It’s too early to draw conclusions for the three year promotion and relegation cycle but here’s a look at the latest standings in chart form.
UAE are running away with almost 2,500 points on Red Bull and Tadej Pogačar has only raced once. Isaac Del Toro, Jan Christen, Jay Vine and Antonio Morgado have scored more so far.
XDS-Astana continue to grab points galore and are ahead of Visma-LAB and Decathlon-CMA CGM. The French team’s top scorer is Tobias Lund on 865 points, just with five points more than Paul Seixas. They are among the big budget teams now but remember that if they spend 80% of their budget on rider wages, a quarter of this goes on French payroll taxes. So whatever the headline, the actual spending power is about a fifth less. Today’s L’Equipe mentions they’re trying to extent title sponsorship from their existing backers until 2035 and quotes team manager Dominique Serieys saying that were Paul Seixas ever to leave the team it won’t be because of money.
Jayco have had a good start thanks in part to Mauro Schmid bringing in over 1,000 points or a third of their haul. Newly promoted Uno-X are settling in well so far.
Soudal-Quickstep sit lower than would be expected. Filippo Zana has 442 points for them thanks to the Giro di Sardegna win and 8th overall Down Under. Paul Magnier their next best scorer on 222.
Groupama-FDJ see almost half their points coming from Romain Grégoire’s strong start to the season. Off all the teams they have the biggest ratio of top rider divided by team score.
The red bars in the chart mark ProTeams, the second tier. Here Tudor, Cofidis, Pinarello-Q36.5 all sit above the line to mark 18th place and so are virtual promotion candidates. Yes there’s a long way to go but they’re doing what they need to so far.
Lidl-Trek are hardly relegation candidates but linger in 17th place. Injury and illness explains plenty with Mads Pedersen out, Thibau Nys needing surgery and Juan Ayuso leaving Paris-Nice which Mattias Skjelmose could not start. Jonathan Milan has six wins this season but they’re stage wins and he hasn’t hit the jackpot of an overall win.
The dark horizontal line marks 18th place. Lotto-Intermarché could get a boost next week from their results in the Tour de Taiwan with two stage wins so far. Alpecin-PremierTech have less to worry about given Matthew Van der Poel should score big but they’re obviously reliant on him and even Jasper Philipsen is only on 41 points.
Picnic-PostNL stand out for their struggles. A year ago they were relegation candidates but had at least scored around a thousand points to keep them in contention. Now they’re already about a thousand points adrift of relegation and are the only WorldTeam without a win so far this season.
Elsewhere…
Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber, Euskaltel-Euskadi, Flanders-Baloise, SolutionTech-Nippo-Rali and Team Novo Nordisk don’t feature on the chart as they’re outside the top-30. Eligibility for a grand tour wildcard depends on being inside.
Cycling’s second tier is shrinking and set to get smaller. There’s still no news on a replacement sponsor for Total Energies and the deal needs to be done in the coming weeks otherwise their best riders will start to sign elsewhere which in turn makes the team less attractive for a potential sponsor, creating a vicious cycle. We know Flanders-Baloise is stopping. Now Kern Pharma announced it will end its seven year sponsorship and the team barely mentioned the search for a replacement, only saying “now is an ideal team”.
Conclusion
If a picture says a 1,000 words then having seen the UCI rankings tables which come out every Tuesday it was about time to see what it looks like as a bar chart and share it. UAE have a huge gap already and Picnic-PostNL are already in trouble.