'We go more and more to a system like football' - Inside Lidl-Trek's development team

Markel Irizar’s job title changed with the establishment of Lidl-Trek’s development team ahead of the 2024 season, but his remit is essentially unchanged: to find and develop talent for the WorldTour squad. 

The Basque spent almost a decade as a rider with Trek’s various guises before being appointed the team’s first talent scout on hanging up his wheels in 2019. One of the first riders recruited on his watch was Mattias Skjelmose, who arrived by way of the now defunct Leopard Continental team.

The process of recruiting and hothousing young talent has become more structured since the establishment of Lidl-Trek Future Racing, but Irizar maintains that the principles were already in place before the team formally entered the under-23 peloton.

“It’s not only a team; it’s a whole development programme,” Irizar tells Domestique. “The goal of the programme is to prepare the next generation, and the team has put a lot of resources into it.”

Two riders – Tim Torn Teutenberg and Jakob Söderqvist – have made the full-time leap from Lidl-Trek Future Racing to the WorldTour team in its first two seasons, while five more, including Groupama-FDJ United’s Matteo Milan, have turned pro elsewhere. 

The raison d’être of the team, of course, is to serve as a feeder team for Lidl-Trek, and that has had an impact on the profile of the rider Irizar recruits for the development squad. He must think about the WorldTour squad’s future needs rather than simply vying for the best under-23 talent in the here and now. 

“It’s true that we’re always looking for something that we are going need in the future, and we have some information of how we are going to develop the WorldTour team over the next two or three years,” Irizar says.

“Based on age, we might assume that certain riders are going to retire, for example, or we might see that we need fast guys or climbers. For example, we lost two guys like Jasper Stuyven and Alex Kirsch for the Classics, but now Jakob Söderqvist is stepping up, and that’s the goal.”

Development teams are en vogue in cycling again in the 2020s – even Ineos have joined the fray this winter – but the concept is hardly new. Miguel Induráin was a product of the Reynolds amateur squad, and he duly spent his entire pro career as part of the José Miguel Echavarri’s ‘Holy Family.’ The legendary ACBB club in Paris served as the de facto feeder team for Peugeot, delivering riders like Bernard Thévenet, Stephen Roche and Phil Anderson to the pro peloton.

The difference these days, at least in theory, is that the emphasis is on developing for the future rather than simply winning in the present. Under Mickey Wiegant’s management, ACBB was an unabashed school of hard knocks, where riders essentially competed with one another for the right to lead the team in high-profile races and thus score the wins that would rubberstamp their passage to the big leagues. The glorious history of the Boulogne-Billancourt club was built on a shaky foundation of broken dreams.

Irizar sees Lidl-Trek’s set-up in 2026 as something more akin to the cantera, or underage system, of a top football club, where young riders are gradually schooled in the trade rather than being called upon to win early and often. That’s partly because, as in football, cycling teams are scouting riders at a younger age than ever before, often well before they reach the junior ranks. 

“I don’t know if it’s the correct way to describe it, but I would say that we go more and more to a system like football,” says Irizar, though he is conscious that brings its own complications. If a young rider has already been training in a highly structured way with a power-meter from 13 or 14 years of age, then what is the realistic margin for improvement once they formally link up with Lidl-Trek Future Racing at 19?

“This is a difficult question, which we have asked ourselves too,” Irizar says. “There is no tool to know how developed a rider is, because even if you now how much he’s training, that doesn’t mean he’s not going to keep improving. And we’ve seen that, where riders who have already trained a lot at a young age have kept improving like crazy. And I really think the question that nobody knows is, will these guys have long careers like we used to have before? I don’t know.”

The ready availability of data has helped the emergence of increasingly precocious winners at WorldTour level. In generations past, a talented young rider was generally expected to serve an apprenticeship in the service of others before being handed the reins of leadership. These days, power output trumps experience when teams are drawing up their hierarchies.

At underage level, however, there is concern in some quarters that the use of accoutrements such as power-meters is contributing to a two-tier system weighted too heavily on a rider’s socio-economic background rather than on pure talent. 

