UAE's 2026 Grand Tour leadership puzzle is a luxury, not a problem

The end of October used to be synonymous with holidays for the professional peloton, but these days teams and riders are already meeting and planning for next season. Fresh off their remarkable 2025 campaign, Tadej Pogačar and his all-conquering UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad will assemble in Abu Dhabi next week, partly to fulfil sponsorship obligations but also to start piecing together the race programme for next year.

Speaking to Domestique at the Tour of Guangxi last week, Jhonatan Narváez noted that one of the team’s great strengths – beyond the sheer depth of the roster – is that sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez has a knack for sending the right riders in the right roles to the right races.

95 victories from 20 different riders across the calendar would back up Narváez’s thesis, but UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s season wasn’t without internecine strife. In a team filled with potential leaders, keeping everybody on the same page requires copious amounts of diplomacy and the occasional pulling of rank, but even that wasn’t always enough.

Just last week in Guangxi, it was hard to ignore that UAE delivered a rather disjointed display on the key summit finish at Nongla, where the team’s supposed goal was to race for Narváez.

More strikingly, the team’s support for João Almeida at the Vuelta a España wasn’t always entirely coherent. The departing Juan Ayuso, winner of two stages but occasionally MIA just when Almeida needed him, was the obvious lightning rod for criticism, but the Spaniard wasn’t the only man whose personal ambitions didn’t entirely align with the collective goal.

Still, UAE being UAE, they came away from the Vuelta with seven stage victories, while Almeida claimed second place overall behind a Jonas Vingegaard who was probably unassailable in any case. It will have grated UAE, mind, that even in their historic year, Visma still carried off two of the three Grand Tours, and they will be keen to strike back next year.

Ayuso’s transfer to Lidl-Trek ostensibly makes Matxin’s Grand Tour planning a little more straightforward in 2026, but only marginally. In Pogačar, Almeida and the emerging Isaac del Toro, UAE have three riders who finished on the podium of Grand Tours in 2025 and therefore three riders who will expect – demand? – the chance to try to win a Grand Tour in 2026.

The big question for Matxin and Mauro Gianetti as they draw up their plan of attack for 2026 is how best to deploy that triumvirate across the Grand Tours. It’s a luxury problem, of course, and in truth, it’s far more of a luxury than a problem, but it requires some finesse all the same.

The one certainty at this juncture is that Pogačar will return to the Tour de France, where he is seeking a record-equalling fifth overall victory. The Slovenian couldn’t hide a touch of jadedness with the Tour last summer, but as the best rider in the world, he is condemned to ride – and more often win – the sport’s biggest race every year.

Pogačar will be backed by an all-star squad at the Tour. Even at this early point, riders like Adam Yates and the versatile Narváez will already be pencilled into the line-up, but it seems clear, too, that at least one of Del Toro or Almeida will be seconded to the Tour team to ride as a super domestique for Pogačar.

Almeida has served in that role for the past two summers, placing fourth overall in 2024 and crashing out last July. Still only 21, Del Toro has yet to ride the Tour, though he showed his quality with second overall at this year’s Giro as well as 16 victories across the campaign.

Whoever is selected would serve as Pogačar’s last man in the mountains, but he might also have the carrot of being able to chase a podium place in Paris for himself.

At this point, Almeida would appear the more likely to flank Pogačar in July, simply because UAE have long held a preference for sending their young riders to just one Grand Tour in a season. Even the latter-day cannibal Pogačar didn’t ride two three-week races in the same year until he was 25. 

In other words, Almeida could well lead at the Giro or Vuelta and also ride for Pogačar in July, whereas a Tour debut for Del Toro would likely rule him out of the other two Grand Tours.

The most straightforward deployment of UAE’s stage racing talent next season would thus be a simple replica of the 2025 configuration – Del Toro to lead at the Giro, Pogačar at the Tour and Almeida at the Vuelta, with the Portuguese also racing in a supporting role in July. 

Things become complicated, however, if Pogačar decides that he wants to ride a second Grand Tour in 2026. There have been faint rumblings, albeit from some of cycling’s most unreliable sources, that Pogačar could return to the Giro next year. That remains to be seen, but his stated desire to race Paris-Roubaix again seems directly at odds with another tilt at the Giro-Tour double. Something would surely have to give, and Pogačar is unlikely to pass up on the Hell of the North after his near miss in 2025.

The Tour-Vuelta double is scarcely more amenable given Pogačar’s late season ambitions. He wants to win a third straight rainbow jersey at the Montreal Worlds, and he knows that a post-Tour break followed by the Canadian WorldTour races is almost certainly the best way to go about doing it. 

Speaking to Eurosport this week, Matxin essentially ruled out the Vuelta for that reason, while just about keeping the door to the Giro ajar. “It’s more feasible to do the Giro-Tour double, because there is an interval of almost five weeks between the two races,” he said.

In any case, Pogačar’s programme across the season will have a knock-on effect for both Almeida and Del Toro. In 2025, for instance, his Classics focus meant that Almeida and Ayuso could split the stage racing calendar between them in the Spring – Paris-Nice, Itzulia Basque Country and the Tour de Romandie for the Portuguese, Tirreno-Adriatico and the Volta a Catalunya for the Spaniard.

Another Spring on the cobbles for Pogačar would give Del Toro and Almeida freedom to lead UAE in a selection of week-long stage races. But ultimately, they know that their schedules are at the mercy of Pogačar’s preferences. There isn’t a flicker of a leadership debate here. Both Almeida and Del Toro know their place relative to the main man and, unlike Ayuso, neither man seems dissatisfied by that hierarchy.

Even in UAE’s record-breaking year, Pogačar alone was responsible for more than a fifth of their victories. What works for Pogačar ultimately works for UAE, and so the Slovenian has first dibs on the entire calendar. Everybody else will fall into line.

That’s the thing about triumvirates; the strongest man invariably ends up calling the shots. Balancing the ambitions of three Grand Tour leaders isn’t really a problem at all when your team has the luxury of having Pogačar.