Who's the boss? Lidl-Trek's transfer spree creates leadership conundrum

Twelve months and a dramatic managerial overhaul later, Lidl-Trek now find themselves with four viable GC leaders in their ranks. Ayuso was joined by Derek Gee-West before the 2026 season began and he was then unexpectedly overshadowed by Mattias Skjelmose at the Tour de France. Shortly afterwards, Felix Gall’s imminent arrival from Decathlon CMA CGM was confirmed.

The conundrum for Lidl-Trek this winter will be figuring out what to do with them. A surfeit of leaders is often couched as a problem, but it can also be a luxury. It all depends on the circumstances. 

In some cases, the decisions make themselves. UAE have one of the deepest rosters in the peloton, filled with riders who could be leaders elsewhere, but the internal hierarchy is abundantly clear: Tadej Pogačar is at the top of the pyramid and Isaac del Toro is next in line. The law of the strongest is rigorously applied, and the rest, from João Almeida to Adam Yates to Brandon McNulty, all know their place.

The situation is a little different at Lidl-Trek, where the four putative Grand Tour leaders will all feel they are in and around the same level. Certainly, none of them can make a watertight case for being placed firmly ahead of the others in the pecking order. 

Lidl-Trek’s revamped management team, most notably CEO Andy Schleck and chief sporting officer Grischa Niermann, face some big choices as they sketch out their 2027 plans.

Ironically, Ayuso joined Lidl-Trek last year expressly because he didn’t subscribe to UAE’s Pogačar-centric vision of the world. The idea was that he would find more space, more freedom and more responsibility at Lidl-Trek after finding himself hemmed in by Pogačar’s dominance and Del Toro’s emergence at UAE.

At the time, his chosen destination looked a smart one. Under Luca Guercilena’s management, Lidl-Trek had steadily grown into one of the biggest and best teams in the WorldTour, but they had always been lacking a reliable Grand Tour leader, something that not even Vincenzo Nibali’s subdued two-year spell there could remedy. 

Guercilena was the key figure in negotiating Ayuso’s passage to Lidl-Trek, and there was every reason to believe it would be a fruitful partnership, but the ground has shifted beneath the Spaniard’s wheels in the intervening period, not least with the removal of the Italian from his role.

Ayuso started life at Lidl-Trek on a high, winning the Volta ao Algarve, and he looked set for a duel with Jonas Vingegaard at Paris-Nice only to crash out while wearing yellow. That incident ruined his spring, and though Ayuso showed flickers of form with third overall at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in June, he never caught fire at the Tour de France.

After fading in the final week, Ayuso reached Paris in a distant seventh place. By then, the manager who had signed him had been forced out by Lidl, and Ayuso’s optics weren’t helped by finishing a spot behind his teammate Skjelmose. 

Last autumn, Skjelmose had expressed, surprise if not necessarily discomfort at the signing of Ayuso (and then, bizarrely, seemed to blame the media for reporting his words accurately). The Dane’s stage racing credentials had long been touted but fifth place at the 2024 Vuelta a España was the height of his Grand Tour career by that point, and it seemed Lidl-Trek had run out of patience.

The Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes seemed to confirm that Skjelmose would play second fiddle to Ayuso in July, but as the Tour drew on, he began to usurp his apparent leader. A thunderous display in the Thonon-les-Bains time trial brought him to within touching distance of Ayuso and he inched past his teammate in the final week, reiterating his own Grand Tour ambitions in the process.

Lidl-Trek’s Tour squad also included another man with proven Grand Tour pedigree, even if Gee-West was in a more obvious domestique role in July after riding to a fine fifth overall at the Giro d’Italia. 

Like Ayuso, the Canadian was signed on Guercilena’s watch, and he was a late arrival after his breakdown in relations with Israel-Premier Tech. That tumult surely didn’t help his 2026 preparations, but Gee-West’s Giro showing was a reminder of his obvious potential in three-week racing.

Shortly after the Giro, Daniel Benson reported that Guercilena was being forced out of the team, with Lidl installing the unproven Andy Schleck as CEO and coaxing Niermann away from his long-term role at Visma | Lease a Bike.

That was just the beginning of an overhaul that saw Dan Lorang, formerly of Red Bull, hired to the performance staff, while long-serving sports director Steven de Jongh would be cast aside at season’s end.

Lidl’s involvement has seen Guercilena’s previous vision not so much discarded as abruptly melded with another. The Italian’s idea was seemingly to build a GC team around Ayuso and Gee-West, while continuing to give prominence to fast men Mads Pedersen and Jonathan Milan in his Grand Tour planning.

