS in the Netherlands aren't bad either for things like the Tour, so knowing Dutch goes a long way. The Tour de France will always be free to air in France - it's the law! - so France 2 and 3 should always have it.
We're back to the dark ages as far as cycling coverage goes in the Celtic Isles. Never near complete to begin with, but at least there was always good Tour coverage with Imlach & Co. on C4 and later ITV, but now... It's VPNs.
Maybe one day the cycling authorities and orgs will learn that selling TV rights to big corporates that want to just lock it up to squeeze as much cash as possible out of the tiny minority that can afford stupid fees is bad for the sport overall. Till then.. VPNs.
I can watch the Tour de France live on France TV but I much prefer to switch to ITV. David Millar has an ability to describe the race tactics that brings the whole race to life. Another reason to prefer ITV is the one hour evening show which allows you to catch up on the day's action; France TV doesn't offer any highlights.
In theory satellite coverage will allow you to receive French TV channels in the UK. You need a viewing card, available for a nominal, one-off payment but the card is only delivered to addresses in France. I suppose it will always be possible to buy cards on the black market but how many people in the UK these days have the ability to follow a broadcast in a foreign language?
After GCN+ went I was unprepared to pay for Discovery+ let alone this obscene amount for TNT. This is 10x the price i paid for GCN+. Ridiculous. I enjoyed watching ITV's Tour De France coverage, I know many criticise it, but for free to air it's great. Putting the rights completely behind a very expensive paywall is a good way to kill the sport. Dumb, greedy, short term thinking.
Four hundred quid a year for just cycling which is the only sport I watch online is too much I'm afraid. I've cancelled my Discovery+ subscription.
Wait till after the CX worlds maybe ?
I did hesitate over that but you get whatever's left of your current month when you cancel so have it to Valentine's Day (oh God, what am I going to do Valentine's Day if there's no cycling to watch?).
on youtube live
Going to miss the ITV comps to win a high end road bike....and some lycra kit
It is a UK-only move (for now). Sorry to say, but it's hard to see what the *sponsor- and advertiser-relevant* demographic is that's going to be too upset by this. The people they care about (i.e. the not-real-cyclists demonised by the comments section under the road.cc review of any expensive new product) will pay the fee - it's just another box to tick along with all the other monthlies and to put it in context, a brand new pro-tour spec bike is going to cost the equivalent of 20-40 years of TNT subscription.
Full disclosure - before I retired I would have upgraded. Now I'm thinking VPN might be the new TNT.
I think you are overestimating the size and influence of the demographic in question. Its more to do with the 31.99 subscription covering a huge range of non-cycling demographics in which cycling fans are bit-part players.
I don't like it, but look at it from WBD's point of view. They want to cut costs / consolidate their offering. If 80% of people cancel their subscription, but the subscription costs 5x as much, they're subsciption revenue flat.
Then their advertising agencies ask "Who are the 80% who no longer see our client's advertisements? Will they be interested in finance software, executive saloons, fancy kitchen appliances and business-class travel?", to which the honest answer is "some of them might, but most of them are complaining to their mates on the club run, watching the classics round their well-heeled mate's house or crying into the opinion pages of the Guardian."
Same Q&A for the ProTour teams really. Which jersey sponsors care?
One answer is raise taxes and have the BBC cover minority sports on a plethora of channels, but I can't see Rachel Reeves putting *that* too high up the to-do list .... a better answer is just to tell WBD that a condition of their license to operate their subscription service in the UK is that some of the content is free on a streaming service after n days where n is to be agreed?
The Beeb have plenty of money to cover any sport they wanted to, they choose to for example spend 1million per year hiring one person to host a sports show, they chose to spend 110million for just 2 Olympics worth of coverage, they chose to cut 35million from the sports budget, they choose to spend around 40million a year covering Wimbledon.
They chose to spend 86million rebuilding the Eastenders set.
I don't know what metrics (if any) the BBC governance model solves for; I suspect there aren't any. Eastenders definitely gets a viewing figures tailwind for just being on BBC1 in the early evening slot, but does get decent iPlayer numbers. I would imagine on a 10 year view, the cost per viewer hour still represents "value" even with the new set factored in.
The Olympics and Wimbledon have some sort of special status which protects them from economic reality. At least partly because they're watched by people who don't watch other sport and have never participated in the sport they're watching (there's probably a green in a RAG box on a scorecard somewhere for that).
This is my frustration with the service, you're not paying £31 for a premium service for the sport you want to watch, you're paying £31 for a load of very mediocre services. Since it looked a good year for MotoGP last year I decided to pay for Discovery+ and I was very disappointed with the experience for the high cost, it feels more like a cheap terrestrial streaming service with a badly functioning app and adverts in the content.
