According to UCI regulations, the top 18 teams ranked by points after a three-year period are declared WorldTour teams and receive automatic invites to every WorldTour race for the next three years. In addition, the top three Pro teams will receive automatic invitations to every WorldTour event the next year and then must qualify again for 2027. All teams must also satisfy UCI’s financial criteria to qualify for promotion and automatic invitations.
This battle for promotion may depend more on an off-road event than on racing. Intermarché-Wanty currently sits 18th in the rankings, with a lead of nearly 800 points over Uno-X Mobility and 1,135 points ahead of Cofidis. But the Belgian team is currently in discussions with Lotto to merge the two squads. If the merger is agreed, then either Uno-X or Cofidis will be promoted to WorldTour status in 2026. However, a last-minute glitch was holding up the merger. According to Cyclingnews, Belgian media reported recently that Intermarché has a €2 million debt that will need to be settled.
The deadline for the merger was Wednesday. On that day, Het Laatste Nieuws reported that the merger had been finalized and the appropriate papers, including sponsor confirmations and a bank guarantee, had been filed with the UCI. Cycling’s ruling body will now move to approve or reject it, with a verdict expected by the end of this week. That decision will not only affect the fate of Uno-X Mobility and Cofidis but also that of a number of riders waiting to make decisions on their future, including last year’s Tour de France green jersey winner Biniam Girmay.
In the meantime, in a desperate effort to make up its gap to Uno-X Mobility, Cofidis has entered riders in the last four races of the season: the Chrono des Nations, the Veneto Classic, and the Japan Cup on Sunday, as well as the ongoing Tour of Guangxi, which ends on Sunday. That means it will have riders racing all over the globe on Sunday: in France, Italy, Japan, and China. Uno-X is only riding in the Veneto Classic and the Chrono des Nations. This last entry was a last-minute decision by the Norwegians to foil their rivals.
“It’s a last desperate attempt to get as many points as possible,” Uno-X team boss Thor Hushovd told TV2. “Then we can look in the mirror afterwards and be confident that we did everything we could. We have a better starting point than Cofidis now, but at the same time, 337 points is not a lot. If we manage to do that, it will be a new milestone in Norwegian cycling history.”
If Uno-X succeed, it will be the first Norwegian team ever to achieve WorldTour status. But the footsteps they are hearing right now are the sound of Cofidis slowly gaining on them in the rankings, thanks to their Polish sprinter Stanisław Aniołkowski, who has picked up a quick 41 points in the first three stages of the Tour of Guangxi, by placing third, fourth, and seventh in the three bunch sprint finishes. (Just FYI, the 21-year-old French Soudal Quick-Step rider Paul Magnier won all three stages.) That leaves the promotion battle nicely poised ahead of Sunday’s decisive three races.
In the meantime, the troubled French WorldTour team Arkéa–B&B Hotels, which was set to be relegated, will cease to exist at the end of the year, having failed to find a major sponsor. “I haven’t submitted anything [to register for a UCI license] because I don’t have anything,” Arkéa manager Emmanuel Hubert told French news agency AFP, as quoted by Cyclingnews. Hubert has spent the second half of 2025 looking to drum up about €20–30 million to keep his team afloat. The team’s exciting young French rider Kévin Vauquelin, who won the team’s first and only Tour de France stage in 2024 and finished seventh in this year’s Tour, has already been signed by INEOS Grenadiers to a three-year contract.