The addition of Gall, however, suggests that Lidl-Trek are flexing their financial muscle more freely and stockpiling stage racing talent in the hope that something sticks. Indeed, their spending hasn’t been limited to Grand Tour contenders. New arrivals for 2027 include Jordi Meeus, Jordan Jegat, Igor Arrieta, Gregor Mühlberger, Georg Zimmermann and, most recently, Filippo Ganna. The Italian arrives to bolster a cobbled Classics unit led by Pedersen, but the signing is also a more general statement from Lidl-Trek about their intentions.

The 2026 season saw Lidl-Trek drop two places to fifth in the UCI rankings. In the absence of an ‘alien’ talent like Pogačar or Vingegaard, the team seems to be keen on providing itself with a safety net by adding as much depth as possible to the roster.

Rumours linking Skjelmose with a move to Netcompany-Ineos appear to be just that, meaning that Lidl-Trek enter 2027 with a quadrumvirate of Grand Tour leaders, as well as two points jersey contenders in Pedersen and Milan. 

How, then, will they divide up their talent and keep everybody happy in 2027? 

Niermann and Schleck might well look to Red Bull for a template, given how smoothly Zak Dempster pulled off a similar balancing act in 2026 for Remco Evenepoel’s first season at the team. Dempster availed of a dual-leadership approach for both the Giro and Tour while holding Primož Roglič in reserve for the Vuelta a España. 

That approach yielded podium finishes for Jai Hindley at the Giro, Evenepoel at the Tour and Roglič at the Vuelta, and Lidl-Trek would surely sign now for something similar in 2027 given the ‘alien’ talents they will be up against in Pogačar, Vingegaard, Seixas et al.

The routes of the Giro and Tour will play a significant role in Lidl-Trek’s deployment of their leaders. Gall, second at the Giro and third at the Vuelta, enjoyed the best results in 2026 and might feel he has done enough to be top of the depth chart for the Tour – but his time trialling is an Achilles heel and the presence of 71km against the watch is a clear impediment to his podium challenge.

In terms of raw talent, Ayuso arguably has the highest ceiling among the Lidl-Trek quartet, but it’s also now more than four years since he placed third overall at the Vuelta as a teenager. His fourth place the following year is the last time he has put together three consistent weeks at a Grand Tour. He will hope for a clear run in 2027, but either way, he enters the new campaign with a point to prove. Logic says Lidl-Trek will send him to the Tour, but they might also feel he has a shot at victory in a Giro without Pogačar or Evenepoel.

Skjelmose will have felt he proved his point in 2026, reminding his employer of his aptitude for three-week racing. But he was also a quarter of an hour down on Pogačar and almost five minutes off a podium place. The gap between very good and great is abyssal in the Pogačar era, and the early indications are that Skjelmose will be dispatched to the Giro in 2027.

Given his track record at the Giro, Gee-West seems an obvious choice to return to the corsa rosa, but the Tour route looks well suited to his gifts, with two long time trials and just three summit finishes. 

Gee-West’s natural inclination towards diplomacy certainly makes it easy to slot him into a Grand Tour with any co-leader. Giulio Ciccone – who has left for Pinarello-Q36.5 – seemed a touch reluctant to sacrifice his personal ambitions for his teammate in the dying days of last year’s Giro, but there wasn’t a murmur of complaint from Gee-West even after he fell short of the podium. 

As well as the new signings, the established sprinters and GC leaders, Lidl-Trek’s existing squad contains riders of the quality of Quinn Simmons, Thibau Nys and Mathias Vacek. There are shades of Mapei in the 1990s about the depth of the roster. 

Speaking to Marca in October, head of performance Josu Larrazabal acknowledged that the influx of new talent would make for some difficult decisions and some massaging of egos. “We are going to have to make decisions that will not always please everyone,” he said. “But that is a welcome challenge.”

Above all, it’s a challenge for Schleck and Niermann, the new men at the helm of the rebooted team. Lidl-Trek had been steadily progressing through Guercilena’s tenure, but the increased investment since Lidl formally took over a year ago suggests they didn’t feel the project was progressing quickly enough. 

Time will tell if they were hasty in forcing out Guercilena, who had built the team into one of the strongest in the peloton with the express backing of Trek. The new management has been handed even greater resources by Lidl, but that only raises the stakes. They have been given the raw materials to assemble a super team, but now they have to make all the pieces fit together. 

Easier said than done.