Egan Bernal, for instance, has suggested that in Colombia, where cycling remains a largely working-class sport, emerging riders are at a clear disadvantage compared to their European peers. “In Europe, a kid of 13 or 14 years of age already has a power-meter, he already has a nutritionist…” he said in early 2024. “In Colombia, we’re not lacking riders – we’re lacking equal conditions.”

Irizar is sensitive to the point, even if it’s not clear that there is a solution.

“It would be great if cycling could stay democratic so that the parents’ financial status doesn’t affect the development of the athlete so much. It would be sad for money to be an issue in the development of a rider,” he says. “I mean, if I’m stronger than you, then it shouldn’t matter how wealthy my parents are compared to your parents. I think this is a philosophical idea.”

Still, Irizar is adamant that power data isn’t the only criterion Lidl-Trek examines when identifying young talent. Ultimately, they can make their own calculations based on a rider’s results and performances against his peers.

“It’s enough that you have a device that can measure speed, because we can collect the info from that and estimate,” Irizar says. “In the end, we sometimes forget that cycling is not about watts, it’s about speed. I don’t care how many watts a rider is doing, I just care that he’s fast. 

“I mean, if you push 10 watts but you win and you beat Pogacar, then I’m happy. I get the point, that it’s maybe easier in Europe because riders have access to the data – but I think a big talent will always find a way to emerge.”

Money is less of an issue when it comes to attracting young riders to Lidl-Trek, despite the increasing competition among WorldTour squads to bring the best teenagers into their development systems. In three years of signing riders for Lidl-Trek Future Racing, Irizar has found that most are enticed by the long-term project rather than the immediate financial rewards.

“Sometimes it depends on the families, or on the expectations of the parents,” Irizar says. “But if I told my wife that I was going to bring my son to the team that is paying the most, she would tell me that we are going to divorce because we don’t have the same mindset anymore…

“I think most of the families, I would say 95%, look for the progression and the environment as a priority. For them, money is secondary.

“And our strong point, I think, is the human side. There are not that many teams that bring the men’s, women’s and development teams together at the same training camp. Like we always say, we have three teams and one identity. I think we are very good at taking care of people. Of course we want to win races, but we don’t forget that they are 18 years old.”

Managing a team of teenagers certainly calls for a different approach to the WorldTour set-up, where winning is the only currency that carries any weight. Although Lidl-Trek Future Racing enjoyed success in 2025, from Albert Withen Philipsen’s Paris-Roubaix win to Liam O’Brien’s Ronde de l’Isard display, results are not the only metric by which riders are judged.

“I mean, of course, it’s important because winning races also shows they know how to handle pressure, they know how to react in certain conditions – but the goal isn’t to be very good Devo riders, it’s to be very good WorldTour riders,” Irizar says. “We see development as a project. For example, Mattias Skjelmose didn’t have a very good season in his last year under-23, but we still decided to sign him. He had very good numbers, but it was also about his mentality. He’s a fighter.” 

Preparing riders mentally is a key part of Irizar’s job spec, particularly when they are drafted in to fill gaps in the WorldTour squad on occasion across the season. He must gently remind them that a temporary promotion is no guarantee of a full-time contract, while a pro race gone awry is not a roadblock to future progression.

“I say, ‘Guys, going with the World Tour is not always one step forward. Sometimes it will be one step backwards, because maybe you go there and the level is too high and we see you’re not ready yet,’” Irizar says. “You want to bring them in when they are really ready, because otherwise they’re going to suffer or start to think it’s too hard. But it’s a good thing to be able to put them in the WorldTour team, where they can get experience, see another way of racing, and learn from the older guys.”

Lidl-Trek Future Racing will carry fifteen riders from eight countries in 2026, though 19-year-old Héctor Álvarez is likely to spend a sizeable chunk of the season riding with the first team.

“He’s going to race most of the season with the WorldTour team in the 1.2 races, because in the coming years, he will go to the World Tour, he has already signed,” Irizar says. 

In the Spaniard’s absence, riders like Liam O’Brien of Ireland and Jack Ward of Australia will have ample opportunity to shine, while junior world champion Harry Hudson joins the set-up for his first season at under-23 level. The names change, but the philosophy stays the same.

“I don’t know if we’re going to have the best team,” Irizar says. “But we’re going to have a very good team.”