The Church of Swatt Club: How a fan movement can change pro-cycling
No sponsors on the jersey, no riders on payroll: Swatt Club explained.
Filippo Conca crossed the line head-to-toe in white: jersey, shorts, socks, the works. Winning the Italian National Championships meant everything. But, in that moment, it wasn’t just a career reborn; a quiet revolution in Italian cycling had just gotten louder.
Swatt Club came out of the shadows and into the global spotlight.
On paper, they’re a small Italian club team. The Nationals win? A proper David vs Goliath upset, or what football fans would call the beauty of the FA Cup style upset. Yet, dig a little deeper and Carlo Beretta has quietly spent the last decade having fun, and accidentally building a movement within Italian cycling.
“They’ve created a movement, a culture, it’s almost a church.”
- Andrew Montgomery
What is Swatt Club?
Swatt Club is fan-first bike racing.
What started in 2013 as an alpine skiing blog called SoloWattagio has quietly grown into one of the most compelling movements in Italian cycling.
Its founder, Carlo Beretta, was a professional skier until his mid-twenties. Disillusioned by the system, he and a few friends began writing about the truth in what they saw. After leaving pro skiing, he fell into cycling, not as a pro rider, but as a fan. And by then, it wasn’t just Carlo and his mates. They’d built an online following of hundreds, maybe thousands.
There was Swatt Corner at the Giro d’Italia with flares and beers. They’d show up at fondos and local crits together. It was a crew of working amateurs who loved the sport. The modern-day tifosi.
I first came across Swatt Club at Santa Vall last year, the gravel season opener in Girona. They turned up in full purple tracksuits. Their frontman was Asbjørn Hellemose, and we ended up sharing a podium after the prologue. With Swatt’s backing, Asbjørn worked through the gravel scene and landed a contract back in the WorldTour. One of their members even wrote a trashy Euro-pop song about him.
“We don’t want riders who feel like a number in the system. That’s what’s happening in the WorldTour, they’re just numbers, robots. Honestly, that’s kinda shit. It’s a job and they make good money, but they’re still people.”
- Carlo Beretta
Swatt Club’s motto is “no difference”. Whether you're on the elite team or just part of the club, whether your FTP is 200w or 400w, everyone’s treated the same.
Building the community
Swatt Club is every bit the modern sports team. They’re winning on the field, but they’re scoring off it too. There’s a YouTube channel, podcast, and active Instagram channels. They’re leveraging all of the right things.
Paying members get access to a WhatsApp group chat that’s buzzing with hundreds of fans. One moment it's debate over the Tour de France stage result, the next it’s a deep dive into white skinsuits or sock aerodynamics. It’s obsessive, chaotic, and entirely brilliant.
It’s bigger than the media though. It’s akin to a mini Tour de Tietema team, but it’s built up from the ground. Swatt Club started in the amateurs, it started with those fondos and local races. The goal of the project was never to become a project. It was lots of little steps that led it to become what it has.
“We don’t have a background in cycling, and I think that’s a good thing” - Carlo Beretta
Andrew Montgomery, now with Castelli, but formerly involved with MAAP, Trinity Racing, Basso and more used to share an office with Carlo. He saw Swatt forming from the inside.
“They’ve created a movement, a culture, it’s almost a church in Italian cycling. They’ve taken the riders away from being numbers and made them people that want to race. Carlo is a big football fan, and you can see that in parts of the team. They have a Panini style sticker book for members of the movement over the years. Those who have played an extra big part become shinies (Ed Note: A ‘shiny’ card is rare and, for football fans, instantly nostalgic. You know the feeling.) Carlo called me recently and asked for a photo - I’m becoming a shiny card…”
SoloWattagio and Swatt Club are exactly what I think would work in the English speaking market. Hell, it’s what I was trying to build last year with Rebellion, and probably what I’ll start building again soon. It makes me question: why the hell has it taken me so long to learn about them?
I put the question to Monty. He’s an Englishman living in Italy, and we speak the same language, literally and in cycling terms.
“They’re so culturally Italian that I think a move to English would lose a lot of what makes them special,” he says.
They’re staying true to themselves. Unapologetically Italian.
Road or Gravel?
As a modern day cycling team, there is always going to be the question as to what discipline they should race. For Swatt Club, it’s not road or gravel - it’s both. It’s whatever excites the riders. Whatever makes sense.
“We go to the races if we want to go to the races,” Carlo says. “We don’t impose anything. The riders decide what they want to do.”
That’s one of the freedoms of gravel, you build your own calendar. If you’re not feeling good, if something’s off, if life’s in the way, you stay home. There’s pressure. No guilt. No UCI points to get.
