'A nice lad, but never a CEO' - Lefevere queries Andy Schleck's Lidl-Trek promotion

Patrick Lefevere has criticised the dramatic management overhaul at Lidl-Trek and questioned Andy Schleck’s credentials to take up the role of CEO.

On Tuesday, Lidl-Trek announced that longstanding general manager Luca Guercilena would depart the team after the Tour de France, with Grischa Niermann joining from Visma | Lease a Bike as ‘chief sporting officer’ and Schleck taking over as CEO.

In his weekly column for Het Nieuwsblad, Lefevere took issue with how Lidl-Trek had handled the dismissal of Guercilena, who had worked as a coach under the Belgian at both Mapei and Quick-Step.

“Once upon a time there was the assassination of Julius Caesar; now there is the PR statement with which Lidl-Trek bid farewell to general manager Luca Guercilena this week: ‘We thank him for his vision, leadership and passion… blah blah blah,’” Lefevere wrote. 

“It’s not literally a stab in the back, but it’s still cowardly, of course. I heard he still had two years left on his contract, so I hope the ‘handover bonus’ is commensurate.”

Lidl took over majority ownership of the team last October, with brand manager and former pro Thomas Rohregger enacting a series of changes to management structures on their behalf. Andy Schleck was brought into the team as deputy general manager last winter and he has now been handed a surprising promotion after barely six months. His brother Fränk Schleck was promoted to manager of the Lidl-Trek women’s team in the spring.

“How much wisdom and ‘assessment’ went into the appointment of Andy Schleck as the new CEO?” Lefevere wondered. “I’ll admit it: I don’t know him personally and he deserves a chance to prove me wrong, but when I came across him in the Tour over the past few years as Skoda’s figurehead, I always saw a very nice lad in him, but never a CEO. 

“Many businesspeople who suddenly find themselves at the helm in football or cycling run into the same problem: it’s difficult to distinguish competent people from smooth talkers if you don’t have any technical sporting background yourself.”

Lefevere, who stepped down as Soudal Quick-Step CEO at the end of 2024, grouped Lidl-Trek with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe by describing the German teams as the “nouveaux riches” of the WorldTour peloton. Like Lidl-Trek, Red Bull carried out a huge overhaul of their management in late 2025 after prising Remco Evenepoel out of his contract with Soudal Quick-Step.

“Lidl-Trek and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe are the nouveaux riches in the peloton and behave accordingly: they splash out on all the latest trends, but the question is whether it all fits together,” wrote Lefevere.

As well as highlighting the amounts of money Lidl-Trek had spent to bring in new arrivals Juan Ayuso and Derek Gee-West before the 2025 season, Lefevere suggested that Red Bull had overstocked their management team.

“There are so many sports directors at Red Bull that they’re getting in each other’s way,” Lefevere said. “Sven Vanthourenhout as team manager in, for heaven’s sake, the Tour de Wallonie: surely he’s overqualified for that?”