I suspect though they know they can get people like me to pay way over the odds for the poor service in desperation to watch a particular sport although I don't think I'll be subscribing again unless they offer a cheaper MotoGP only package ore similar which I can't see happening.
I wonder how much value Jim Ratcliff views the UK market for INEOS? They have not won much since he took over from Sky and seem to be in a right mess. Too many good people gone, but at least they have unbound themselves from some overrated road cyclists but will it be enough?
Okay, so we're being asked to pay £31 a month to watch cycling, but where is the money going? With football I know a lot of the big TV money goes to pay the inflated wages of the stars, but some of it does filter down to the grass roots of the game.
Anyone know ASO / UCI or whoever are getting out of it and where's the money going?
The UCI gets11.82% of the total prize fund for the Tour, which was about €270,000 last year, and that goes to the riders' union. ASO make an estimated €30 million profit on €150 million turnover for the Tour and as far as I know that goes nowhere but into their own pockets. So it would seem very little of the TV profit goes back into the sport at all, and none down to grassroots level.
Thats interesting if correct... a massive failure of the UCI...say compared to the FA... or UEFA....who at least funnel token amounts down to grass roots afaik.
The FA might though its a fraction of a fraction of the money they generate, not convinced UEFAs money goes anywhere but Swiss bank accounts...where their hq is based of course
Well, yes, but (acc. INRNG) those pockets are then steadily emptied by all the other races they run, which pretty much all run at loss.
The £31 isn't what we pay to watch cycling. It's what they want us to pay to watch a football package, which has some cycling thrown in for free.
It's mad: we will refuse to pay a four times more to watch cycling, so they will lose our business, and the football fans won't even notice that they've gained cycling.
The only positive I can think of is that someone at WBD thinks cycling is a sufficently 'high profile' sport that it needs elivating to the same broadcasting status as Premier League Football, and presumably they think us mugs will pay through the nose to watch it. I'd love to think that's true, but it ain't.
The Manchester United FB page has 84m followers. I'll say that again 84,000,000 and the MU Channel 213,000 members, (and remember that's just one of twenty premier league teams). Cycling just can't compete with those sort of numbers and when the extra sign ups at nearly £400 a year don't follow, some bean counter somewhere will say, no, it's not worth it and that's that for broadcasts cycling.
Or someone at WBD has noticed the insanely high prices of bikes & equipment, and has guessed cycling fans can afford a huge hike in subscriptions.
Don't think so, if you translate the word salad Young delivered, they're talking really about making fans of football,MotoGP etc into cycling fans to boost their viewing figures presumably
Because ad revenues for cycling are low based on the current setups, yet cycling consumes such a gigantic amount of the schedule in comparison.
I dont think they care at all for the existing cycling fanbase, or just assume youll go with price rise regardless.
I think what you say has some sense to it (for WBD).
More sports, for the die-hard "Watch any sports" fans but also for their football-centric viewers, to try to justify the price to them, in the face of their weak, but over-paid, UK football rights.
Like for that handle alone!![smiley smiley](/sites/all/themes/rcc/images/smilies/16.gif)
So let's see, if you're into sport and you have a family who like a bit of TV...
£100+ a month for a reasonably full service on Sky
~£50 a month for Netflix, Apple, Prime, Disney, Paramount...
~£31 a month for TNT
Add your broadband at £20-50 a month.
Have I missed anything? Oh your TV licence as well. And they wonder why dodgy services on Fire Sticks are all the rage![laugh laugh](/sites/all/themes/rcc/images/smilies/41.gif)
Yes you forgot the £169,50 license fee.... thats the only entertainment subscription I have along with ROUVY
From across the North Sea, here in NL I pay about 90 euros/month for a decent TV/broadband bundle, and 19 euros/month for HBO Max + sports package (14 + 5 euros). Plus a few other bits like Viaplay (football and F1), Netflix and Prime. I think the killer is the way that things are being "bundled" for our "convenience".
I'd paused my subscription over the winter, and with the start of racing down under, was wondering when to resubscribe - opening weekend and Milano - San Remo can't be too far awat. The answer now looks like it's going to be never. Could I afford £30.99 a month - yes, potentially. Would I do so, absolutely not - this is attempted extortion. The GCN+ sub always seemed a bit too good to be true, discovery+ was reasonable, but a price hike of nearly 5 times that is insane. Yes, I'm sure I would get more 'content' available, but I'm not interested in that whatsoever.
I liked the presentation with Orla, Dan, Adam and co, enjoyed Rob Hatch and tolerated Carlton, but I refuse to be held hostage to WB's exclusive control over pro cycling coverage. I'd be surprised if they don't lose a very large proportion of their existing customers. It looks like it's back to trying to find streams and torrents of cycling coverage![2](https://cdn.road.cc/sites/all/modules/contrib/smiley/packs/smilies/2.gif)
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