When beginning a game, your team will have 12 cyclists and will be placed in the lowest division of your country.
The first time you log in, you might want to check the team news. There will be two messages for you: a welcome message with links to the forum and the Wiki, and a message informing you that your team has a one year contract with a sponsor (one year means one season in Peloton).
Starting teams will always have a sponsor for 1 year. When the next season starts, you will be able to choose a sponsor yourself.
When you are a new player, you might want to go through all the different pages to see the different options and possibilities you have. Even though your team will have 400.000€ in the bank (plus the money from the sponsor) and this might seem a lot at first, there are multiple ways to spend this money on and if you are not careful, you might bankrupt your team faster than you think.
Hiring a trainer
One of the first things you should do is hiring a new trainer. They cost a large sum of money, but you will need to improve your cyclists if you want to become succesful in the game.
A common mistake made by new players is that they hire a trainer with different low skills, for example one with 5 flat, 5 mountain and 5 sprint. While this means that the trainer can train your cyclists in all three categories, having only a skill of '5' will improve the cyclists not very fast. A better tactic would be to focus on only a single skill at first, but with a lot higher skill value. For example, 20 flat (20 is the maximum). Such a trainer costs just as much as one with 4 different skills with only 5 points, but the cyclists will improve a lot faster.
Don't forget your finances, though! A trainer with 20 points for a skill will costs 400.000€. The bank balance can go below zero, even as far as -500.000€, but this comes at a price: the bank will charge you intrest costs! When you are below -500.000€ at the weekly update (Sunday evening at 20:00 server time), your team will be declared bankrupt and the game is over.
