The 2026 season has finished and here is a look at the UCI rankings for the year. There’s the three year promotion and relegation contest to note. More immediately we can see which teams are eligible for invites to the major races next year, assuming they’re viable.
The chart shows the top-30 teams, blue are the 18 WorldTeams, red are the second-tier ProTeams.
UAE lead the rankings for the fourth straight year while Red Bull are second, a big gain from sixth last year and with help from Remco Evenepoel and his score of over 7,000 points. Visma-Lease a Bike slip to third, the first time outside the top two since 2021 and are set to go into 2027 as Team Yellow B, the name of the legal entity behind them as there’s no news on a search for a replacement title sponsor yet but they’re undewritten by Dutch billionaire Robert van der Wallen.
Decathlon-CMA CGM are up from seventh to fourth, in part thanks to their nouveau riche status but signing Olav Kooij on a mega contract has only brought 1,600 points after he resumed racing mid-season; Felix Gall delivered double that and Tobias Lund delivered more points than Kooij too, all while Paul Seixas is their obvious big scorer but not yet their big earner as contract talks continue.
Elsewhere Lidl-Trek are a flop in fifth, this is visible in the rankings but see the internation ructions with management this year and the shopping spree they’ve been on lately. XDS-Astana played the system well last year to stay in the top flight and have kept this up.
Netcompany-Ineos finish the season in eighth, their worst position since… well last year when they were eighth too which was their lowest since the UCI team rankings started a decade go.
Uno-X have done well. 11th last year was impressive and gave them just enough points to pip Cofidis for the World Tour but this late promotion could have overwhelmed them. Instead they’ve finished 10th and got some high profile wins, built a foundation to secure them in the coming seasons and all retaining an underdog image.
Alpecin-PremierTech finish 11th. Their top scorer is… Jasper Philipsen who scored 3,665 points compared to 3,404 for Mathieu van der Poel. The pair earned two thirds of the team’s points.
Next come a bunch of teams with little more than a thousand points between Movistar and Cofidis. Movistar owe plenty to Enric Mas who got a quarter of their haul thanks to his Vuelta a España win but also second in Lombardia and more. Kudos if you can know their second-best scorer, it’s Natnael Tesfatsion. EF were lingering in 21st place at times during the year but have moved up only they lose Richard Carapaz and clearly the search for a replacement title sponsor has yet to find one, perilous but Jayco only have one year’s funding from sugardaddy Gerry Ryan to bank on so they’re arguably in even more need of something and a reminder that while these rankings look back at 2026 we need to see the teams as much for what is coming next.
Promotion-relegation
The red line sits between 18th and 19th place and marks the promotion and relegation zone but we’ve just finished the first year of the 2026-2028 cycle. Pinarello-Q36.6 and Tudor look set to join the World Tour for 2029 especially as they’ve made strong signings for next year so ought to score more. NSN will hope that signing Richard Carapaz gives them a boost.
Groupama-FDJ are in trouble but only 500 points adrift, so trouble rather than doom. Saying it’s only one year and there’s time to turn things around may prove comforting but there’s little to suggest they can reverse the trend. Romain Grégoire is a big scorer for them and so they’re at risk if he is injured in the spring; they’ve lost big names like Stefan Küng and Valentin Madouas but the budget has not been deployed on big scorers, much of it gobbled up by contract inflation.
Auto Invites
Assuming 18 teams in the World Tour then under rule 2.1.007 bis the best three teams outside the World Tour get automatic invitations to World Tour stage races and one day events: this is Pinarello-Q36.5, Tudor and Cofidis. These are elective, for example this year Cofidis could have ridden the Giro but declined. But team management has said it intends to do the Giro in 2027, both title sponsor Cofidis and their equipment suppliers all have business interests there.
Wildcards
Under the same UCI rule there are two wildcard invites for a grand tour next year, as long as it makes the top-30 in this year’s final rankings. Alas Bardiani-CSF slipped to 31st at the last minute so a Giro d’Italia without the green-clad squad looks likely for the first time since 2012. Organisers RCS will likely pick among Unibet Rose Rockets, Polti-Kometa, SolutionTech-Nippo-Rali and MHB CSB Telecom Fort. However we shall have to see for the viability of these candidates, Polti may have stopped as a sponsor; Telecom Fort too and so on. RCS doesn’t have to decide yet.
Vuelta a España organisers Unibet have tended to rotate among the Spanish teams and thanks to some eleventh hour wins in Panama last weekend, Euskaltel-Euskadi move up to 29th place and look likely to get an invite, given Mikel Landa as a their new signing. Caja Rural sat out this year’s Vuelta so could start especially as 27th placed Kern Pharma is stopping. But Burgos-Burpellet-BH have been bolstering their squad.
Which teams go to the Tour de France? Total Energies may not survive, more on this below. Unibet Rose Rockets could be a pick especially if they can say “no thanks” to the Giro to better save themselves for July but they don’t have a must-have roster and their selling point of being strong on social media is no asset given the Tour hardly needs a boost here but in the past Christian Prudhomme has used the UCI rankings as a yardstick, it was cited as one reason why Caja Rural got invited this year instead of the Rockets and if so then the Franco-Dutch team qualifies. Burgos-Burpellet-BH have signed French riders from the Total Energies exodus but the Tour is a big ask.
UCI Licence Review
Made sense of it all so far? It’s not certain that the teams cited above are all licenced for 2027. Yesterday evening the UCI published the list of teams applying for next season and there was a gap between the number of teams applying and the amount listed in the press release. Jayco and Picnic-PostNL were missing from the World Tour teams; TotalEnergies absent among the ProTeams. It happens, teams may not be able to send every document ahead of the 15 October deadline and have until December to fix this. We know Jayco’s finances are tight and Picnic-PostNL are struggling on several fronts; the Dutch team got a warning last year from the governing body about its viability already.
Total Energies is the one that looks in real trouble. We know the French oil major is stopping sponsorship having pivoted to fund Netcompany-Ineos. Team founder Jean-René Bernaudeau has talked a good game lately saying he’s lodged a wage guarantee and other paperwork with the UCI but what’s missing is a title sponsor contract. Only this is fundamental to the team’s future. It’s here there’s a Catch-22 scenario because the team is eligible to for a Tour de France wildcard if they can find a main sponsor to keep the show on the road. But this may not be sufficient, if the roster is weak then ASO may just prefer another team. But there’s a prize awaiting: a viable title sponsor, a couple of signings and it’s bonjour to the Tour for 2027 and beyond. This is appealing but these deals typically take years or months to land and there are only weeks left.
Conclusion
These rankings can tell us which teams had a good season or not but they’re also used for next year and beyond. Pinarello-Q36.5 and Tudor are looking like World Tour teams already, their signings for next year consolidate this and they can and will race all the major events in 2027.
Outside of the World Tour there’s a tricky game of musical chairs where only a few surviving teams compete for the places left. If Euskaltel-Euskadi get to ride the Vuelta next year then Gotzon Martín’s win last weekend in the 2.2 Clásica Provincia de Chiriquí delivered this, arguably more than signing Mikel Landa. If teams are trying to game the system and going to far-flung places, well it’s not a bad outcome to populate smaller races as a way of attending the bigger ones.
All teams face two races, the one to win events, land results, earn publicity and with this to get the points they need whether to top the table or qualify for races or the World Tour. The second race is existential, to be a viable team and to stay on the road. Here the promotion and relegation race ahead is fraught because some teams racing this year will no longer be around by 2029 or perhaps earlier.