The 2025 Points Race

Embed from Getty Images

Crunch time for the World Tour with two teams facing relegation and two aiming for promotion. Here’s a closer look at the contest ahead this year. It’s not the biggest story of the season but it will regularly affect tactics, race programs for teams and riders alike and so shape the season. And can Lotto afford promotion?

The Rules
Teams are ranked on the basis of their UCI points for each of the 2023, 2024 and 2025 seasons. This annual score is based on the total of a team’s 20 best scorers. Any ProTeams from cycling’s second tier in the top-18 are eligible for promotion. WorldTeams below 18th place face relegation.

There’s a secondary contest where the best ProTeams, including any relegated squads, are eligible for automatic invites to the top races next year based on the rankings of 2025 only. If there are 18 WorldTeams, then the two best squads here can be invited to the grand tours like the Tour de France and the three best teams get invites to the World Tour classics.

There’s also a further contest where for 2026 teams wanting a wildcard invitation for a grand tour have to be among the top-30 teams in the world, the threshold moves up from the top-40 and this means the likes of Euskaltel-Euskadi and Team Solution Tech-Vini Fantini need to score to be eligible for the Vuelta and Giro; without an invite they might stop racing.

The points scale can be seen here: https://inrng.com/2025/01/uci-points-rankings-2025.

The standings today
Despite the crucial nature of these rankings they’re not published by the UCI. So bloggers and team managers alike are left to compile them. The UCI updates the team rankings every Tuesday and this data – not just results but also points docked by commissaires – can be combined with the rankings for 2023 and 2024 to keep an eye on the promotion and relegation race. You can see the full standings above and the relegation race zoomed in below, the red line marks the relegation promotion line:

If today was the end of the season:

  • Lotto and Israel-PremierTech are among the top-18 and are eligible for promotion
  • Arkéa-Samsic and XDS-Astana are outside the top-18 and face relegation
  • Automatic grand tour invites for Burgos-Burpellet-BH, Tudor; TotalEnergies for the classics… but we’re one week into the season for this

Embed from Getty Images

What to look for…
So far so prescriptive about promotion and relegation. But it might not be so simple. Just being above or below the top-18 doesn’t mean automatic promotion or relegation, there’s also a review process. But a team already registered and racing should be able to clear this admin hurdle.

The issue is who applies as promotion is elective. Three years ago Alpecin-Deceuninck were eligible to move up but they didn’t say out loud they’d got for it until well into the season. This left other teams guessing about their position in the rankings for several months.

Lotto are in the right place to get promoted and it’s been a stated goal. But can they afford it? Already the roster has been pilfered, they’ve sold off Maxim Van Gils and they’re cutting back on racing this year to save on costs. Only promotion to the World Tour next year will be more expensive. The admin cost in fees is small, instead it’s the obligation to race every event and have a roster capable of this is the expensive part. They might like to be back in the World Tour but is the funding there? It’s something to watch as they search for a co-sponsor and also know that their main backer – the state lottery – faces regulation requiring gambling companies to exit advertising and sponorship by 2028.

Embed from Getty Images

As suggested in the Predictions for 2025 post Arkea-B&B Hotels face relegation but also risk losing the sponsors. Will both renew, can the team find new backers? If the team stops it’ll vanish out of the rankings. Management have said they won’t string riders along and will make an announcement before summer.

XDS-Astana are far behind on the rankings after dire 2023 and 2024 seasons, more than 4,500 points short of Cofidis and 18th place today. But they’ve had a hiring spree and one week in already we can see their strategy is paying off. Near invisible in the World Tour’s Tour Down Under, they’ve scored big in lower level races in Spain last weekend. The hard part for them is going to be keeping this up all year, and featuring in World Tour races too for more points, and it’ll be interesting to watch.

Women’s World Tour
Teams are ranked on the basis of their points from 2024 and 2025 in order to qualify for a World Tour 2026. Look for EF Education-Oatly to rise up and Roland to lose out; and if VolkerWessels keep scoring they can get promoted while Uno-X risk dropping.

