We’ve started the first year of a three year promotion and relegation cycle. As a result the urgency and desperation is gone. Keep an eye on two things instead: financial health of the World Tour teams and the jostling teams in the second division.
Scoring recap
Riders get points from the results in UCI races as set out here for the men and here for the women. The team scores are the combined total of the best 20 riders for men’s teams and the best 10 riders for women. Teams are then ranked on their combined scores for three seasons. The top-18 teams are eligible for the men’s World Tour, the top-15 for the women’s Wold Tour.
These rankings are updated here every Tuesday by the UCI, other sites keep a record too but the UCI is the official one and includes points deducted by commissaires that don’t always get picked up by results; but even the UCI tables can have mistakes.
New 2026-2028 cycle
Human nature means deadlines matter more the closer they get and we’re at the start of the 2026-2028 cycle. Anecdotally though there’s more urgency among teams with management acutely aware of the need to score now. Gone are the days when team managers didn’t know which year of the relegation cycle they were in, now they’re more likely to know precisely how many points a rider will get for sixth place in a 1.Pro race. Calendar choices and race schedules are being made with points in mind for plenty of teams.
The relegation race is real
If Pinarello-Q36.5 and Tudor Pro Cycling look and feel like World Tour outfits then which two teams currently sitting in the World Tour risk will lose their places to the them? To speculate Groupama-FDJ and Picnic-PostNL fared worst last year, look weak today and have concerns about whether they’ll exist come 2029, but feel free to cite other teams. Plenty of men’s teams don’t have to worry about relegation but almost half of the 18 ought to.
But who survives?
Indeed three years is a long way out and unlike other promotion and relegation contests in different sports pro cycling has an existential one where who knows which teams will still be around in 2029? Last year’s Race for Survival post needs an update as a whole separate post. Finances and relegation are intertwined, teams can’t hire big scorers; sponsors won’t stay if they’re getting less for more.
Why all this?
The World Tour promotion-relegation system gets blamed but surely it has to exist in some form? Some team owners howl that unlike other sports they don’t have ticket revenue and get little in TV rights income but they do have one big implicit asset: guaranteed entry to the Tour de France. Like it or not, the French race counts for vast majority of a team’s media exposure and by extension the rationale for team sponsorship. Square this and a team becomes a durable, if brittle, proposition.
Given the sport’s structure won’t change overnight, some sort of ranking system seems fair where stronger teams can replace weaker ones. Doing this over three seasons allows for an annus horribilis and for teams to recruit their way out of trouble. Ranking teams based on a lot of their riders still means some can be tasked with helper roles and adds a depth to the count rather than basing it of a handful of top scorers which would reward the winners even more.
All this is done with rules and handled by the UCI. It’s surely better than race organisers subjectively awarding invites; or worse corrupted by pay-to-play (we see this where some team sponsors become race sponsors: never mind making additional revenues, this reveals how teams will actually pay if they can).
Soft landings
Relegated teams are not cast into the wilderness either, they should qualify for automatic invites to the major races.
A means to an end
Being a top team is not the point it itself, the right to compete in the best events is just the start, it’s the ability to deliver here that really counts. The story of Arkéa-B&B Hotels is illustrative, it targetted a lot of smaller races to score big during the 2020-2022 cycle and won promotion. Only on moving up it won just once in the World Tour and faced with the rising costs and shrinking results the team folded. Teams need a plan and matching resources to thrive in the World Tour.
Reform it?
The system can’t be perfect and is not set in stone but there are few obvious tweaks. Teams travelling far to score points in races where many of their peers are absent is gaming the system; but then again it’s also a boost for races on the Asian calendar that can hope to attract more teams. Teams having to score points in small races can have an opportunity cost as it tires riders to chase points; but this only happens when a team is not winning points in the big races.
Instead calls for reform are likely to be more radical, like a franchise system where teams face no jeopardy but that’s a whole other blog post. You can see the gains in stability but the risks where teams go stale but hog their spot and can’t be replaced by new entrants.
