World Tour Promotion-Relegation Rankings

With the Giro completed, a quick look at the weekly UCI rankings and the World Tour promotion and relegation race as the points for the Giro have been added.

Relegation-facing Astana and Arkéa-B&B have started scoring more but their problem is their rivals have too. And for Astana the troubles are piling.

Relegation reminder
It’s a three year process between 2023-2025 based on the sum of each team’s rankings for each season. The top-18 teams qualify for a World Tour place, a World Tour team below 18th place faces relegation.

Riders score UCI points with race results and a team’s ranking is based on the total of its 20 best scorers. The in the chart below red line signifies the promotion-relegation barrier. The raw data is at uci.ch.

Lotto-Dstny and Israel-PremierTech are on course for promotion with both sitting well above 18th place. All the second tier ProTeams have the coral-tone bar for 2023.

Arkéa-B&B Hotels and Astana are still below the red line. Astana are still well behind but they’ve started scoring more and have taken over 1,000 points in the last five weeks. That still leaves them trailing and it’s probably not momentum that they’ll keep. Besides as good as recent times have been for them, Uno-X has now overtaken them to move up to 20th which shows this is always a dynamic contest.

Arkéa-B&B have been scoring of late too but their problem is that DSM Firmenich have too with the Dutch squad hauling over 2,000 points in the last few weeks. It all means Arkéa are about 1,250 points short of 18th placed DSM Firmenich and Astana 2,500 points behind.

There’s a mini-peloton of teams jostling above the red line and there are about 2,000 points between Jayco-Al Ula at the top of this section and DSM-Firmenich right now, or just one good month’s results. But they’re all more comfortable for now because Arkéa-B&B are still 1,250 points below DSM Firmenich, there’s a gap there. Still management at Cofidis and Intermarché will be worried that the Dutch team overtake them and they’re the ones sitting on the frontier.

Finally reminder that relegation isn’t ruinous. Just ask Lotto-Dstny.

However in the event of relegation the two best teams on the rankings from 2025 would get invites to the grand tours. Using 2024 as an example only this would mean Arkéa and Uno-X today, with Astana are adrift here. For the big one day races the best three are invited so Arkea, Uno-X and the next team right now is Tudor. Astana are after them right now. But relegation will be after 2025 and invites are based on next year’s rankings alone. It just shows that Astana need to score, to think ahead and hire riders who will help here.

So a soft relegation for Arkéa may not be so bad: unwanted but not disastrous. As long as a team faces the drop with a plan and can retain riders then it can still prosper but easier said than done. Teams get demoted because of poor performance, it can be harder to recruit, sponsors crave the security of the World Tour and so on. Astana though may have things much harder.

Conclusion
There’s still a year and a half to go so we can’t make definitive calls. Still for Astana we’re left reaching into the sack of sporting metaphors and pulling out phrases like “a mountain to climb”. Arkéa don’t have it easy either.

For all the tables, points and charts there’s also just the sense check here where these two teams just are not appearing the headlines or even the moves enough to get results. Without looking you can probably tell they are having a tough time of things.

26 thoughts on “World Tour Promotion-Relegation Rankings”

  1. “Finally reminder that relegation isn’t ruinous. Just ask Lotto-Dstny. As in the event of relegation the two best teams on the rankings would get invites to the grand tours and this means Arkéa and Astana. For the big one day races the best three are invited so Uno-X get included here.”

    You’ve missed something here – the ProTeam invitation zone is based only on the previous year and not on the three year aggregated points.

    According to your calculations, Astana is the fourth team outside the top 18 on 2024 points (Arkea 5187, Uno-X 3713, Tudor 2921, Astana 2873).

    In the hypothetical event that the 2023-25 cycle was drawn to a close immediately and the teams for next season selected accordingly, the following would be the changes:
    WorldTour relegation (on aggregate points): Arkea, Astana
    WorldTour promotion eligibility (on aggregate points, and assuming they apply to step up again): Lotto, Israel
    ProTeams with stage race invitations (on 2024 points): Arkea, Uno-X
    ProTeams with one day race invitations (on 2024 points): Arkea, Uno-X, Tudor

  2. Astana would be relying on wildcards to make a guest appearance at any WorldTour race, like TotalEnergies and other teams further down the order.

    • Given the long and checkered history of Astana along with its location, you can bet that there aren’t going to be a lot of optional wild cards for that team. Memories are long and while there hasn’t been any issue there in some time that won’t matter.

  3. On another note, this shows just how far Jumbo has fallen without van Aert, Laporte, and Vinegaard etc
    I haven’t crunched the numbers, but just eyeballing the chart above and the difference between this year’s blue points and last year’s grey, Jumbo is clearly the greatest underperformer proportionally.
    It goes to show that when you set yourself high standards it’s a big challenge to maintain them.

  4. Decathlon-AG2R showing what difference a year can make. Granted hard to see Astana making that kind of dramatic improvement but a team can be saved by one good year in a 3 year cycle it would seem.