44 thoughts on “The 2025 Points Race”

  1. The combined rankings for all three years (well, 2 years 1 months so far) are indeed available on the UCI website, under the heading Technical Rankings on the Road racing page.

    No, I don’t know why it’s there either.

    • I’ve just seen this as well after someone pointed it out on Bluesky, hadn’t known this until now…

      …so far so good but the numbers are different, eg Soudal’s score for 2023 in the technical rankings is different from the score in the ordinary rankings, Astana too and others. Small differences but confusing

      • I agree. IPT seem to have started the 2024 season with around 200 points more than they ended 2023. I presume these small things are the result of adding errors at some point but it would be nice to know how they came about. I think the gaps – or at least the important gaps – are too big for these small difference to matter.

    • Likewise, Paris-Chauny for example took on a sudden importance, the same for many other races later on.

      IPT and Lotto show relegation needn’t be disastrous, especially with the automatic wildcards for ProTeams that can score. It’s probably preferable to some fixed system.

      • It helps to round out my knowledge of the sport, that’s for sure. Looking at top tens in relatively minor races, or seeing what Asian races Astana might send stronger riders to that others wouldn’t leads me down rabbit warrens I wouldn’t have otherwise ventured down.

        I find it all quite exciting – there are teams with ambitions just to survive (Astana, Arkea) competing with teams who have much grander ambitions (Tudor, Q365), and those who are seeking secure the status they have (e.g Total, Uno-X). All this is mixed up in arcane rules and myriad scoring opportunities that you can really dig into. The perfect mix for my interests – and I suspect many others who share a love of this sport

      • If I remember correctly from your articles on the introduction of the points system many years ago, enhancing the value of those smaller races and the broad spectrum of races across the calendar, was a goal of the points system, right?

        In which case, it has succeeded, right?

        • I’d say so… the best ones among “minor races” probably still lost some of their appeal, but the average package of “smaller races” have become more and more competitive as teams became more aware of the points system. Including some teams which actually don’t need the points!

    • To those who consistently complain that there needs to be more money in cycling: this is the result when you bring big business into a sport. £31 a month.
      You wanted it to be more like football, and now it is. Except it doesn’t have anywhere near the level of interest that football does (the pubs won’t be showing Paris-Roubaix). The level of popularity in the UK will go back down to how it was in the 90s.
      I won’t be paying (couldn’t if I wanted to; wouldn’t pay if I could afford it), and many others won’t either.

        • Too off-topic, plus only a fraction of readers are from the UK.

          We’ll look at the shrinking viewing options in an upcoming post soon, and probably with money-saving tips and techniques to keep watching.

          • I’m old enough to remember when the only race you could see on tv was the Tour. Some of the races merited only one line every night on Ceefax (remember that?) or a round up on Radio5Live on a Friday night. It’s a huge hike in price and I recognise that some people won’t be able to afford it, but it’s still a lot better than I had when I first came to cycling, and I still became a fan. It does make life more difficult and it’s a step down from what we’ve had the last few years, but there’s still a lot to be thankful for. Though it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on it in case they do make further unwelcome changes.

          • I’m even older than that! I remember waiting a week at a time for the cycling magazine (comic?) to come out, and find out what had happened….. the, one magic afternoon when UK’s “World of Sport” had their planned sports cancelled, and went over (almost) unannounced to live coverage of the TdF…. that would have been in the sixties I think…

      • I respect your resistance. It grinds my gears too, but watching pro cycling is a big part of our family culture, something my partner and I do together, so I suspect I’ll be cutting back on vinyl and alcohol to fund whatever I have to pay to add it to my Virgin Media package… while also following your example and emailing Discovery+

        I won’t miss the Discovery+ app, though… what a pain that was.

  2. Different topic: some people in Aigl must be getting really nervous about those Kigali World Championships with the current escalation in Eastern Congo.