Women’s World Tour
Last year VolkerWessels were declined promotion. This means 14 teams in the Women’s World Tour when the rules allow 15. It suggests there’s not much of a cliff edge and a team outside of the World Tour can find advantages, securing invites to races it wants while declining to take part in events where its sponsors have little interest and ensuring the roster isn’t overstretched by a long calendar.
The women’s relegation race is less intense, if no team wants to move up then relegation is less of a worry. For now though as there are plans for more women’s teams to launch next year and this could change the equilibrium. This could mark more competitive tension compared to the men but again it also depends on the financial viability of all teams.
The immediate action is over the one year rankings
Teams outside of the World Tour need to finish in the top-3 in order to get an automatic invite to the World Tour races. Tudor and Q36.5 ought to qualify here but can Cofidis join them? They’re racing against TotalEnergies and Unibet Rose Rockets for this spot with the possibility of Caja Rural, Kern Pharma or Burgos Burgpellet BH scoring if they get a metaphorical tailwind.
There’s also secondary contest here where to be eligible for a grand tour invite a team must be inside the top-30, this is a real pressure for the likes of Burgos and Bardiani.
Conclusion
A stressful system for team managers but given the structure of the sport is not going to change overnight then promotion and relegation is here to stay.
Three years out from the next cut means the contest is a background story this season. Keep an eye on the team rankings from time to time but this blog won’t be doing weekly updates. For now Jayco are off to a great start while Picnic-PostNL are struggling… but it’s mid-February.
It’s just as worth watching the financial health of teams to see if they’ll exist come 2029 but finances correlate with scores. Teams struggling to deliver results will find it hard to tap sponsors for more. It’s this that can change the equilibrium and come 2029 it might be budget and viability that weighs on promotion and relegation more than UCI points but given no team should plan on rivals imploding they’re all chasing points.
I’ve spent so much time over the last year reading about points in general & Astana’s hunt for points in particular that while I was watching the Olympic ice skating yesterday when a Kazakh skater was doing his routine I found myself automatically wondering how many points he’d pick up for the team!
this is an excellent comment.
made me laugh out loud.
i love cycling but these points updates (from all cycling writers/podcasters not just INRNG, who is as always the most incisive, informative and brilliant of all this fantastic sports journalists) make me want to shoot myself.
The Kazakh skater ended up winning the men’s gold medal so I bet Astana were wishing they could get points from him! Though they did pretty well points wise last week as it was.
“Gone are the days when team managers didn’t know which year of the relegation cycle they were in”
Would love to know which team was this about!
PS What about riders with points won from cross, track MTB etc, isn’t this changing?
The team was EF and when I did a post about the relegation race in 2021 Jonathan Vaughters tweeted back something along the lines of I’d got the dates wrong and there was an extra year to go. Alas there wasn’t, and so a shock for him as his team was 12th out of 18th with one season remaining and so at risk of relegation. An illustration if you like as teams have all changed and those that need to be are well aware of where every point can be won and lost.
As for the other disciplines, good point but this isn’t happening in 2026. It is due for 2027. The UCI promised to run simulations over the winter so we should see the points scale outside of road cycling published during the year. Hopefully very soon too in case teams are interested in hiring a track or MTB specialist for a points boost.
It’s a chance for the UCI to promote some events but can it avoid a “rich get richer” scenario the extra points go to Van der Poel, Van Aert, Pidcock, Milan, Kopecky, Ganna etc?
“It’s a chance for the UCI to promote some events but can it avoid a “rich get richer” scenario the extra points go to Van der Poel, Van Aert, Pidcock, Milan, Kopecky, Ganna etc?”
It depends what the goal of the move is.
If it to incentivise releasing riders to compete in other disciplines and for national teams, then the method would be to issue the team fixed bonus payments for each other race a rider enters in the road off-season and for national team races on the road.
And if the goal is to incentivise contributing to the sport, why not also award bonuses for running a development team and a women’s team?
If the goal is better recognition of elite performance, then the points scale will recognise race results, and the best riders (i.e. the “rich”) will get the most points from it.
Having not been introduced in time for the start of the 2026-28 Technical Ranking, points from other disciplines shouldn’t be considered for WorldTeam only be introduced to the Technical Ranking for the 2029-31 cycle. Changing the rules mid-stream is opening up the possibility of legal challenges from teams that get relegated.
