The news that Warner Bros Discovery have made the call to end the Eurosport brand in the UK, rolling all of its properties into their TNT Sports brand is a cause for concern and irritation far beyond the nostalgic kick of losing a brand over thirty years old and beloved by most sports fans.
Because, beyond that, it is not exaggeration to describe this as potentially the death knell for professional cycling in the UK. One can look at Eurosport’s other properties - tennis, motorbikes, snooker, winter sports - and point to other broadcasters offering plenty of coverage be that Sky, BBC, ITV or others. Cycling does not have that luxury beyond the ITV coverage of the Tour de France (which ends after the 2025 edition). If you want to watch cycling in the UK, you will need TNT Sports.
At the distinct risk of this sounding like a first world problem, let’s just look at my own cycling subscription viewing over the past three years:
22-23 - Eurosport Player - £40 per year
23-24 - GCN+ - £40 per year
24-25 - Discovery+ - £7 a month (£84 per year)
25- - TNT Sports - £31 a month (£372 per year)
To be fair, the first three of those options are essentially services that continued on from each other with the same personnel and operating model that, for the user, had no real noticeable difference so while that may look unstable, it isn’t really. And you’ll note that, broadly, pricing hasn’t been THAT different, especially given that you could cancel Discovery for the 3 months of the year that is much of the off-season.
To ask an extra £24 a month, however, is ridiculous. TNT Sports will argue that rather than just getting what was on Eurosport, you instead get the magic of the Champions League, the epic season of the Premier League, the home of Rugby amongst other things.
To which most cycling aficionados would rightly say “Great. Do those things really justify me paying £24 more a month because I’m probably not going to watch them?”. TNT only need 1 in every 4.5 cycling Eurosport subs to convert to TNT to actually turn a profit on this - can they pull that meagre conversion rate?
I mean, I’m certainly not. I don’t care about Rugby and their main property there (the English Premiership) is in a bad spot at the minute. I don’t watch the EPL, I havent watched test cricket in years because, well, it got stuck behind a big paywall and most of my footballing interest in European competitions is done with by the start of September. In short, you are asking me to pay an extra £25 a month for what I have now and are about to act surprised when I don’t do that.
Because, quite aside from the price issue, there’s another much larger issue at hand. That issue is that there’s no sign that the TNT top table know actually how to broadcast road cycling.
There’s a free hour long magazine show on Quest coming and potentially free to air Grand Tour highlights. TNT have four channels - Eurosport is closed rather than rebranding so that number of channels isn’t getting bigger. As such, we can pose the very first big question of TNT within a fortnight of them taking this over - Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. The two great spring 7 day tours which, as always, run alongside each other. What happens on the first Saturday when both of those will have a big stage on but there’ll be live football at lunch, rugby through the afternoon, MotoGP on and whatever else is on. Eurosport would give you those stages with two hours (at least) of live coverage, and a wrap up. Is there room for that in TNT’s schedule? The EPL finishes during the Giro, England play tests during the Giro. England host India for a test series during the Tour de France. The Tour won’t be TNT’s jewel in the crown and this is where TNT’s problem lies.
The reason why people are annoyed beyond the price rises is that Eurosport were really, really, really good at broadcasting cycling. For grand tours, you got the stages from depart to denouement whatever happened. Whether that was an incredibly exciting stage or whether it wasn’t, you got it and Eurosport made it entertaining. The best Eurosport coverage wasn’t necessarily the great stages, it was the times when you’d have Adam Blythe end up doing a few minutes of stand-up comedy because there was nothing going on in the peloton. The Tour de France was part sporting event, part background ASMR podcast with Eurosport. You could spend a day with the cycling and an evening trying out their recipe of the day because of course they had a recipe of the day. The reason it feels a loss isn’t because of losing merely a service it’s because that I, like many Eurosport cycling viewers, aren’t just losing out on a relationship that began in the era of Pogacar ruling the roost, it began in the era of David Duffield, continued through the double team of Carlton Kirby and Sean Kelly and stays into the generation of now in Rob Hatch, Adam Blythe (and, until mid-2024 Dan Lloyd).
And while everyone has their tastes, Eurosport’s coverage was rarely below excellent. Plenty of people find fault with Carlton Kirby’s… enigmatic style, but if you’ve got a breakaway that’s been out front for 100km coming into the last 5km with a peloton bearing down upon them, there is no man you’d rather have with a microphone in their hand for the ultimate in sporting cat and mouse (and you know it’s THAT Iljo Keisse stage) as, at times, he elevates his game into those rarified names of commentary of a Barry Davies or Peter O’Sullevan. Who knows, at this point, if TNT’s plan is even to use him but, with the Tour de France on ITV for one final summer, the biggest show of the summer in this household will be narrated by Ned Boulting and friends and, with the greatest respect to the ITV team, listening to them will feel that trying to strike up a relationship with a new stepfather that’s trying that bit too hard.
Even had things ended up with Sky, you just know they’d have had a Sky Sports Cycling channel set up tomorrow, showing only cycling all day everyday with races on the red button, etc. They’d have made some accommodation to make sure there was no loss in standard of service. TNT aren’t doing that and, with everything else they have already, there simply isn’t the room in their schedules to do what fans are used to.
All this comes in a landscape where British cycling is at a modern nadir - unable to support a continental team, the one day races disappearing, the Tour of Britain on its deathbed due to funding issues and a lack of interest in hosting it and Britain’s only World Tour team, INEOS Grenadiers, having lost all relevance over the past 24 months. To shove cycling behind not just a paywall, but to shove it behind the monetary equivalent of the Theodosian Walls, will surely serve to finish a sport on a domestic wane off entirely. What makes the decision even more bizarre is that that decision has not been taken elsewhere in Europe - the only territory getting their wallets punished is also the only territory going through an extended crisis in what is a boom era of cycling worldwide.
Maybe this all sounds like humbug. Maybe this is just another rung on the ladder of the UK’s ensh*ttification. But it’s a loss that thousands of cycling fans will feel because they can’t or won’t pay the difference. They may sail the high seas for it going forward but they shouldn’t have to. All Warner Bros Discovery had to do was absolutely nothing and they failed at that and, more than any other sport on Eurosport, it’s cycling that will end up shifted to the fringes of everyone’s consciousness yet it’s cycling that was the foundations on which Eurosport’s reputation was built.
It’s all so unnecessary.