World Tour Relegation Update

Two months of the season to go and here’s a look at the standings in the promotion and relegation race. Things are close at the bottom end of the table with events off the road as well as likely as racing results to impact the outcomes.

As things stand Lotto and Israel-PremierTech get promoted as they are among the top-18 teams on the basis of their cumulative points score from 2023, 2024 and 2025. Meanwhile Cofidis and Arkéa-B&B Hotels get relegated. However this scenario looks like it won’t stand…

Arkéa-B&B Hotels is set to lose both sponsors. Team manager Emmanuel Hubert keeps pushing back the date when he’ll announce the team has run out of road for 2026, loyal readers will remember April was the first deadline, then the Tour, then the end of the women’s Tour was the deadline and now there’s no news. Could the team be saved? Yes is the simple answer, if someone reading wants to give them €20 million then they can ride on. More realistically they might try and salvage something, perhaps the women’s team?

The men’s team still has a hope too because of the points. Because while it faces relegation Kévin Vauquelin’s parting gift is a stack of UCI points which means that as of today it could be eligible for a Tour de France invite next year; but the real deadline is the end of the season and things are tight, it’s not a golden ticket that an incoming sponsor should bank on.

Cofidis are below the red line after a lacklustre Tour de France while relegation rivals Picnic-PostNL soared away. So they’re facing relegation. There is still a path to remain in the World Tour but it’s tricky. First they could overtake Intermarché-Wanty but that alone is a hard ask, the French team started the year 1,865 points behind, now they are 1,142 and so the trend says they won’t close the gap with only two months of racing left.

Instead Cofidis’ better hope for Intermarché is that the Belgian team merges with Lotto in time for 2026 which frees up a space in the World Tour for the French team currently in 19th place so it would sit in 18th place and thus the World Tour.

Only here come Uno-X. They started the season almost 3,000 points behind Cofidis and are now just 263 points short. So that 18th place could well go to the Norwegian team instead leaving Cofidis relegated. Uno-X say they are interested in the World Tour, it would give them guaranteed Tour starts from 2026-2028 rather than chasing wildcards each season, especially with rivals like Tudor and Q36.5 on the up too; but it’s costly to race everywhere for sponsors that only have an interest in their home markets.

The Intermarché-Lotto merger probably needs to happen for both teams to shore up their financing. Mergers only work by as a means of consolidating sponsorship, putting two teams of 25-30 riders together must result in a team of 25-30 riders so this is a fraught prospect just for the riders. Talks are still ongoing, Intermarché is very much Jean-François Bourlart’s team and a squad that can trace its origins out of a local cycling club. Lotto meanwhile is the longest-running title sponsor in the sport going back to 1985 but the involvement of the state lottery means it comes with political oversight, a polite way of saying some politicians want to meddle with the team. Reading the Belgian press it seems likely to happen but is far from a done deal.

If it doesn’t happen there’s a chance that Lotto has to turn down World Tour promotion because it can’t afford to race everywhere all the time; and Intemarché could even be overtaken by other teams, get relegated and because it’s having a dire time, not be eligible for automatic invites next year either. This is getting highly conditional, a what-if scenario raised by another one but still only one or two outcomes away from reality.

The 2026 Grand Tour Invite Race
If the World Tour has 18 teams then five more teams are eligible to ride the Tour de France, the sport’s golden ticket. Three places go to the best team on the 2025 rankings: currently Uno-X, Tudor and Arkéa.

But here comes a brain-frazzling chain of unstable scenarios because if Lotto and Intermarché merge then Uno-X could join the World Tour… while Arkéa-B&B Hotels could stop which means the three teams for 2026 are Tudor, Cofidis and Q36.5. Meanwhile the French team is only 440 points clear of Q36.5 and so these two teams have plenty to race for in case one link in the chain of events doesn’t happen.

Conclusion
There’s only two months of racing left to the season but arguably the situation for promotion, relegation and the allocation of invites for 2026 is more uncertain today than it was at the start of the year. There are a lot of what-if conditional scenarios now regarding a Lotto-Intermarché rescue merger, if it doesn’t happen it could be tricky for both teams, but also others too. Rather than needing a calculator or a spreadsheet to tot up the points, it’s also down to more factors.

But there is also plenty to race for in the coming weeks. Uno-X, Cofidis and Q36.5 face a crucial period where results could determine their calendar for next year and beyond.