    • Another point to be addressed soon. Rwanda is safe for a bike race but several countries are considering sanctions on the Kigali government and this could have repercussions. Bike races are the least concern here in many ways but it can mean a spotlight.

  3. I have always thought that giving the world champs to Rwanda was a strange move.
    When you consider that the general international thought is that Rwanda is directly backing and helping rebel groups in the next door nation in a region where these wars have cost millions of lives and even more displaced people.

    • The UK and US, both of whom have hosted the world championships, are both directly backing and helping a country whose leader the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is also a race going on at the moment in Saudi Arabia who don’t exactly have a squeaky clean reputation either.

      • A lot of the “rules based order” is involved in mass murder of women and children. If they’re not directly involved in providing logistical and intel support, and/or sending arms and munitions, they are providing geopolitical support by blocking trade sanctions and stymying legal efforts. There are few exceptions.

        The west has lost all moral authority. The veneer of moral leadership it setup in the latter half of the 20th Century, on human rights, rule of law (inc. international), etc. has been stripped back. And there we find the veneer just lay on the same old murderous imperial-colonialist material as before.

    • I believe that Astana is quite probably doomed, but I also suspect that your take misses completely a couple of very relevant points, although of course it also highlights something interesting.

      The TDU is probably the “easiest” WT race. As a stage race, stage victories don’t grant many points, but the final GC does, and brutally so. Yet, “easy” as it is, the big big points come only if you grab a final top 5, which on turn requires your athlete to be in excellent form (albeit maybe not the very top one). Which, on the other hand, generally means that he’s going to struggle much in the second half of the season, normally from the TDF included on.

      Meanwhile, Astana got 405 points with Scaroni, Champoussin, Charmig and Velasco in just *three* days of racing in Castellón, Valencia and Mallorca. The easiest of logistics.

      Cofidis which sent to Australia an in form Coquard plus support riders (less of a problem for a sprinter to hit multiple peaks) got 163 points for all their efforts down under, via 5 different riders (out of 7!). Whereas they only collected 38 points in the three Spanish races.
      Again: Cofidis, with all the deserved applause for their WT performance, has actually got *half* of Astana’s points, these weeks.

      To put things into further perspective, Luke Plapp, an in-form, strong, local, motivated athlete, collected “only” 200 pts for his committed TDU. His team, also hugely determined, just collected 55 more points through three further riders, including strong Harper and Schmid. Of course, in this case it all makes sense well beyond points, but it’s just to make you see how complicated it turns out to be to harvest points even in an “easy” WT race like this.

      It’s to be seen if Higuita or Bettiol will actually be able to collect points coming into their best form when the season is at its high. Yet, for now and on paper, it makes perfect sense to send them in Australia just to train a little in the sun, whereas you use mostly your second line in order to score heavily in those Spanish .1
      In a single January week Astana has cut their difference from Cofidis by nearly 5% and, probably even more important, they needn’t disrupt their (supposed) best athletes’ normal training cycle in order to do so.

      As inrng points out above, this is clearly the winning strategy and for week one it’s been prefectly executed – yet, of course, it’s far from sure that they’ll be able to keep it going on for the rest of the year, even more so as Cofidis has got a strong advantage in being French, hence having a lot of “inflated” home races.

      • One thing to add is Astana say they have a data analyst working for them in order to pick their calendar for just this kind of reason, for example they say they’re not going to do the Volta ao Algarve because Roglič and Vingegaard will be there and so they expect a controlled race where the odds on these riders winning are high, leaving few chances for them.

        It’ll be fun to watch Astana especially as a good start can help with mood and momentum.

        • Woooow, I thought that the only true disappointment at TDU for Astana had been Aaron Gate, but, hey, the data analysts are really doing a great job… the authentic cushy bargain was Cadel’s Ocean Race where Gate went deep and brought home 250 pts vs. Coquard’s 20. I had actually thought that Cofidis had brought Coquard down under mainly to target CEGOAR, albeit on a relatively tough course (but Coquard can digest a couple of hills or three), yet it was Astana which had planned it best.

