Men's WorldTour 2025 – Comprehensive team-by-team guide

The 2024 Tour de France peloton (Image credit: Getty Images)

The off-season is over and the 2025 campaign is upon us. Who will punch above their weight? Who will struggle for results? And who will even be in the WorldTour in 2026?

Indeed, relegation is one of the themes of the season, as we enter the final phase of the three-year rolling ranking that will decide the attribution of men's WorldTour licences from 2026-2028.

With little to write home about in the transfer market, the two big pieces of business have been to extend both Van der Poel’s and Philipsen’s contracts - amid competition for the latter. Classics and Sprints are the focus, then, with no great prospects in the stage racing department, but that can wait – the rise of this team to this point over the past half-decade has been nothing short of remarkable.

The French team face a stressful season, with a relegation battle that starts from day one - not to mention the sponsorship search. They managed to gain a ticket to cycling’s top tier at the expense of some big squads in 2023 but two years into the three-year ranking that will determine the 18 WorldTour licences from 2026, they sit 19th. The team struggled for wins in 2024 but the rise of Kevin Vauquelin, who won a stage of the Tour de France, was a major boost.

Losing their top 2024 points scorer, Axel Zingle, who’s off to Visma, will not help matters. Neither will losing their traditional stage race leader, Guillaume Martin, who has chipped in with Grand Tour top 10s in their colours. However, their list of signings does give cause for optimism. Dylan Teuns arrives from Bahrain Victorious (a team where likewise he was snapped up to score points) to add some top-level quality to the roster.

There were no major new signings and so the moderately priced Van Rysel bikes were credited with a remarkable upturn in results; Decathlon ended the year sixth in the UCI team rankings, increasing their 2023 UCI points haul by 50%. And now for the problem. A quarter of their points were scored by Ben O’Connor, who is moving to Jayco-AlUla. Have they lined up a replacement? No. Paul Seixas and Johannes Staune-Mittet are exciting prospects for the future but for 2025 Decathlon lack a top-level stage race rider, and a leader in general.

The bigger loss is that of Alberto Bettiol, the high-class Italian puncheur, but in comes Kasper Asgreen, a former winner of the Tour of Flanders. The Dane has laboured in the past couple of years, with no shortage of injury complications, but soared in the Classics in his pomp, and is still only 29. Can EF unlock that old magic? On a one-year punt, it’s exactly the sort of deal that manager Jonathan Vaughters has built his team on in recent years.

The other of those big four points-scorers was David Gaudu, whose struggles looked to be deepening throughout the 2024 season until he popped up with sixth at the Vuelta. Time trialling remains a major Achilles heel for the team’s stage race leader but that was at least something to build on. The new signings aren’t overly inspiring though Guillaume Martin’s move from French rivals Cofidis does catch the eye – the Frenchman is often ridiculed for his yo-yoing racing style but does attack and does occasionally scratch the top 10s in big races.

The paucity of big wins came with a rolling snowball of negative headlines, from the MIA Steve Cummings to the controversy surrounding the de-selection of Tom Pidcock at Il Lombardia and the British star’s subsequent decision to terminate his contract and move teams. Ineos got rid of Rod Ellingworth ahead of 2024 and looked to put a new management structure in place, but with Dave Brailsford busy at Manchester United alongside team owner Jim Ratcliffe, the team look as listless as ever.

If Egan Bernal, though, can continue to inch back towards his best, that could be a really exciting prospect. Filippo Ganna and Josh Tarling are two of the very best time triallists in the world, with the latter a potential Classics contender alongside Magnus Sheffield, while Axel Laurance has been added for punchy sprints. But it’s hard to see Ineos making good on their intentions to challenge UAE and Visma in 2025.

Gerben Thijssen can mix with the world’s best sprinters, while there are options for the smaller races, but the star of the show is far and away the Eritrean trailblazer Girmay. Previous feats such as his Gent-Wevelgem victory and Giro d’Italia stage felt like massive moments, and so did his first Tour de France stage win last year in fairness. But the way he kicked on to two more stages plus the green jersey last summer suggests a man really settling into his stride now.

In steps another Grand Tour leader in Ben O'Connor, a home Aussie rider who has had some great years at AG2R. After placing fourth at the 2021 Tour de France, he led the Vuelta last year for a long time before placing runner-up. He might have steadily shipped the lead he built up in a breakaway, but the rest of O’Connor’s 2024 results sheet confirms he's one of the top stage racers in the world, and Jayco should see some good returns.

The rest of the signings are nowhere near as high profile, so it's over to the existing big names to deliver, not least the sprinting duo of Caleb Ewan and Dylan Groenewegen. The duo struck eight times between them last year, and realistically that needs to significantly increase if the team are to lift themselves up the rankings – relegation isn’t exactly looming but we’ve seen before how one poor season can see a big team sucked in.