42 thoughts on “World Tour Relegation Update”

  2. Thank you, once more, for this!
    Lotto are doing so badly this year, if the merger didn’t happen and they didn’t apply for promotion, they’d be in danger of not getting an invite to the Tour, I assume? And so that might affect their calculations.
    More generally I wonder about that old question, the total number of WT teams. Given the shortage of sponsors, the financial strain on some teams, the increasing gap between the richest and poorest, increasingly reflected in results, contracts and transfers (as in the Cycling is the new football post), and given that some riders, at least, associate larger start fields with more dangerous riding, perhaps it would make sense to reduce the number of WT teams to 15 or 16, and the number of teams at the start of big races to 20?

    • Lotto are having a dire season, fewer points than Total Energies and Caja Rural could overtake them with a good Vuelta; although De Lie is looking good for the rest of the season now. But it means they’re far from the automatic invites if they can’t sustain promotion.

      As for shrinking the number of teams, which ones would you condemn at a stroke of your pen? 😉

      So far though we might see some teams go like Arkéa but new ones are coming to take their place and look better, eg Q36.5, Tudor, Uno-X etc. But then comes the question is if these teams to move up, where are the replacement second tier teams to take their place and compete for wildcards etc?

      • Five years ago Q36 and Tudor didn’t exist and Uno-X were just finishing their first season as a ProTeam. If I were the UCI I wouldn’t want to be complacent – the UCI compacent? Never! 😄 – but I could as easily see this as an example of opportunities for ambitious, well-run, well-funded second tier teams coming through reasonably quickly as wonder where the next ones could possibly come from.

        Israel too. They started off with a gimmicky endorsement from Sagan not that long ago, went up to the World Tour for the plague year, got relegated at least partly because they seemed to be running a retirement home as much as a cycling team, and have now bounced back at the first time of asking, just like Lotto. Sugar daddies may not be the ideal way to fund a cycling team but they don’t all walk away like Tinkoff and, again if I were the UCI, I could easily argue that the incentivisation from the promotion/relegation system works in keeping committed funders on-board and getting them to run their teams better.

        Which brings us back to Astounding Astana …………………………….

    • The problem with reducing the number of teams, is that you’re then condemning dozens of riders and dozens of support staff to unemployment (or at the very least, demotion). Not an easy thing to push ahead with.

  4. There are obviously a lot of factors outside of racing that will impact how things look next year, but the racing has the potential to be really interesting for the rest of the season too. Onley showed how one big result in a GT can change the course of the season for a struggling team. I don’t see much gc hope in the Vuelta for the lesser teams (I’m not a big Pidcock believer), but you never know. The late-season Canadian, Italian and Chinese(!) races could really mean something this year.

  5. Don‘t they have a new wildcard rule for the grandtours? The third wildcard is gifted to the team with the third highest points from the year before? That rule puts Arkea back into the tour at the moment.

    If intermarche and lotto merge don’t they sell the worldtour spot?

    • > If intermarche and lotto merge don’t they sell the worldtour spot?

      No.

      The actual way this will work is that only one of the two teams will apply for a WorldTeam licence (with the financial side of things aided by sponsors formerly aligned to the other team) while the other one will close down.

      It’s important to remember that the sporting criterion only exists as a tie breaker for use in the event that there are more than 18 teams which meet all the other criteria.

    • It’s three – double-checked this while doing the post, but still wrote it up as two, doh.

      For the merger it depends which licence is retained with the existing team, is the Lotto one or the Intermarché one? If it is Lotto then the Intermarché one could in theory be sold, it has value. This is how Intermarché got into the World Tour as it bought the old BMC/CCC team licence and the legal entity is still “Continuum Sports Belgium”, the company set up by Jim “Och” Ochowitz.

  6. Is the 440 point gap between Cofidis and Q36.5 up to date enough to reflect the Hamburg result, and the 400 odd points that Q36.5 collected?

    • Yes, it is. Third position in the year ranking is important for Cofidis. So they would be invited to all world tour races.

      Interesting would be, what will happen with the new us pro team. Is it possible to merge with arkea?

      • The new US Pro team, Modern Adventure Pro cycling, has very low ambitions for right now. Go look at their plan they basically don’t really want to be competitive until the 3 yr cycle that starts 3 years from now. It is cool that they are signing US riders, the initial batch seems to be riders that haven’t tapped their full abilities yet. ( assuming the 16 signing rumors are accurate). One can hope the international riders might make a mark along with a few US guys initially.

