Like Manchester United, Netcompany-Ineos look stuck in the same old story

Another year over, and what have they done? On the face of it, the raw numbers aren’t damning at all. Netcompany-Ineos weighed in with 36 wins in 2026, a tally beaten only by UAE, Visma and Red Bull. 

That figure not only surpasses last year’s total of 28 wins and dwarfs the nadir of 14 victories in 2024; it’s very much in keeping with the kind of totals the team used to record during their salad days in the Team Sky era.

Their high-water mark came in 2012, when the team swept all before them and racked up 50 wins across the season, but that annus mirabilis was an outlier. It was the only time Dave Brailsford’s team finished a campaign with more wins than anyone else, with their tally usually falling short of 40.

But in their pomp, the wins column at the end of the season was an afterthought, as they annexed seven Tours de France out of eight between 2012 and 2019. For Ineos, the focus has always been on quality rather than quantity, and director of racing Geraint Thomas acknowledged as much when he looked back on their season on his Watts Occurring podcast earlier this week.

“Purely from results, I’d say it definitely wasn’t good,” Thomas said. “We had a lot of wins, but they were like smaller wins. It wasn’t like any big wins really.”

Netcompany-Ineos did notch up 13 wins at WorldTour level, the same as last year, but Thomas is right to acknowledge that they were the kind of victories that would have been a footnote to their season in years gone by.

Dorian Godon’s brace of stage wins at Paris-Nice and Filippo Ganna’s victories at Dwars door Vlaanderen and the Giro d’Italia time trial were as prestigious as it got. Indeed, they didn’t score a single victory in the WorldTour after May.

More glaringly, for a team whose raison d’être is the Tour, they were anonymous in July. Second place in the opening night team time trial in Barcelona was the highpoint, and their only other top five finish came from Ganna on stage 9 to Ussel.  Egan Bernal’s 20th place overall marked their worst GC showing since Rigoberto Urán took 24th for Team Sky after Bradley Wiggins crashed out in 2011.

When Netcompany came on board as title sponsor in May, injecting a reported extra €20 million per season into their budget, the team made a point of stating that they aimed to win the Tour again within five years.

It was a deliberate echo of the mission statement when Team Sky was launched in 2010. After a hugely underwhelming start, they hit their stride in 2011 and then won the Tour with Bradley Wiggins in 2012. It’s hard to imagine that lightning can strike twice. 

It’s also hard not to draw comparisons between the team and Jim Ratcliffe’s most ambitious sporting venture, which saw the Ineos group purchase a 25% share in Manchester United in late 2023 and assume responsibility for sporting decisions at the club.

Like Netcompany-Ineos, Manchester United have fallen far from their perch, but Ratcliffe’s involvement has done nothing to arrest the decline. If anything, Ineos’ muddled direction – including Ratcliffe’s rounds of cost-cutting – has seemed only to exacerbate existing problems.

Inedeed, few of Ineos' recent sporting ventures have worked smoothly, as the Independent pointed out last week, labelling United as ”just another disaster in Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s crumbling sports empire.”

Ineos’ time at United has been one of repeated false dawns and disjointed thinking, encapsulated by how United sacked their manager partway through each of the past two seasons. Another change seems inevitable before the current campaign is through. 

When Ineos first took over at Old Trafford, Dave Brailsford was seconded to a position at the club, but he was quietly moved aside in the summer of 2025. He resumed a hands-on role at the cycling team in time for that year’s Tour, but his return hasn’t yet made any material difference to the bottom line.

Like at United, there has been a shake-up at various levels of management since Brailsford’s return. CEO John Allert left the team in May, shortly after shoring up the arrival of Netcompany as title sponsor in a deal worth a reported €20 million per year.

On the sporting side, the most significant change already came last winter, when the freshly retired Geraint Thomas became the team’s new director of racing. Much like the appointment of Michael Carrick at Manchester United, Ineos opted for a figure from the team’s glory years in the hope of getting them back on course.

Thomas, like Carrick, hasn’t managed to turn the ship around just yet, though unlike his footballing counterpart, he doesn’t find himself in stormy waters. Despite the increasing football-ification of management roles in cycling, there is no sense that Thomas’ job is at risk. 

