Who will go up? Who will come down? It’s the season of all dangers in the peloton: “We see that the world ranking reflects the budget”

What strategy?

To prepare for 2025, sports directors on the job have already established clear objectives for maintenance. Like Arkéa B&B Hotels, 19th for the moment, more than 2,300 points behind Cofidis, first non-relegable. “We are going to reduce our number of racing days compared to previous years, to be much more efficient”informs us Didier Rous, sports director of the Breton team. In 2024, the French team ranked number one in the category of teams with the most distance traveled with 314,324 kilometers, just ahead of… Cofidis. A strategy which is not bearing fruit, since the two teams were the lowest ranked in 2024 at the WT level. “We didn’t necessarily have the squad to be competitive in all the races we took part in. We are going to refocus our forces with a view to scoring a lot more points,” Rous specifies.

The World Tour, a poisoned chalice?

It remains to be seen whether being part of the World Tour is a good or bad situation. Particularly when you don’t have the budget, and de facto the workforce, to compete with the top teams. “We see that the world ranking reflects the budget”slips us the DS of the Breton team. In four years, the total budget of World Tour teams has soared to 570 million euros, an increase of more than 200 million, driven by rich sponsors like Lidl, Red Bull and Decathlon. Which created a gap between the richest and the rest.

Search for a partner, impact of the departure of Van Gils and extension of Widar: CEO Stéphane Heulot prefaces Lotto’s “transition season”

Lotto, which has been at the Pro Tour level since 2023, does not yet have the requirement of having to compete in all the higher level races. But, as it ranks among the two best teams in the second level, it receives an invitation for all World Tour classified races with the possibility of declining the invitations. A privilege which will be taken away from 2026, since the Belgian team will move up a notch next year. It will then be necessary to meet the standards to be able to survive the laundry that the highest level can represent. “2025 is a year of transition. We aim to return to the World Tour to perform there. Not just to survive”, said Stéphane Heulot, the sports director, on this subject.

“Pogi Team” ready for maintenance?

Will Tadej Pogacar stay at World Tour level? This question clearly reflects the gap that separates the best teams or the richest, it depends, from those who are fighting at the back of the pack. The Slovenian, with 19,350 points amassed over the last two seasons, would, if it were a team on its own, be 17th in the World Tour rankings ahead of Cofidis, Arkéa B&B Hotels and DSM Firmenich Post NL, in particular. A remarkable fact when we know that “Pogi” only takes part in a few races, where the three other teams mentioned eat up the kilometers.

More than ever in 2025, teams on the razor’s edge will have to act by calculation.