        They won’t have near the budget as companies backed by large conglomerates, or billionaires that want to promote ethno nationalism. I personally like cheering for underdogs in contrast to the vanity projects.

    • Yes, I waited for Tuesday as this is when the official rankings come out from the UCI, they’re better than calculating it yourself or using a cycling results website’s attempt as the official ones normal include UCI points penalties from race juries etc… but even the UCI version can vary and teams might lobby to ensure each rider gets their due points.

  7. Groupama-FDJ were lucky to have a cushion at the start of 2025 as this season has been dire. For 2026 they are losing Askey and probably Kung, two of their top points scorers. In 2026 they will have Martin and Gregoire for the hilly and stage races but what about Paris-Roubaix etc? They must feel frustrated having had Martinez, Pithie, Stewart, Watson and Askey through the Conti ranks and lost them all. Is it purely a budget problem? Today they even missed the split in Limousin-Perigord and couldn’t place better than fifteenth.

    • Yeah, for 2023 their only incoming riders were the seven they promoted from their development team including Gregoire, Martinez, Pithie and Watson. Admirable, sure, but bold and risky too. An in-depth conversation with Madiot about that decision, its outcomes, its ramifications, its lessons, etc. would likely be very interesting.

    • I wonder how much their ability to keep riders is down to French teams having to pay a larger proportion of their wage bill towards French social security and if this decreases the salaries they can afford to pay their riders? Are rider salaries lower on French vs other teams?

  8. The Vuelta, with it’s daily Grand Tour point hauls and potential payoff at the end, could be play a big role in the end of season point race.

    Uno-X won’t be there, giving Cofidis a chance to get some room in the 3 yr cycle
    Cofidis will be there, but how are they set for chasing points?
    Q365 is there with GC aims, and could see a decent haul of points

      • It might not be his thing but if he does it he can earn the team a Tour de France start; they might get invited anyway but they’d prefer to know soon and be certain. This doesn’t mean winning… but 7th = 340 points, comparable to two stage wins (360).

      • Yeah. He had all the freedom he wanted at Ineos but left for more freedom. Some people even started saying he left partly because they were forcing him to go for GC in the Tour de France when he didn’t want to, though I remember him saying multiple times that this was his ambition. Then he goes for GC at the Giro. Or was it stages? Or was it GC after all? The answers seemed to vary according to what day of the week it was. And now he’s going for GC at the Vuelta at least plausibly, as INRNG says, because his team requires him to do so. But he left Ineos for more freedom. And don’t get me started on that interview with Sans Vega back at the start of the season about how Pidcock is one of the Big 5 in cycling. He may know and understand what he’s doing but I’m lost in the wheels of confusion and he seems to me to have a different story for every set of eyes.

        • Pidcock left Ineos because he wanted to be team leader in all the races he enters. Ineos thought they had other, better, GC-riders and thought he should sometimes support them rather than going for his own goals.

          • Love it Anon. He really made a poor decision to speak his mind in the Netflix doc; he came out looking like a pretty immature kid. His talent has overcome his questionable temperament at times, but he’s going to have to produce a lot more to prove that he is what he thinks he is.

  9. Do you think Arkea would have been in a better place if it weren’t World Tour right now? How much is their obligation to ride every WT race adding to their financial woes?

    • They have the cash right now. But one problem was they rode well to get into the World Tour but this was as if it was the end, rather than a means to something and they’ve not done much in the three years when they moved up. The recruitment decisions they made didn’t pay off, eg Démare.

  10. Decathlon are the team I’m interested to see what happens next year. New big money sponsor and they’re already clearing out riders (only 17 down for next year now) so I’m guessing some big name signings – maybe pick up some guys too if mergers fall through.

    • Kooij, Benoot, Lund, Bol, Ghys. Their internationalisation and upgrading both continue apace as the team is transformed from the sclerotic ways of Lavenu.

  11. A perfect photo with almost all the promotion or relegation threatened teams in one shot. Which race is it: Denain, Dunkerque, Fourmies, Roubaix..?

  13. Any info on the Total Energies team? Previously there were comments on funds going to Ineos. As a French team how likely they get an invite?

    Alepecin was rumored to be looking for a co-sponsor as well.

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