Although Brailsford hasn’t deigned to speak to media since his second coming at Ineos, one imagines there is acceptance that Netcompany-Ineos are, for the time being, a long way off getting back to where they want to be. Thomas’ project is a long-term one, as he pointed out during the week.

“Let’s just say we’re starting at 20% of what we used to be, just to pick a number. You can’t just go from 20 back to 80 straight away,” Thomas said. “It’s like climbing a ladder, isn’t it? You can’t go from the second rung of a ladder straight to eight. You got to go to three, four, five.”

But how far did Netcompany-Ineos progress in 2026, if at all? The signing of Godon proved a shrewd one, but the team judges itself on how it fares in the Grand Tours and in July, above all. 

Thymen Arensman took a solid fourth at the Giro d’Italia, but an eventual podium finish at the corsa rosa or the Vuelta already looks the very limit of his future capabilities.

The Tour was a failure, though there was mitigation as injury took out the team’s anointed leader, Oscar Onley. Even so, it didn’t say much for Ineos’ contingency planning that they then scrambled to include both Arensman and Egan Bernal as their team’s GC options, despite both men going deep at the Giro. Not surprisingly, neither made a real impact in July.

The Vuelta was more encouraging, even if Onley had to settle for sixth place in Madrid. The Scot’s first season at Ineos had been blighted by illness and injury, culminating in his heavy crash at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, but he showed flashes of his potential in Spain, most notably when he took second on the Alto de Aitana.

With Pogacar out of the race by that point, Onley briefly looked a potential winner, but his challenge was quickly hamstrung by crashes and a couple of imperfect tactical decisions. And in a three-week race, the final GC rarely lies. He might have had the legs to fare slightly better, but on balance, sixth was a fair reflection of his effort.

Onley was signed from Picnic-PostNL last winter on the back of his fourth-place finish at the 2024 Tour, and his arrival gave the team a narrative for the Tour after years of drift. Still only 24, he has time and margin for improvement, but, as with Arensman, it’s difficult to imagine him competing with the peloton’s top-tier talents for Tour victory.

The same goes for Carlos Rodríguez, who has regressed since placing fifth on the 2023 Tour, and for new arrival Kévin Vauquelin, who is a fine rider but not a Grand Tour winner in waiting.

The man with the best Grand Tour pedigree in the roster is still Bernal, of course, and his life-threatening training crash in 2022 was a sliding doors moment for Ineos. The Tour and Giro winner was only 25 years old at the time, and although he has made an admirable comeback, the game moved on in the intervening period. 

Bernal claimed to have posted his best-ever power numbers en route to 10th overall at this year’s Giro, and he acknowledged last month that he was weighing up his future in the sport, even if he added that he intended to start the 2027 season.

It all means that the same glaring hole remains at the centre of the Ineos project. There is no rider in the roster who can realistically compete with Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Paul Seixas, and the team’s drift will continue until they find him.

That was already the case as far back as the winter of 2022-23, when Ineos made a concerted effort to prise Evenepoel away from Soudal Quick-Step. But long before Evenepoel finally opted to leave in 2025, Ineos’ place at the negotiating table had been taken by Red Bull.

A similar scenario looks to be unfolding with Seixas, who has yet to sign a new contract with Decathlon CMA CGM. One would assume Netcompany-Ineos are in the sweepstakes, and their surprising willingness to let Filippo Ganna tear up his contract and move to Lidl-Trek suggested a team eager to free up space in their budget for a major coup. 

Those in the know, however, suggest that Visma Lease a Bike might be a more realistic landing site if Seixas does opt to move. The lure of Ineos is decidedly less than it was a decade or so ago, when they could sign men like Mikel Landa and Michal Kwiatkowski as deluxe domestiques for July.

They will hope junior time trial world champion Benjamín Noval, who turns pro in 2027, will prove the long-term solution to the ongoing problem, and they might argue they still have the bones of a roster that could support a potential Tour winner, were they to sign one.

But like at Manchester United and Ineos’ other sporting projects, there’s no obvious or immediate end in sight to the longstanding malaise. The same old story keeps on repeating itself as fiercely as before.