'Nothing for granted and no gifts' - UAE Team Emirates XRG won't ease up in 2025

When the 2025 men's racing season finally gets underway, a huge amount of attention will be placed on Tadej Pogačar's performances, victories and (perhaps) defeats. 

Pogačar's UAE Team Emirates XRG will also be put to the test once again and they have an awful lot to live up to. Their strategy for repeating their stunning 2024 season will be scrutinised and analysed before and after every race. 

UAE and Pogačar, only have themselves to blame for such high expectations. 

As the most prolifically successful squad in men's cycling in 2024, UAE Team Emirates' total of 82 wins was well clear of the 42 races won by their closest rivals Lidl-Trek and Soudal-QuickStep. Even without Pogačar's 25 wins, that's still a vast lead on the other teams.

Furthermore, in 2024, UAE also triumphed with more different riders - 20 - than any squad in the last four decades. Winning with 19 riders, again excluding a certain Slovenian from the equation, would still be seven more for last year than their closest rivals in that category, Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, with 12.

For 2025, the UAE team management have no intention whatsoever of taking their foot off the accelerator. 

That might sound overly ambitious - but the way the team's fortunes changed so dramatically in 2024 from a relatively disappointing 2023 are fresh enough in their memory to guarantee any lack of complacency. Secondly, UAE are well aware from their own previous predicament with Pogacar in the 2023 Tour de France just how great a motivator for some of their most dangerous rivals a major defeat can be. 

One excellent way of maintaining team motivation on a high is to ensure that all races, not just the ones with Pogačar in them, are major targets. 

The UAE roster is stronger than ever in 2025. New signings include Jhonatan Narváez, 19-year-old Spanish super talent Pablo Torres, Florian Vermeersch, Rune Herregodts and Julius Johansen. The only major loss is Marc Hirschi, who moved to Tudor Pro Cycling. 

"We know the Tour is much more important, but there are no small races for us," Sports manager Joxean Fernández Matxin tells Cyclingnews.

Winning across the board

The ability to spread success stories across the team is not something new for UAE in 2024: according to ProCyclingStats, UAE had the greatest number of different winners of any WorldTour team in 2022, with 16 and again in 2023, with 17. 

Play the 'take away Tadej' game again with this number for last year, incidentally, and their 2024 total of 19 winners still remains the most since the Italian super-squad Mapei, also with 19, way back in 2000.

"We're not changing the sport completely, but it's another kind of cycling," Matxin tells Cyclingnews. "It is not the same kind of cycling as, say, Sky nor [1990s Spanish powerhouse] Banesto."

"It's about generating an ambitious and victorious collective, and that's something I'm trying to help create. We're not just focussed on having the best rider in the world. We count on Tadej and we build on that but we are also interested in having a team which is competitive everywhere on all fronts."

"We know the Tour is much more important, of course we know that. But for UAE, there are no small races, all races matter from the first to the last. So that idea of going to a race to train for other races is something that doesn't happen with us - that's called training and that's what you do at home."

"Rather our mentality is to be competitive from start to finish, and not to give anything away to anybody."

This 'no gifts' policy is a far cry from the strategy practised by Banesto in the 1990s where Grand Tour stages were sometimes tacitly awarded to rivals, easing leader Miguel Indurain's pathway to the main target of overall victory. 

While Matxin says that UAE have left no stone unturned in their bid to up their game collectively in 2024, he says the team's core attitude to racing of 'win everything' has remained unchanged.

"We've improved everything, no matter what place it has in our priorities: we've got better in terms of aerodynamics, best practice, nutrition, training, planning, calendar, human relations..." he explains.

"But like everything in life, the way to improve is realising where you've made mistakes, seeing what you can change, drawing your own conclusions. It's never a question of 'copy/paste' from other teams playbooks, and we don't want to stay the same either."

"HTC for example, won 85 races in one year" - the all-time modern-day record for a single squad in 2009. "But we've not got a lot of sprinters, who maybe won HTC 60 of those victories. We got 81 in 2024. Which goes to show we've got our own, very well-defined system for winning, and it's one in which we've managed to find space for 20 different riders to take their chance to win."

Learning from defeat

So much for the past, though, what about the future?  

The 2025 season is yet to start, but Matxin says he and UAE are well aware that defeats, like the one two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard experienced in the 2024 Tour de France, can be exceptionally motivating. That was the case for Pogačar, after all, following his two years winning the Tour in 2020 and 2021, only to lose to Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023.

But if there are parallels between the two, Matxin quickly adds that the consequences of Vingegaard's crash this April were far more serious than Pogačar's fall and broken wrist in Liége two years ago. That said, he's convinced the underlying principle of a setback sparking top riders' urge to kick back harder against the odds remains the same.

