UAE Team Emirates-XRG's year of plenty could be cycling's new normal – Analysis

Mauro Gianetti laughed when the idea was put to him in Wieliczka on Sunday afternoon. Brandon McNulty had just claimed UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s 71st and 72nd victories of the season at the Tour de Pologne. With more than two months of the season still to go, someone wondered if the team CEO had considered the possibility that his charges might rack up 100 wins for the year.

“It would be nice to get the record of 85, but 100 might be too much,” Gianetti smiled. “We’ll try to take it day by day and we’ll see how it goes.”

HTC-Highroad’s 2009 record of 85 wins record certainly looks eminently achievable, given that UAE had ‘only’ hit 64 victories at the corresponding point last season en route to a final total of 9. With the Vuelta a España still to come, with Tadej Pogačar lining up at least five more times this season, and with men like McNulty and Isaac del Toro in scorching form, it would be a surprise if UAE didn’t rack up another fourteen bouquets between now and the Tour of Guangxi.

They have already equalled their own record of having 20 different winners in a single season, and with riders like Nils Politt and Florian Vermeersch among those yet to break their ducks for 2025, there’s every chance a new mark will be set there too. Wonders never cease.

The potential records and points of reference are multiple, and the data is all pointing in one direction – UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s dominance of the cycling calendar is of a kind never truly seen in the sport before.

It’s certainly difficult to make any fair comparison with the sport prior to the 1990s. It was more or less impossible for any one team to win so much given the smaller rosters and the less globalised nature of the sport at the time. Relatively few teams in the 1980s even lined up in all three Grand Tours in the same year, a situation that only fully shifted with the advent of the ProTour (now WorldTour) twenty years ago.

Prior to the WorldTour era, Mapei was the squad with the biggest budget and the biggest roster. That meant it was the team that fought on the most simultaneous fronts, and that helped them achieve some gaudy numbers – 80 victories in 1997, 19 different winners in 2000 – but their dominance was still limited to specific domains. Giorgio Squinzi’s team famously never won the Tour de France, and their only Grand Tour victories came from Tony Rominger in 1994 and 1995.

Their spiritual successor QuickStep continued in a similar vein. They collected Classics and stage wins like Pokémon but showed no real inclination towards three-week success until the team was remodelled around Remco Evenepoel in the past five years. Not coincidentally, the squad’s win rate contracted in tandem with Evenepoel’s growing Grand Tour ambitions. 

HTC-Highroad was formed from the ashes of T-Mobile’s doping scandals in 2008. Their raison d’être was to project a radically different image to the T-Mobile of old. Part of that concept involved jettisoning the GC at Grand Tours in favour of winning early and often, most notably with sprint trains built around Mark Cavendish and André Greipel. 

In their year of years, 2009, their 85 victories were not matched by striking results in the GC at Grand Tours. Michael Rogers was their best rider at the Giro d’Italia in 6th and George Hincapie led the line at the Tour de France in 18th. At the Vuelta a España, meanwhile, their best finisher was Adam Hansen in 94th. 

HTC also had a comparably modest budget, even by the standards of the time, and their recruitment strategy was, in baseball terms, more Moneyball than UAE’s Yankees-style stockpiling of talent.

Money always talks in professional sport, of course, and when Team Sky entered the peloton in 2010 with the biggest budget in cycling, they quickly established themselves as the most successful team.

But even their best years didn’t quite match UAE’s current pre-eminence. Sky’s main focus was the Tour, and they duly won the sport’s biggest race seven times in eight years from 2012 to 2019. In that time, the expression ‘cyclisme à deux vitesses’ was dusted down and used again in reference to their financial might, but outside of July, they left more than mere crumbs for the rest of the peloton.

Sky endured repeated calamity at the Giro until they finally cracked the race in 2018, for instance, and they regularly fell short in the Classics. And even in their most successful year, 2012, they ‘only’ won 50 races. Not coincidentally, that Mark Cavendish's sole year with the team.

The game has changed significantly, however, in the 2020s, with UAE and Visma | Lease a Bike moving far clear of the rest of the WorldTour. But even between the best two teams in the sport, a gap is developing, and Pogačar’s otherworldly brilliance is not the only explanation.

True, Visma swept all three Grand Tours in 2023, picking up 69 victories in total, but they didn’t reel in a single Monument that year with Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel winning two apiece.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s 2025 vintage, by contrast, has been the standard bearer on all terrains and in all periods of the season. Pogačar, of course, is the biggest factor – who else could win the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Tour de France in the same season while finishing on the podium at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix? – but this is far from a one-man band.

Isaac del Toro came within one mountain – or was it one dubious tactical call? – of winning the Giro at 21 years of age. João Almeida has been the outstanding one-week stage racer of the season, and he might well win the Vuelta, even with Jonas Vingegaard as a rival. 

A rider like McNulty – likely a Tour GC leader in all bar five or six WorldTour teams – can be deployed as a domestique at the Giro. Their roster of galacticos includes Jhonatan Narváez, Juan Ayuso, Jay Vine and Adam Yates. Their reservoir of emerging talent includes Jan Christen, Pablo Torres and Del Toro, and the supply line seems endless, despite growing interest from rivals like Ineos in recruiting directly from the junior ranks.

In cycling, some teams have always had bigger budgets than others, but the gulf between the first and the last has mushroomed in recent years. UAE’s estimated budget of €60 million dwarfs Arkéa-B&B Hotel’s reported €17 million.

During this year’s Tour, Michael Rasmussen outlined the gap between the haves and have-nots, wondering if any rider with a salary of less than €2 million could win a stage at the race. UAE have more of those kinds of rider than anyone else, and so, according to Rasmussen’s logic, it stands to reason that they are racking up so many wins across the year.

A big budget provides more than just salaries, of course. It also covers all the resources – training, equipment, miscellaneous – that go into maximising performance at this level. 

In his last season at Movistar in 2023, Matteo Jorgenson revealed that he had used his entire salary for the opening third of the year to pay for his own training camps, time trial equipment, and nutritionist. Part of his motivation for signing for Visma was the fact that his new team would provide all those extras in-house. But UAE Team Emirates-XRG, it seems, can offer even more to their riders, and the results are plain to see across the entire UCI calendar. 

Just as a team’s final position in the Premier League usually reflects its total spend on salaries, it’s maybe only to be expected that UAE Team Emirates-XRG have been so dominant in 2025. And UAE, like Manchester City, is a venture bankrolled by Abu Dhabi in the name of soft power. A Liverpool or Visma, operating on a slightly lower budget, can still knock them off their perch every now and then, of course, but the sheer weight of money eventually tells. 

UAE Team Emirates-XRG may or not break HTC’s record this season, and they may or may not reach 100 wins. But in the grand scheme of things, those statistics don’t really matter. 

The more pertinent questions for cycling are about the meaning behind the prevailing trend, given that UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s dominance shows no signs of abating. Is their enormous budget and consequent success a problem for cycling? And if so, can something be done about it? 

So far, little more than lip service has been paid to the idea of introducing salary or budget caps to pro cycling. Besides, financial fair play rules in other sports have proven tricky to apply. The elite cadre of so-called ‘super teams’ - and UAE above all - could zoom further into the distance. UAE’s 2025 of plenty might simply be the new normal.