Scoop up 20 victories in a year, your second rainbow jersey in a row, three monuments and your fourth Tour de France win, along with increasingly being referred to as the GOAT and surpassing Eddy Merckx, and you can expect to be rewarded well.
According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, that’s certainly the case for Tadej Pogačar, with the Italian sports journal estimating his 2025 earnings at €12 million.
That’s split between the salary from his deep-pocketed UAE Team Emirates-XRG team, a well-merited bonus, personal sponsorship and merchandising.
The Gazzetta says that, following the 2024 season, when he took the triple crown of the Giro, Tour and Worlds, UAE signed a six-year, €8m per season contract with Pogačar, securing his services until 2030, when he will turn 32.
As an incentive to keep pedalling, the contract is claimed to add a bonus of €1m for winning the Tour de France, which maybe helps explain why Pogačar kept going in the 2025 edition despite suffering from knee pain.
There are further bonuses of €500,000 each in the contract for winning the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, and €250,000 for winning the World Championships, according to the Gazzetta.
It calculates that Pogačar‘s bonus income has dropped by €0.5m this year from 2024, though, thanks to not competing in a second grand tour, having won the Giro as well as the Tour last year.
Plus sponsorship income
Turning to sponsorship income, La Gazzetta dello Sport reckons Pogačar‘s income from his main sponsors is €2m, with another two sponsors negotiating to come on board next year and rumoured to be paying €1m each.
The €2m is said to be paid out by bike sponsor Colnago, shoe brand DMT, MET helmets and a cluster of other brands, including the Slovene tourist office. Pogačar will play host at the UCI eSports World Championships in November, an event platformed by another of his sponsors, MyWhoosh.
Then there’s Pogačar‘s merchandising income, with his TP logo appearing on everything from Carbon-Ti chainrings to MET helmets. La Gazzetta dello Sport reckons that’s worth another €1m, paid out by brands including cycling kit maker Pissei, and sunglasses and bag vendor Scicon. You can buy one of 300 special Pogačar edition Colnago V4Rs bikes for €17,000.
More cash than Armstrong or Pantani
La Gazzetta dello Sport points out that there have been other high-earning cyclists in the past with, ahem, Lance Armstrong benefiting from a $28m contract with Nike.
In 1998, Marco Pantani, who had just taken the Giro-Tour double, declined an offer of 5 billion Lire from Mapei to leave his Mercatore Uno team. Even when translated to Euros, that’s quite a lot: the Gazzetta calculates it to be worth around 4 million Euros in today’s money, accounting for inflation.
Totting it all up, the Gazzetta comes to the €12m figure for Pogačar’s 2025 income, which it reckons he will eclipse in 2026. It points out that it doesn’t all end up in his pockets, though, with some of Pissei’s cash paid into the Tadej Pogačar Foundation, which funds cancer research, support for sick children and assistance for victims of natural disasters.
What if another team wants to sign Pogačar before 2030? It will need deep pockets; his contract with UAE Team Emirates-XRG includes a €200m break-out clause, so expect to see Pogačar winning in UAE team colours for some time to come.