“When our road riders started the season at Santa Vall they went into another world. They saw that there was another kind of racing, that there’s super talented riders in gravel. We have this perspective in Italy where gravel riders are between amateurs and low level elites, but they saw and now understand how talented gravel is. Our guys are also improving by racing both disciplines, they learn different techniques, skills and tactics”
“I feel like racing is racing. It's not as if one thing is more important than another. You go to Traka, you go full gas. You go to a UCI 2.2, and you go full gas. You have the same attitude and we only go to a race if we want to go to a race.”
- Carlo Beretta
At the Italian National Championships, the Swatt Club guys rode like it was their World Championships. They were on the attack from the start. Meanwhile, Carlo spoke to some WorldTour friends who’d been told they had to be there: “You could see it: 90% of them weren’t fully in the race. That’s when you make the difference.”
The gravel and road mix isn’t just a play to the sponsors, or a play to the everchanging landscape of team ownership. It’s a message that they’re bike racers, and bike racers race.
They even host ‘Swatt Crits’ and collaborate with ‘Poli Crit’ - a party race in Milan. I’m hopeful I’ll be getting on a plane and heading there come September…
The Swatt Club Budget
They’re men after my own heart: full white kit, winning big races, and building something bigger than just a team. But, while a plain white jersey might look sharp, it screams “no title sponsor.” As someone with far too many budget spreadsheets, I had one question: how the hell do they afford to do this?
“Giant and Cadex are big sponsors for us,” Carlo tells me. “To them, we’re more of a gravel project, but we’re showing we’re a strong road project too. Shimano and Lazer are also involved. The deal was simple and we asked for the freedom to race with just Swatt Club on the jersey. I don’t know exactly how I convinced them, but they believed in me.”
Then there’s Carlo’s e-commerce site, also called Swatt Club. The team’s built around it. What started as a blog now has 1,200+ paying members and a growing clothing brand. There’s membership, merchandise and training camps. It’s on track to pass €1 million in revenue this year, and where another part of the budget comes from.
Seven figures sounds like a lot, but running a 15-rider program that hops between continents adds up fast.
“No one gets a salary,” Carlo explains. “Instead of paying riders €500 or €1,000 a month, I pay for everything else: training camps, food, all the coffees, even their coach. Whatever I can cover, I do. At the end of the year, they keep both bikes. That’s about €10,000 if they choose to sell them.”
It’s a leap of faith model: If you trust me, I’ll trust you. It’s a new project, and they want to go full gas. Every rider deserves a salary, he says, and that’s the goal for 2026. But if they’d started with salaries, the team wouldn’t be racing in the US, Canada, or Indonesia.
“I’m not an old-school team manager. If a rider wants to do wind tunnel testing, and it makes sense, we’ll support it.
For some riders, it’s the last chance to stay in the sport. For others, it’s simply a better deal than scraping by on a small contract and paying their own way. Either way, it’s working.
What’s Next?
“The plan is to go Continental in 2026. We will have our own rules with that too, I believe every rider should make at least €5,000.
What I learned this year is being a club team gives you more flexibility if you just want to do UCI 1.1, or 1.2 races. Of course, for gravel it doesn’t matter. Only being a club team can make race invitations hard, but with our Instagram and YouTube it has helped us a lot.
I want to go to Continental so we can do some big races though, races like the Tour of Denmark.”
I smile, and nod. I’ve had the exact same thought myself. Staying as a club team is cheaper, it’s less paperwork and there’s more flexibility. But, to do the Tour of Britain or whatever UCI .PRO race means something to you, then you need that Continental license.
Carlo and I spent forty minutes on the phone together. It was like speaking to a mirror. We were talking about how it was running teams, he was telling me how in the Italian system many athletes see themselves as numbers on a page, rather than people.
I bring up Ribble Rebellion, and Carlo tells me he was at Tulsa Tough and saw us race. I smile, there’s a degree of ego, but it’s more nostalgia.
“I can say now that our project has been successful, but you don’t feel it with the results on ProCyclingStats. You feel it when you see us before the race, when you see us after the race. If you talk to the riders you just feel the project. That’s what I felt about the project you had with Rebellion when I saw the guys in Tulsa…”
Carlo, thank you for your time. Thank you for Swatt Club, it’s one hell of a project. I have a feeling that one day in the future I’ll bring another team to the table, and maybe we can do something together.
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Really liked this piece! I really do think this is the direction cycling should go.
Would love to see more groups like this, and specifically in the US