That means the burly Jonathan Milan winning some of the biggest sprints with one of the strongest lead-out trains. It means Mattias Skjelmose continuing to get better and better stage race results. It means Mads Pedersen taking the fight to the top two Classics riders and winning plenty of races besides. And it means Thibau Nys, one of the brightest talents, taking another step forward after his storming debut in 2024.

They're losing Lennard Kämna – capable of big things – and Sergio Higuita among others but it looks like a decent refresh, especially for the cobbled Classics. Elsewhere, Roglic leads the Grand Tour line but Jai Hindley, Dani Martínez, and Aleksandr Vlasov are all capable leaders in their own right, while Sam Welsford can win the biggest sprints on his day. 2025 might not be the year when Red Bull really challenges UAE and Visma, but it could represent one step closer.

It's a new era for the long-running Belgian team, who have been shepherded by Patrick Lefevere since 2003 but must now find their way without the inimitable Belgian boss. Lefevere was something of a throwback, a divisive figure who did things on his terms and always pointed to his track record of results when anybody kicked up a fuss. Without showering him with praise or criticism here, it's fair to call Lefevere a towering figure in the sport and it's hard to see how the culture of this team doesn't shift or dilute in his absence.

On the road, Remco Evenepoel is still hanging around and he represents the beating heart. The 24-year-old was already a Grand Tour winner and now has a Tour de France podium on debut to his name, not to mention his incredible Olympic double. The team have said goodbye to two-time world champ Julian Alaphilippe, as well as former Tour of Flanders winner Kasper Asgreen. While the former had dried up in terms of results, the latter represents a fresh blow to the team's Classics credentials.

If Tadej Pogačar was a team, he'd have finished 11th in the UCI rankings in 2024. There are many ways to try and put the Slovenian's season into perspective but with 25 victories, including the Giro d'Italia, Tour de France, and World Championships road race, it was one of the greatest campaigns of all time. This is a rider who suffered for two Tours in a row but is now looking like he could beat anyone on one leg.

2025, then, will be about seeing whether he can continue to stretch his palmarès to even more extraordinary proportions. The worrying thing for the other teams is that UAE aren't a one-man team anymore. There are so many top-level riders it would take too long to mention them all, but Adam Yates just gets better and better, João Almeida remains solid, Brandon McNulty seems like he still has more to give, and Juan Ayuso faces a big year as he looks to assert his status in the pecking order.

The team's other star man, Wout van Aert, suffered a Spring crash of his own that took him out of Flanders and Roubaix – yet more heartbreak for the Belgian. Those injuries left the team looking a little thin, and they may well have regretted the decision to allow Primož Roglič to leave last year. Either way, Vingegaard and Van Aert remain the two figureheads of this team, and if both can stay injury-free then they can deliver the team back to dizzier heights. Simon Yates has been snapped up as a luxury domestique, so Visma will still have an incredible Grand Tour first eight, and with Van Aert flanked by Matteo Jorgensen, Christophe Laporte, and Dylan van Baarle, they have the strongest Classics collective in the world.

Jorgensen especially was a revelation last year, and not just in the Classics, so it will be fascinating to see what heights he can reach this year, and which direction he takes his career. Meanwhile, Cian Uijdtebroeks was snapped up amid much controversy this time last year but had a debut season to forget amid claims of persistent injuries – if he can come good on his promise he'll feel like a top-level new signing himself. Visma may have lost their perch as the world's top team, but they still have the quality and depth to get it back.

Likewise, question marks have swirled over Chinese carbon but XDS' bikes will mark a debut in the WorldTour for Chinese bike manufacturing. It remains to be seen quite how ambitious the new sponsors are, but this certainly represents an expansion beyond the team's Kazakhstani essence. And boy how they needed it; Astana have almost sleepwalked into a relegation battle. They currently lie 20th in the three-year ranking and need a big shift in momentum for XDS to still say they sponsor a WorldTour team in 2026. The 'ins' list on their transfer sheet certainly looks like that of a team in panic mode, and with a bit more cash to spend than in previous years.

Alberto Bettiol is a high-calibre rider and immediately becomes their linchpin in 2025, especially with the departure of Alexey Lutsenko, which itself marks a major turning point in his status as the home star of the Kazakhstani project. Wout Poels and Diego Ulissi are in their late 30s but the former is still a classy operator and the latter still a points magnet in smaller races, while Colombian climber Sergio Higuita is capable of being up there in the biggest races on his day. There's no Mark Cavendish, but this feels like a team that languidly wasn't looking far beyond his Tour de France record pursuit and has now suddenly woken up.

Patrick is a freelance sports writer and editor. He’s an NCTJ-accredited journalist with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages (French and Spanish). Patrick worked full-time at Cyclingnews for eight years between 2015 and 2023, latterly as Deputy Editor.