“Right now, it feels like it’s a one-trick pony and the rest of us are just picking up scraps,” says Doug Ryder, manager of Pinarello-Q36.5 Pro Cycling.
The Tour de France peloton is frustrated. And not for the first time.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s chokehold on the race, and on the wider sport in general (they won a record 97 races last season, 93 more than fellow WorldTour teams Picnic PostNL and Intermarché-Wanty), has accelerated the push for change within cycling.
The status quo isn’t working. The richest super-teams are getting richer, their dominance is suffocating the competition, and the rest are left splashing around for the odd victory to boost morale.
So what can be done about it?
Christian Prudhomme, the race director of the Tour de France, has called for a budget cap to be introduced, an idea that is also favoured by cycling’s world governing body, the UCI. But putting a limit on teams’ spending isn’t the only proposal being put forward on how to make cycling and the Tour de France less unpredictable and more exciting.
Others have proposed a draft system, a mechanism used routinely across American sports, as well as a properly enforced transfer market where buying and selling directly bolsters and reduces a team’s coffers. Reducing team sizes or setting a UCI points cap have also been tabled.
“There are lots of things we could do, but the teams and the UCI have to be serious about implementing some of them,” says Movistar’s sports director Matt White. “Let’s pre-empt a disaster and do something before the bubble bursts.”
Would a budget cap work?
The idea of introducing a budget cap in cycling has been around for years. Many other sports and leagues across the globe, including football’s Premier League and America’s NFL, already have one in place – though to varying degrees of success.
A budget cap in cycling runs into practical obstacles that most other sports and leagues don’t have, such as cycling’s teams being based in many different countries, and therefore coming under multiple different legal jurisdictions. But it’s not impossible – Formula One, an international sport, has one, and UEFA, football’s European governing body, also has a budget cap for its competing teams who are based in 55 different countries.
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“The only way to stop [the concentration of top talent in a few teams] is to have some kind of parity with the budgets which would have to involve a salary cap. There’s no other way,” White says.
Rider agents and the athletes they represent are against such a move, though. “I don’t think salary caps are the solution,” says Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe’s Jai Hindley. “The salaries of cyclists are now very good, better than they’ve ever been, but if you compare them to a football player’s and the demands of a professional cyclist, they’re still not the highest paying.”
The average wage for a WorldTour cyclist in 2026 is €654,000 if they’re self-employed, and €384,000 for riders on employed contracts. Many are on much more, though, and Hindley referenced the Tour’s leader Tadej Pogačar, who currently earns €8.4m per annum. “Pogi is underpaid for what he’s doing. He’s probably one of the best endurance athletes ever. Do I think he should be paid less? No.”
White, however, dismissed that school of thought. “That’s a pretty small-minded way of looking at it,” he says. “All [a budget cap] means is that the talent would be dispersed among the teams.
“You can also structure the cap differently. So if you did have a big sponsor and a big budget, the salary cap could be X amount, but then Pogi and the world’s best sprinter would be outside the cap.”
Kurt Van de Wouwer is a sports director at Lotto Intermarché, one of the WorldTour’s lowest budget teams. He says something must be done to address the lack of competitiveness, but doubts whether a budget cap “could work practically”.
He cited teams who already funnel parts of some riders’ wages through their sponsors. “They’d just game the system. Will a budget cap really solve the problem?
“We need to look at other sports to see how they are coping with it. If they do a budget cap, they need to do it in a smart way, but I’m not convinced it will be the solution.”
What about a draft system?
Hindley might be averse to a budget/salary cap, but he does agree that a rethink is required. “Cycling’s business model is quite outdated,” the Australian says. “You have a handful of teams with massive budgets, and then a lot of medium-sized teams with average budgets. The gap is getting bigger and bigger, and every year it’s getting harder and harder for the smaller budget teams.
“I don’t know what the solution is, but if you want teams to continue being sponsored, then I think something needs to change, also for the longevity of the sport.”
One idea Hindley has is a draft system. “It could be good to have the best riders in the under-23 level going to the lowest-ranked WorldTour team.”
Jonathan Vaughters, manager of EF Education-EasyPost, also proposed a draft. “It’s a proven model that works,” he says. “The NFL in the US is the best example. The worst-ranked team gets the first pick of college recruits.
“In cycling, even if a rider wanted to ride for UAE because they were offering 10x more money, sorry, they can’t. They have to go to the worst-ranked team in the WorldTour.” The result is that the NFL is far more competitive than cycling’s WorldTour. But whether or not a draft system would be legal under European law is questionable.