Last paragraph meant to say
Having not been introduced in time for the start of the 2026-28 Technical Ranking, points from other disciplines shouldn’t be considered for WorldTeam qualification this time around. They should only be introduced to the Technical Ranking for the 2029-31 cycle. Changing the rules mid-stream is opening up the possibility of legal challenges from teams that get relegated.
I can see your point but announcing it ahead of introducing it can work too, a challenge isn’t automatic. But it would have better to have announced it in 2024 and start it now… or wait as you say for equality and planning.
But it wasn’t announced in time, so it would not be competent administration to change the rules mid-stream.
Making up the rules as they went along is what forced the UCI into having 19 WorldTour teams in 2013 when Katusha was reinstated by court order, reversing the WorldTour reform plans to accommodate Dimension Data in 2017 (at the time the UCI President’s son was working for the team) and then having 19 teams again in 2020-21.
A legal challenge would be near enough to automatic if the changes were brought in and Pinarello-Q36.5 got promoted at the expense of another team, as the losing team would be able to argue this scheme is basically a special rule for Tom Pidcock. And the general rule with legal challenges against the UCI is that the other party can win just by staying in the fight long enough that the UCI has to start thinking about how many lawyer’s hours they can get by mortgaging the Aigle velodrome.
Best if they get phased in carefully, applying only to the single year world rankings in 2027 and 2028, then potentially including them in the Technical Ranking in the next cycle.
What’s the compensation like for team principals or ‘executives’ like JV? I’ve read he has somewhat extravagant taste in food, clothes, and wine. It would be interesting to understand how his compensation is structured (salary, bonuses, eats and treats budgets, etc.) If they view themselves as team CEO’s, their compensation and lifestyles can’t be cheap.
It depends on the teams, some are owners while others – like Vaughters – are managers. But there’s little market here, it’s more dependent on the situation. Dave Brailsford can command plenty, Thor Hushovd less.
If you are a manager than can land a sponsorship deal worth tens of millions and then assume responsibility for overseeing the delivery of this then you’re entitled to a %.
One of the big drivers of the breakaway leagues has been team owners trying get the equity in their teams to be valuable when often owning a team hasn’t been valuable by itself; but it’s brought 20 years of salary etc.
“Some team owners howl that unlike other sports they don’t have ticket revenue and get little in TV rights income”
But they also don’t pay for the venue unlike other sports. When they form organisations like One-Cycling they rapidly discover that organising races is tough; it requires a lot of interaction with government, costs a lot of time and money, and largely only happens due to the support of barely volunteers.
Which is why their plans involve racing on motor circuits etc as this is a closed space, you can have ticketing and it can be safer too. But it can make for dry racing as a tight corner in an F1 GP is a wide bend in a bike race etc.
Back to rankings and points, the plans also include a lot of effort to create, sustain and reward an alternative rankings system but nobody inside cycling follows the rankings much except for these relegation contests and then this is tangential. So content for niche blogs, less so for the wider public.
The idea of the awarding of points across mixed disciplines is appealing, but I don’t see it working well. Despite the cross-over we see (mostly in Europe) with road and gravel, there’s not a huge number of riders in total doing both, let alone CX, XC as well.
But it leads to the idea of the best ‘pound for pound’ bike rider. Though how could we ever decide this pound for pound raking. It’s subjective. That’s why we need Inrng InrRankings – just like boxing’s Ring Magazine Rankings.
If you don’t want to use the UCI rankings to assess who is the best cyclist, then Vélo d’Or also give an award for the best cyclist each year. While this award is restricted to road cycling, the other disciplines are really pretty much amateur with the odd person making enough to race full-time (if they don’t have a road contract).
Ah, the classic ignorant ‘roadie’. Go and do some research and you’ll realise there’s talent outside the World Tour……
Cycling isn’t just about watts, FTP, W/kg…….but the cycling media/ world have convinced you it is.
