Women’s WorldTour relegation battle - Who stays up? Who makes the drop?

The fight to maintain Women’s WorldTeam status has been pretty clear cut for most of the 2025 season, with Swiss-registered Roland-Dévoluy looking almost certain to be relegated. With Roland’s chances of staying up looking grim, there are others who stand to benefit.

The Women’s WorldTour was created in 2016, essentially as a replacement for the World Cup, which was a series of one-day races. The WorldTour included stage races but remained purely a calendar of top-level events until 2020, when the UCI introduced Women’s WorldTeams. In that first year eight teams signed up to various innovations, including maternity leave and a minimum wage for the first time in women’s cycling.

That number rose to nine the following year, 14 the season after, and has now settled at 15. While the top tier was becoming established, selection was based on various factors, including ethical and financial. At the end of this year sporting criteria will be added, with the top 15 teams qualifying. This is calculated using each team’s accumulated points scored at all levels of the sport during the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

WorldTour races attract the most points, so teams have to set a strategy to maximise scoring opportunities. Some choose to skip certain top-tier races, instead sending their best riders to lower-level events where they are more likely to score.

As you might expect, the teams with the biggest names can sleep easy. Updated every Tuesday, the UCI’s Technical Rankings are led by SD Worx-Protime, the Dutch squad on 28,450.58 points, ahead of Lidl-Trek by 8,573.12 and FDJ-SUEZ by a staggering 11,101.45. Remember, these are cumulative points totals, and FDJ are this year’s leading scorers by a clear margin.

Even with Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s win at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, her Visma | Lease a Bike team sit only in sixth place, with less than half the points of SD Worx. AG Insurance-Soudal have had a breakout year, Kim Le Court winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège and a stage at the Tour de France, where she also wore yellow. They also saw Sarah Gigante finish third at the Giro d’Italia Women and sixth at the Tour, but the Belgian squad sit only in 12th place.

AG Insurance are very unlikely to be relegated, even though their placing is relatively lowly. In fact, none of the bottom teams are in too much danger. Fourteenth and 15th placed UNO-X Mobility and Human Powered Health might appear to be in a precarious position, but they have a huge advantage over VolkerWessels, so it seems the status quo will continue into 2026.

Only Roland-Dévoluy are in real trouble.  

Though they were victims of the recent disqualifications at the Tour de Romandie, EF Education-Oatly are by far the best ranked ProTeam, sitting comfortably in 13th place. They’ve had a decent season, with Noemi Rüegg winning the Willunga Hill stage and the general classification at the Tour Down Under, and they are already close to matching their points total for the 2024 season, even with a few weeks of this year’s campaign remaining.

Though the name and the colour of the jersey might cause some confusion, there is no organisational connection between the current team and the now-defunct EF Education-TIBCO-SVB squad, which was a WorldTeam when it stopped at the end of the 2023 season.

Some of the riders came across from the old team too, giving the squad a backbone of continuity, but the current set-up was built from the ground up for last season, UCI rules preventing them from joining the WorldTour level in their first year.

To date, they’ve won fewer races than last year, and there is a clear drop in the quality of those successes, with four top-level victories in 2024 and only Rüegg’s Australian wins in the WorldTour so far this campaign.

The chances of Roland-Dévoluy maintaining their WorldTeam status are almost non-existent and have been all year. They began 2025 ranked 17th and have since slipped to 18th. Registered in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, last week’s Tour de Romandie Féminin was their home race, but they remain 518 points behind 17th place and 2,951 behind 15th place – the cut-off to retain WorldTeam status – a deficit greater than the number of points they’ve scored so far this season.

They began life as Cogeas-Mettler Pro Cycling in 2018, Russian-registered with seven home riders. In 2022 the team switched its registration to Switzerland and its name to Roland Cogeas Edelweiss, while an association with the Israel-Premier Tech men’s team the following year produced their best results.

Now though, with only 11 riders, they have the smallest roster of any top-tier squad, and this has negatively impacted their ability to compete. They’ve entered only 15 of the 23 WorldTour races so far this year, fielded a full roster in just seven of those, and managed only five top-10 finishes.

We approached both the EF Education and Roland squads for comment about their 2026 plans, but neither responded.