        • And we can equally see how Cofidis grabbed a 125+ bonus winning in France the GP Marseilles with Ferron, nice race with strong guys playing around a bit (nice to see Vauquelin or Seixas on show, plus Laurance whom I met while training last week in Tenerife)… same as the Spanish races? yep, but with much less WT teams in the final top-10, i.e., actually even less competitive. As I said above, Cofidis’ big jolly will be scoring at home, taking advantage of the “Lappartient effect” in points granted by French races.

    • My calculations are a team will need 27,000 points to stay up.
      That means Astana would need 13,500 points this year.
      That rate of scoring points is achieved by the teams currently ranked 8th or 9th, Groupama-FDJ and Lotto. Not teams I think of as paragons of the sport.

      By way of comparison, Decatholon went from 9,000 in 2023 to almost 16,000 points in 2024.

      Astana needs that kind of improvement.

      • I did a similar back-of-envelope calculation and came to the same conclusion. The number of points Astana need is possible for them to attain, but not easy. Will be fun to watch.

  4. I feel Astana’s primary aim would be to be one of the top 2 teams for 2025 that don’t get the world tour places based on the 3 year rankings

    At least that way, they will be guaranteed the races they want to do from the world tour next year (like lotto have done in 2023 – 2025)

    Anything else is a bonus for them.

    • That’s a good consolation case and the system does help relegated teams here. But the message they’ve been saying is World Tour, in Vinokourov’s words in L’Equipe yesterday (translated) “we have to stay in the World Tour to continue to exist”.

      • I was struck by that comment, since XDS has reportedly signed on for five years. I don’t know if Vino sold them on the sponsorship by convincing them that they would not be relegated, or what exactly is going on here. If XDS looked at the current points situation, I would think it would be clear that Astana are in serious danger. Maybe the contract has an escape clause if Astana go down? If so, Vino’s comment makes sense. Otherwise, it’s kind of a head scratcher.

  5. Can Lotto file paperwork to stay as a Pro team instead of a World Tour team? It would be a bit weird to not want to move up but budget constraints may make that a consideration.
    If Lotto stays as a Pro Team, would there be 17 WT teams? Or does that open a license to the next ranked team? Would that offer be based on points over the previous 3 years or just 2025?

    • Yes, they don’t have to move up. Promotion isn’t automatic, it’s elective and also the UCI is supposed to review the candidate team’s budget for the year.

      Under the rules there would be 17 teams in the World Tour and because of this three automatic invites to grand tours based off the 2025 rankings alone to ProTeams, instead of two.

      Hopefully Lotto do resolve their financial situation but they don’t have the funds today to run a World Tour calendar and are turning down races to save cash.

  6. Am I wrong in thinking that it’s actually better to be 19th or 20th? You have the freedom to pick and choose which races to go to (and probably more importantly NOT go to)? Possible that this is what Astana are attempting to do?

    • Not entirely wrong, that´s for sure. But the thing is, being 19th or 20th is good only for one season, whereas 17th or 18th gives a guarantee for three years.

      And it´s one thing to be fairly certain that the next season will bring, at the very least, another 19th or 20th position – and quite another to have to worry about losing a sponsor and not finding another as good, losing top riders and failing to attract new ones, while there are hungry, ambitious PRT teams with sponsors with deeper pockets that threaten to outrace you.

      • Yes, it can work as the team need not spend as much on a roster and can target the race it wants to suit the sponsors etc… but it’s the risk. See Q36.5 signing Pidcock, Tudor sign Hirschi and Alaphilippe etc, a team banking on being 19th can quickly slip to 21st because of other teams eating their lunch, or injuries etc.

        Astana do say it’s got to be the World Tour although they will hardly say otherwise.

Comments are closed.