With the Tour de France done a look at the UCI World Tour promotion and relegation standings. If you want to save a click then stage wins for Astana and Arkéa-B&B didn’t make a difference. In fact they lost ground in July
We’re now approaching the opening of the transfer season when new hires for next year can be announced and this is all the more crucial with 2025 as the last of the three year cycle.
Promotion, relegation?
A quick reminder that teams will be ranked by the sum total of their points from each of 2023, 2024 and 2025 and the top-18 teams qualify on sporting terms for a WorldTeam licence and this gives them automatic entry to the Tour de France, the golden ticket.
First just look at the top. UAE keep pushing the x-axis out. With over 26,000 points for 2024 they’re on more than double the next team. Tadej Pogačar has over 9,000 points to his name but two thirds are down to the rest. Seven, including neo-pro Isaac del Toro, have more than 1,000 points each. Even without Pogačar they’d still have more points than Visma-LAB.
Going up
Promotion candidates IPT and Lotto-Dstny are on course to get back in the World Tour, the former is buying in more talent for the future while the latter has an excellent pipeline from its U23 team just as long as it can fend off rival squads but it’s done with this with Flemish climber Jarno Widnar who is just one year out of the junior ranks and has won almost every major U23 stage race going so far this year except the mighty Ronde de l’Isard… where he finished second.
Going down
Meanwhile the standings still show Arkéa-B&B Hotels and Astana languishing below the red line. They enjoyed a successful Tour thanks to a stage win each. These triumphs are huge and mentioning the points is borderline petty as the 210 point reward isn’t commensurate.
Arkéa’s Vauquelin got the stage win they craved for so long and had a great time trial in the Beaujolais but was missing in action in the mountains while Arnaud Démare was only once in the mix for a sprint win and duly got relegated, forfeiting the points. So they’re now over 1,500 points adrift, further away than after the Giro.
Astana pulled off a memorable win for Mark Cavendish but “Project 35” has been the equivalent of painting a masterpiece fresco on a wall at risk of collapse. After the Giro they were 2,500 points away from safety, they’re now 3,300 points adrift. Chinese bike brand XDS is investing in the team and this could help them sign riders who can score for them next year. This short term plan is a way out but they’ve signed riders like Lorenzo Fortunato, Ide Schelling and Anthon Charmig to do this job in 2024 and this trio have 376 points between them… Schelling and Charmig haven’t scored. Hiring riders is one thing but having coaching staff, training camps and resources to support the delivery of results counts too.
18th place = safety
In the absence of a relegation battle DSM Firmenich-PostNL remain 18th. Star signing Fabio Jakobsen is more than a contender, alas, for flop of the season. This isn’t meant as a swipe, rather he’s just been such a solid sprinter but now has challenges just getting to the final kilometre.
Cofidis are been good at scoring before but they’re stalling so far this year and it’s possible the Dutch team leapfrogs them. The French team is in an interesting position because it has no development team to supply talent and its two best scorers Axel Zingle and Guillaume Martin are leaving. It needs to recruit well.
Both teams though still have a cushion above the relegation red line, there’s yet to be the drama of the 2020-2022 relegation battle.
This chart shows the difference in the rankings for 2024 between 16 July and 23 July, effectively the Tour de France points haul. You can see Astana and Arkéa’s problems where a stage win was good but they struggled for more. It also illustrates the phantom Tours of Red Bull, Decathlon-Ag2r and Groupama-FDJ.
2025 is crucial
The best two ProTeams on the UCI rankings at the end of year get automatic invites to the Tour de France and other major races next year. This means IPT and Lotto-Dstny now but imagine today’s points situation transposed into 2026. IPT and Lotto would be back in the World Tour, Arkéa and Astana relegated. Automatic invitations would go to Arkéa and Uno-X.
With relegation looking increasingly likely for Arkéa and Astana, this secondary contest to top the rankings in 2025 matters as it sets up a soft relegation, out of the World Tour but still qualifying although year to year rather than automatically.
If they are going to get relegated because of weak 2023 and 2024 seasons then can they get enough points during the course of 2025 to become automatic picks? If not then the corollary is then whether they can sign star riders or have some unique selling point to win wild card invites ahead of squads like Tudor and Q36.5. Tudor especially are playing a clever long game here.