"We've lived through our own moments of knowing how it feels when you're going to lose the Tour, even if you'd gone in there hungry and determined to fight to the last. Of reaching a point when you know the race has gone and, equally, when you know how much you want to fight to get it again."

"Obviously, the consequences of the two crashes are not at all comparable, even if our case was 15-20 days closer to the Tour than Jonas' in April. But for both, during the race itself there'll have been a feeling of uncertainty generated by those predicaments - a feeling that hits you really hard."

"You're aware, too, that during the countdown there'll have been times when you won't have been able to work and train but your rivals will. And the uncertainty of what that implies is partly what drives you up the wall. But it's what drives you on as well."

"So we know that Vingegaard will be going through the a similar moment to the one that we experienced. As a result of which, we know we can't sleep on our laurels, that we can't take things for granted. Tadej's won three Tours, now, but if you want to be in the fight and go for a fourth Tour then you have to deserve it."

Discussing the team's motivation to keep improving, not to mention one of their key rivals, brings us neatly to the question of what Matxin feels is the way to maintain Pogačar's focus after such a successful season. 

His strategy for the Slovenian varies very differently from the Tour champions of yesteryear like Indurain or more recent ones like Chris Froome, who might have kept the Tour as their central aim. In Pogačar's case, Matxin argues, the more variety, the better.

"There are more and more races for us to defend, but we're not overly obsessed with that idea," he says. 

"If you look at his calendar with him, the overriding aim is to keep him motivated, and stimulated. And sometimes that stimulus means not doing the same races again and again."

"What does it matter if he wins something twice or if he wins it three times?", he asks rhetorically - and obviously excusing the top prizes like Flanders or the Tour.

"Ok, there's Il Lombardia, [which Pogacar has won four times in a row - Ed.] but it's virtually a stand-alone race at that point in the calendar, there's not much else around. When it comes to the rest, we're always looking for ways to keep him motivated."

"Of course, it's great when it's a race he loves, like Strade Bianche, for example. But we also know that if you're going to do Paris-Nice, you can't do Strade the day before. So one year we changed it all and he did Paris-Nice instead."

"Or look at the UAE Tour" - to which Pogacar will return this year. "He'd won that twice so he changed to the Vuelta a Andalucia. The key thing is they're different races. And this year we're not looking at Paris-Roubaix, but in the future…"

The one area that has never come up, Matxin says, is mixing things up even further and putting Pogačar on the track and, say, having a crack at the Hour Record. The Record was once a revered goal for Tour de France champions like Indurain, Anquetil, Merckx and much more recently, Bradley Wiggins. But as Matxin says, "with Pogačar, it's a different kind of cycling."

"To tell you the truth, ever since I first met him in 2017, we've never once talked about track racing at all. Never. It's not even come into conversation, neither from him, me nor even the team."

Back in yellow?

Regardless of what else he wins or tries to win, though, a huge part of whether Pogačar's season is judged a success will pivot on whether he's back in yellow in Paris on the evening of July 27 or not. 

Just to add further intensity to that pathway to a fourth Tour victory, it inevitably runs over the summit of the Ventoux and the Col de la Loze in the race's third week, two challenges where in the past Vingegaard has had the better of Pogačar. 

Matxin though is adamant that just like the bigger overall defeats in the Tour can push riders to raise their game, "Anybody who knows Tadej will know that what happened there in earlier years will give him an extra level of motivation for this won."

As for Vingegaard and if that past knowledge would serve as extra mental fuel to challenge Pogačar, Matxin is more cautious. 

"I can't offer a specific opinion about him, because I don't know him as a person. But we all know that past history doesn't win you races. It's the present that does that."

Furthermore, even if Vingegaard has already said he's convinced he can get back to a point where beating Pogačar is possible, Matxin says that precedent shows that Pogačar is far from reaching his own upper limit.

"Every year he's got better, and he's going to go on doing that. Sometimes it's 1%, sometimes it's 2%, but I'm still convinced he's got room for progression."

But just as Vingegaard will represent a serious threat to Pogačar, Matxin underlines that Visma-Lease a Bike are far from being out of the battle when it comes to being the best team of the season, either, in 2025.

"They haven't let down their guard. In 2024, they had a hard year with a lot of crashes for their top names like Wout van Aert and Vingegaard, plus they'd lost one of their top riders, Primoz Roglič, to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe."

"Maybe we'd still be leaders [in the team rankings] even if you took out that factor, but you can't ever tell one way or another. What's certain is that if we take away Tadej from UAE's performance in 2024, even without him, we'd still have been the number one team in the world, with the most wins."

"That's not to take away any merit from what Tadej has done for UAE, it'd be hard to do that with 25 wins and after being the world's [top-ranked] number 1 for four straight years."

"But we wanted to be strong as a collective beyond Tadej, too - and we've done that."