    • At this point Decathlon-Ag2RLM has already exceeded their scoring for ALL of 2023. Their 2024 score is almost exactly the combined 2023 and 2024 points total for Astana. After their excellent Giro and 4 Days of Dunkirk (among other recent races), they must all be walking on a cloud! 23 wins, nine different winners, and lots of high finishes scoring solid points. It’s been mentioned here before, but deserves emphasizing that that kind of success breeds big confidence (and camaraderie), which breeds more success, and rinse and repeat.

      Meanwhile, the opposite pattern makes it all the harder to break out of the negative spiral.

      • Interestingly enough, there were 2 teams last year with essentially identical totals. AG2R hit the reset button correctly, DSM not so much.

        Maybe UAE and Alpecin got greedy, but it still seems like there are a significant number of underperformers this year. Astana, Arkea, VLAB, DSM, of course, also Cofidis and Jayco, but I’d say the biggest surprises to me are FDJ and Bahrain. Really expected more of them. Also, ISTM UAE have overperformed. Pog only has 31 race days, and 21 of those were in one race, so the rest of the squad has been raking it in.

    • 210 according to Inrng’s post on UCI points from a few months ago. I think Cavendish would have to win all 21 stages plus the overall in order to save Astana!

      • Just for the sake of curiosity, I worked out that Cav winning 21 stages of the Tour would get the team the following points:

        21x 210pts (4410) for stage wins
        20x 25pts (500) for wearing the leader’s jersey in stages 2-21
        210pts for winning the points classification (impossible not to if winning every stage) and probably some points for a top 3 position in the mountains classification due to summit finishes.
        1300pts for winning the GC.
        Total: at least 6420

        Adding 6420 to Astana’s current points without making any other changes (remember that other teams will score for the positions behind Cav, and in other races through June-July) it would lift them to 12th place between EF and Jayco.

  6. A rough tot up of the points Pogacar scored in the Giro indicates he scored more just in that than Astana has scored in the entire season so far! No wonder Astana is seriously struggling. I continue to be baffled as to how Ineos manages to be third on points for this season. I know they had a pretty good Giro but they haven’t had many victories otherwise & it’s not as if they’re doing many smaller races & picking up extra points there like second place Decathalon are doing (I know Decathalon has had victories in bigger races as well but it feels like they’ve won almost every second-tier French race this season).

      • INEOS vs AG2R nicely shows the difference routes teams can take to secure points.

        INEOS have have lofty aims; grand tours and monuments, major stage races. They might not dominate like they once did but can be relaxed (whatever that means in this context) knowing they have big riders to score big points in big races.

        AG2R clearly recognised they were never going to do that, and have been sending crack teams of snipers, targeting ‘smaller’ races and accumulating points. Sure, they’ve had some great success in the big races too, but I wonder if this can be attributed to a mindset change – attacking and sniping points.

        A few years ago I might have associated that approach with DSM. But it doesn’t seem to be working now. Jakobsen would have been expected to score many points, and injuries to Oscar Onley haven’t helped after a promising start.

        • AG2R has, like, always done a good number of those smaller races. Being a French team means not missing the French races.

          It isn´t my impression that AG2R has changed its policy in picking riders for those races. It certainly isn´t sending a B team to races where the competition is tougher and an A team to those French races like DSM was often seen as doing.

          DSM was, rightly or wrongly, accused of not riding for wins, but for points, i.e. targeting Top 5 or 10 with 2 or 3 riders rather than betting everything on the captain´s chances of winning. As I see it, AG2R hasn´t resorted to these kind of tactics – and I´d hazard a guess that a respectable share of its points tally comes from the wins alone.

          • It’s not a good look for DSM, but it’s important to blame the game rather than the player.

            I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – a good reform for the team ranking in the next cycle would be to count the best result for the team in each stage/race result regardless of which rider scores it, rather than adding up the top 10/20/whatever riders’ season totals.

            This would lead to better recognition of road cycling as a team sport, as domestiques will be able to work for their leader without having to worry about their individual placing in the final after their work for the leader is done.

            Alternately, another way to incentivise more positive racing could be to cap the number of points that a team can bank from adding together minor placings at the amount awarded to fourth place, i.e. ensuring that any podium position is always more valuable than any combination of lower placings.

  7. I have heard Lary Warbass talked about how they have just been more selective and rather than sending their best riders to every race they have been a little more selective. I think for example Cosnefroy has said he doesn’t like stage races so has targeted one days only – granted some of his wins are smaller races but he has also done well in the bigger ones.

  8. I personally love the points race because it adds a little spice to the Coupe de France races and Belgian one-days. It also shows the value of riders like Arnaud De Lie and Lenny Martinez, who just clean up some of the smaller races (like the Mercantour). Then you have the teams that try to do it with older riders, some of whom come through and some of whom just collect a paycheck. And it can all change in an afternoon with a GT stage win, suddenly making an individual rider way more valuable. I really enjoy that added drama.

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