World Tour cyclists are supreme athletes, but not all are great cyclists, many are poor skills wise; they’re not all like Pidcock or MvdP……..and even MvdP has struggled in recent XCO races as his skills have gone rusty……
How offensive. You may not like it, but road cycling pays high salaries and has full-time paid cyclists; with nearly 1000 paid full-time professionals. Anyone who can, will end up in road racing.
There is enough money in cyclo-cross such that the top 20-30 riders can be full-time (at least if they race in Belgium). But the very best cyclo-cross cyclists make most of their money by riding for road teams. In the other cycling disciplines, a handful of the top riders are basically grifting to make enough to get by, the other riders are more-or-less amateur and have a regular job to support themselves.
As stated: the Vélo d’Or awards a prize to whom they consider to be the best cyclist each year, but they restrict their attention to road racing. Road racing not only requires watts, but also tactical skills, and positioning/peloton skills (where bike handling is very important). The different kind of handling skills used in cyclo-cross or mountain-biking are still important in road racing, but less so than in the other cycling disciplines.
“The different kind of handling skills used in cyclo-cross or mountain-biking are still important in road racing, but less so than in the other cycling disciplines.”
Tell us you have never seen a track race without telling us that you’ve never seen one. Most roadies wouldn’t survive 10 rounds of a Madison or elimination race
i presume the purpose is to reduce the reasons that teams have to stop there riding competing.
This is similar to awarding points for NC and worlds. Its not a fairness or competition thing its simply to get better fields in the promoted races.
If the rider can score points many teams may think that is a good bet,
With two less teams the fight for the top 30 will have a bit more breathing room, potentially.
What happens if Picnic is denied a WT license upon review of finances at the end of the year? 17 teams in the WT?
Is Total Energies expected to close up shop at the end of the year? Or is the team looking for a new sponsor?
The UCI will accept applications for another team to replace Picnic for 2027-28, just as they will be doing for the 15th Women’s WorldTour spot.
They can have 17 teams too, the rules allow for this.
As for Total, there’s no news of a replacement. In the past teams would unveil sponsors at the Tour or even later but things are different now, the deal whether announced or not, needs to be in place soon. Otherwise all their best riders with contracts expiring – and that’s most – will be looking elsewhere now and could sign elsewhere by the spring. Which leaves a less exciting team for any replacement sponsor which makes it a harder sell, a spiral.
They can do that, but the signals being received by ProTeams are strongly pointing towards the UCI opening applications for the spot.
Towards the end you touch on another issue that is only going to grow in its impact on cycling – the increasing use of rider contracts as just a starting point for the next negotiations and the decreasing power of the UCI to exert any control over that in the face of liberal labour laws in Western Europe.
How will this additional WTT be chosen? Do they have some rules to determine which team gets upgraded? Or will it be a matter of which team buys Picnic to merge with them?
If a new owner buys Picnic ahead of whatever review deadline the UCI has set, then the team could continue – potentially under new branding.
If they fail the review, the UCI (via its control of the Professional Cycling Council) will allow teams to apply for the vacant position and will set terms. Applications will be assessed to verify if they meet the essential criteria, and if there is more than one team applying then the sporting criterion will be used as the tie-breaker.
A fascinating article and subject and, as IR appears to suggest, a broadly fair system.
As a PicnicPostNL fan it sounds as if I should worry. Degenkolb and Barguil will drift into retirement, Poole will be coveted by other teams, but many others will be uneasy.
For how long will Ratcliffe continue to throw his diminishing but still considerable riches at Ineos? The publicity, even if it’s good, can’t help his company much and he doesn’t appear a natural fan of the sport.
I suppose it’s to be expected this early in the season, but many of the recent results indicate that teams are really struggling to get things figured out with their new lineups. Lots of weird results with leadouts bearing down on the winners but just missing out. Seems like only a few teams (Bora being the best so far) have come in ready to go.
So each race is really two races – one for the podium (price money, pictures, and glory) and one for the teams (overall points). When will we see race reports with not only the top 10 finishers, but also the top 5 or 10 teams and their points gained? To better appreciate and understand those numbers, we’d also need a basis of comparison – maybe the average number of points gained per team over the last three editions of the race?
I had similar thoughts. No need to go overboard but I think the points should at least feature in the “classement” tables.