On Thursday afternoon, the WorldTour cycling team formerly known as Israel–Premier Tech unveiled its new form: NSN Cycling Team, which will be licensed out of Switzerland and based in Spain. A few short months after its presence at the Vuelta a España incited fierce protests, the IPT project has unraveled. According to reports, IPT's cantankerous owner, Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams, is out of the sport.
What will replace IPT? NSN, short for "Never Say Never," is an "international sports and entertainment company" based in Barcelona and co-founded by Catalonian soccer legend Andres Iniesta; its official website boasts that it is positioned on "a global cross-cutting axis between Barcelona, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Emirates," whatever that means. Though only NSN's name will be on the jerseys, the cycling team is a partnership between NSN and Stoneweg, a Swiss money-management outfit with some €11 billion in assets. NSN also owns the Danish soccer team FC Helsingør—currently in last place in the Danish second division, with seven points from 16 matches—and the gravel bike brand Guava; the cycling team instantly becomes the company's biggest and most prominent venture to date. NSN's logo looks like the Nine Inch Nails logo.
As the Escape Collective boys opined, NSN's relative inexperience in the cycling space could be read as a good thing: It is essentially a marketing company attached to some sports-style events, which is cycling's whole thing. But NSN is not without its controversies. Iniesta and the subsidiary company NSN Sudamerica are presently under federal investigation in Peru; several Peruvian businessmen accuse the company of defrauding them out of $600,000 by using Iniesta's name to sell them on some big exhibition soccer matches that never happened. Meanwhile, NSN Sudamerica has declared bankruptcy and put its assets into liquidation.
The real question here is how clean a break NSN makes from the IPT days. At several points during the Vuelta, Adams and IPT attempted and flirted with cosmetic tweaks—removing the word "Israel" from the jerseys, raising the prospect of changing the team's registration to Canada—in an effort to get protestors to relent, without changing anything about the team's actual identity or ownership structure. The team also dropped out of a few big races to avoid getting protested. But the 2026 Grand Depart being in Barcelona gives protestors tremendous leverage: It's one thing for the Vuelta to be disrupted, but the entire world watches the Tour de France, and the first three stages being derailed would be a significantly bigger deal.
The team's announcement made no mention of IPT or Adams. Initial reports left unclear how involved Adams would eventually be in the team, as he said a month ago that he would be "stepping back from day-to-day involvement with the team," which is not the same thing as selling it. The public-relations staffers listed on NSN's contact page all worked for IPT; per a staffer who spoke to Escape, the staff will largely be the same and "at least 80 people keep their jobs." However, it does now appear Adams is out. Cycling Weekly reported, cautiously, that "the announcement that the licence has been transferred signals his exit from the project." The word "signals" is holding up a lot there, but the Spanish publication Marca, which is authoritative on Spanish cycling, was unequivocal. "The renovation is total," it asserts. "Israel and Sylvan Adams have disappeared from the project."