Q36.5’s Ryder believes that riders could more evenly spread out without the need for a draft. “What needs to happen is that riders who are good enough to be leaders in those big teams need to make the decision: do they want to be a worker, or go somewhere else and be a leader?” he asks.
“It’s up to us smaller teams to create an environment where those riders are able to lead with good support and that’ll balance the ship a little bit. We’ve done that with Tom [Pidcock]. All of us need to work better at creating that space and agents have a role in that too.”
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Is a transfer system a better idea?
Lidl-Trek rider Carlos Verona says that a draft “would be complicated in cycling. Where you’re going to ride depends on the type of rider you are and your cultural aspects, so it’s not going to be easy to say the lowest teams can go first [in picking the best young talent]. I don’t think it’d work out.”
What Verona instead proposes is what many of the biggest teams’ managers, as well as agents, have been openly calling for in recent years: a properly regulated transfer system.
Cycling is still a conservative and antiquated sport, and it’s only in the past half-a-decade that riders have been breaking contracts and teams have been paying fees to their rivals to sign certain names. But there is still no transfer market like in football, and the UCI remains opposed to introducing one, even if the winds of change are pointing in that direction.
“Some teams can pay a buyout clause of €1-4m for a rider, no problem, and for some teams that could be 20% of their overall budget,” Verona says. “I think this is the only way to balance the budgets and close the gaps.”
What about a limit on UCI points?
Speaking all the way back in January, Soudal Quick-Step’s CEO Jurgen Foré suggested that the UCI would be better introducing a ruling that would prevent teams from fielding several world-class riders in their Tour de France roster.
“I would be in favour of a sporting regulation where there is a maximum amount of UCI points that you can bring to the start of a one-day race or a Grand Tour,” Foré said. “That would already make a more equal playing field. Then it would be impossible to go to the Tour de France with a team where the eight riders cost more than my team of 30 riders.
“If you intervene in the business or economic model, there will always be a regulatory body saying it’s anti-competitive, so make a sporting regulation that is more equal and teams will be obliged to be more creative in how they approach a sporting event.
“For me it would be a step forward in the competitiveness of the sport and keep the insane amount of money [being paid to riders] at bay a little bit. It would be more competitive at the Tour and the high level riders would be more equally spread.
“It would be less about money [for riders], and more about can I achieve my sporting goals and what is the best team to support me? I think some people share the same angle as me and it’d be something constructive to do.”
Not everyone is convinced, though. The common perception is that teams would find a workaround to still be able to select their best riders in the best races, such as not sending their highest point-scoring riders to many races before the Tour, therefore limiting the amount of points they can accrue.
Q36.5’s Ryder also made the point that such a method would be counterproductive to the even wider discussion surrounding reform which calls for the best riders to race against each other more often. “To have Tadej, Jonas [Vingegaard], Remco [Evenepoel] and the other top guys racing more often would create more interest and more hype,” he says. “That’s also part of the solution.”
What Ryder really doesn’t want is a limit on team sizes at the Tour; CW understands that ASO, the Tour’s organiser, is warm to the idea of six-man squads. “I wouldn’t reduce the number of riders in teams because the sport is already hard enough,” Ryder says.
“If you look at us in the Giro d’Italia, we lost three riders in the first week, so if we’d have had less numbers that wouldn’t have been a solution. Being on the startline here gives your partners big exposure and the commercial side of it is important.”
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How urgently does change need to happen?
The consensus within the sport is absolute: change must happen. But as with anything in cycling politics, change is often slow, and neither the teams, nor the rest of the stakeholders are aligned on what to do.
There is, however, no time to waste if the sport wants a more unpredictable and less rudimentary Tour de France than the 2026 edition. “The ecosystem of cycling needs to support each other to create a competitive dynamic that people want to see and are energised to want to watch it,” Ryder says.
His EF counterpart Vaughters puts it in even more urgent terms. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, but the thing is, cycling is stuck in the mentality that its athletes don’t get paid enough and the sport is worth so much more that we can’t discourage new investment with a salary cap.
“But the top teams are no longer a valuable proposition from a sponsor standpoint. A company could get their logo on a ninth-ranked F1 team’s car for €20m, or they could invest it in a cycling team. But €20m isn’t going to win them the Tour de France. There’s zero chance. Cycling used to be a valuable proposition but we’ve lost that now.
“Smaller teams can’t attract big sponsors anymore and that’s because cycling isn’t as attractive anymore. Once you make changes, entice sponsors and make cycling more achievable and valuable again, then investors will flood back in.”
And in turn, goes the theory, the sport – and in particular the Tour de France – will become more equal and more competitive.
