Netcompany-Ineos reboot faces high stakes at Vuelta after anonymous Tour

Ahead of the Tour de France, Netcompany-Ineos director of racing Geraint Thomas said his team’s approach would be “a combination of being realistic, but also really ambitious and wanting to go after it every day.” 

They certainly went after it on the opening day, placing second behind Visma | Lease a Bike in the team time trial in Barcelona, but were hit by a bracing dose of realism over the remaining three weeks.

By Paris, Egan Bernal was their highest finisher in 20th overall, their worst GC showing since Rigoberto Urán took 24th for Team Sky after Bradley Wiggins crashed out in 2011. Back then, Edvald Boasson Hagen scored two sparkling stage wins to put a different gloss on their Tour, but there was no such saving grace for the Class of 2026. 

Aside from the team time trial, their best result was Filippo Ganna’s fifth place in Ussel on stage 9, and Netcompany-Ineos’ chasing on his behalf in the finale was arguably the only impression they left on the race. 

For the record, they produced five other top 10 finishes in a decidedly nondescript July that served only to underline their steady drift from Tour relevance in the 2020s. For a team with an estimated annual budget in the region of €50 million, this was an abject display. 

Thomas and Netcompany-Ineos will hope it marks the nadir, and they might argue that there was mitigation. The team prised Oscar Onley away from Picnic-PostNL last December to lead their Tour challenge, but his heavy crash at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes ruled him out of the main event in July.

For reasons that were never fully articulated, they opted against deploying Carlos Rodríguez as Plan B. Instead, their Giro leaders Bernal and Thymen Arensman were pressed into Grand Tour duty again. Unsurprisingly, neither man replicated his Giro form in France, and their stage hunters never really looked like pulling off a win either.

That no-show in July adds to the pressure for Netcompany-Ineos as they line up at the Vuelta a España. When Danish IT outfit Netcompany came on board as title sponsor in May, injecting a reported extra €20 million per season into their budget, the team’s stated aim was to win the Tour again within five years.

It was a conscious echo of Team Sky’s founding mission of winning the Tour with a British rider within five years. Despite Wiggins’ breakout Tour display the previous year, that aspiration seemed a touch fanciful in January 2010, but astonishingly, they achieved it in less than half the allotted time. Team Sky would reach the moon with Wiggins in 2012, ushering in an era of dominance that saw them claim seven Tour wins in eight years through four different riders.

The lie of the land is very different for this attempted reboot. With Tadej Pogacar on the scene and with UAE Team Emirates-XRG now the biggest budget in the peloton, it’s difficult to imagine Netcompany-Ineos turning their fortunes around as rapidly as they did a generation ago. But they desperately need to start trending upwards, and in that light, the Vuelta takes on outsized importance for the team.

There are distinct echoes between now and the summer of 2011, when Sky had just endured a second successive Tour where they made no impact on the general classification. Then as now, a crash had cost the team their leader in July, but he was fit and back in situ for a tilt at the Vuelta. 

Wiggins arrived in Spain after breaking his collarbone in July and with a point to prove about his Grand Tour credentials, given that plenty wondered if his fourth place at the 2009 Tour had been an aberration. 

He would confirm his bona fides over the next three weeks, placing third overall in Madrid, though he would also suffer the indignity of being surprisingly overshadowed by one of his domestiques. 

Chris Froome emerged from obscurity during that Vuelta, pushing Juan José Cobo all the way to Madrid in the battle for the maillot rojo. He would be awarded Vuelta victory in 2019 when Cobo was snared by the biological passport, but he might well have stood atop the podium in 2011 had Team Sky not hesitated so long before designating him as leader rather than Wiggins.

Netcompany-Ineos are a long way off having that kind of luxury problem in 2026, of course, but they will hope this Vuelta can at least provide some kind of momentum for a Grand Tour project that has seemed increasingly adrift in the 2020s.

Bernal’s career-changing crash in early 2022 was a key turning point, but Thomas’ remarkable late-career consistency glossed over the deficiencies in their roster building in the Ineos era that have become more apparent with each passing year.

Dave Brailsford’s return to the fold last summer after his very public failure at Manchester United was supposed to herald the beginning of a new era, and Thomas’ appointment as director of racing hammered home the Back to the Future feel to the outfit.

So far in 2026, mind, the biggest managerial accomplishment appears to have been since-departed CEO John Allert’s negotiation of Netcompany’s arrival as title sponsor. Brailsford has not been made available to media since his second coming at the team, but his work hasn’t exactly spoken for itself over the past year either.

Instead, Thomas has been left as the frontman, putting words on the team’s ambitions and, where necessary, downplaying their shortcomings. Articulate and affable, Thomas is perhaps the ideal figure for the role. He was on the scene back in 2010 and 2011, after all, when Team Sky’s uneven start was the subject of much schadenfreude, and he knows better than most the work that happens behind the scenes before the wheel starts to turn.

But Thomas always knows that patience is not in infinite supply in this business. Ineos made repeated attempts to sign Remco Evenepoel to spearhead their Tour challenge over the years and they have more recently been among Paul Seixas’ reported suitors.

When they signed Onley from Picnic-PostNL last winter, it was in the belief that he would at least provide them with a coherent narrative. Onley was never going to win the Tour in 2026, but he at least offered the team a sense of direction and a project to work on. In his absence in July, Netcompany-Ineos were rudderless. 

Onley and Ineos go again at the Vuelta. The Scot showcased his recovery from his Dauphiné crash with a stage win and second overall at the Vuelta a Burgos, where Carlos Rodríguez could only manage 21st. Tadej Pogacar is the runaway favourite to win the Vuelta, and the world champion might well have the race wrapped up within the first week, but the scramble for the second and third step of the podium promises to be wide open.

Burgos winner Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM), four-time champion Primoz Roglic (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) and Cian Uijtdebroeks (Movistar) are among the more obvious contenders, but Onley should be firmly in the mix.

Netcompany-Ineos have been coy about their ambitions ahead of the Vuelta. The team declined to allow Domestique to interview any of their riders or management in the build-up to the race, and they were also the last of the participating teams to announce their line-up.

Perhaps they feel they over-promised ahead of a Tour where they delivered precious little. They will expect better from the Vuelta, where the stakes for Brailsford’s team are the highest they’ve been since 2011.