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The idea of a league table that charts each team’s progress throughout the season remains alien to most bike racing fans. However, a football-style ranking for cycling teams has been with us for as long as the WorldTour.
Introduced in 2009, the UCI World Rankings system awards points to riders, teams and countries for placing highly in races, with the points on offer depending on each race’s classification.
Rankings for individuals and countries are on a 52-week rolling calendar, however the points for teams are totalled up at the end of the season. Although it isn’t new, this has largely been ignored until this year.
That’s because in 2018 the UCI decided to use the system to determine which teams would be relegated from and promoted to the top division, the WorldTour.
Photo: Godingimages
Running over three years and starting in 2019, that meant 2022 was the final season in the first cycle, so teams would be officially relegated and promoted after the final race depending on their three-year points haul.
This brought the system into focus as teams faced elimination from the 18-strong WorldTour. Below them, two strong ProTeams were hoping to move up and obtain a WorldTour licence for the 2023-25 seasons.
In the final months of the season this scramble saw WorldTour teams abandoning the season’s last Grand Tour and push their riders to miss the World Championships in favour of hunting any remaining points in smaller races.
In the end Lotto-Soudal and Israel-Premier Tech were relegated from the WorldTour, with Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic taking their places.
How did that happen and what do teams need to be aware of for 2025? Below we explain how the system works.
How do teams score UCI points?
Each race in the WorldTour has a category attached to it by the UCI. At the top, you have the Tour de France, followed by the other two Grand Tours. Below that are the more notable one-week stage races as well as the bigger Classics including the Monuments.
After that come mid-level WorldTour races like E3 Saxo Bank Classic and Itzulia Basque Country, followed by lower level WorldTour races such as Tour of Turkey or Strade Bianche.
The classification of the race and where you finish will dictate how many points you score. More significant events offer points on from first to 60th place.
There are also points on offer at World, Olympic, Continental and National Championships, plus lower tier races all the way down to the UCI’s .2 classification, which includes regional events open to semi-professional riders.
How many points are on offer in each race?
This is where things get tricky. Cycling teams, their sponsors and fans know which races they’re interested in, but this wasn’t necessarily reflected in the ranking given to them by the UCI in the 2020-2022 cycle, however after the system was controversial, the weighting was changed for 2023-2025.
Under the new system, winning the Tour de France overall gerts you 1,300 points, winning the Giro or Vuelta bags you 1,100. Stage placings and placings in the points and mountains competitions also generate points, with the new system boosting the points on offer for Grand Tour stage wins to 210.
Also new for this cycle is a separate category just below the Grand Tours for the Monuments: Milan-San Remo, Ronde van Vlaanderen, Paris–Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia, with 800 points on offer for winners.
Below that points are, as before, stacked towards winning one-day races, which often offer the same points you’d gain by coming out on top overall in a stage race.
If you were targeting points rather than exposure, a tilt at the 400 points on offer for winning the EuroEyes Cyclassics Hamburg would be a much easier target than winning Itzulia Basque Country.
As the race to avoid relegation in 2022 got more desperate, the mismatch resulted in teams sending their strongest squads to obscure races to mop up as many points as possible, however the UCI is hoping additional weighting to Grand Tours and Monuments will help keep every team focussed on what should be the biggest races.
Race-by-race points breakdown
Tour de France
Overall (goes down to 60th)
First: 1,300
Second: 1,040
Third: 880
Race leader’s jersey per day: 25
Stage placings
First: 210
Second: 150
Third: 110
Fourth: 90
Fifth: 70
Points and mountains competitions
1st: 210
2nd: 150
3rd: 110
Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España
Overall (goes down to 60th)
First: 850
Second: 680
Third: 575
Race leader’s jersey per day: 20
Stage placings
First: 180
Second: 130
Third: 95
Fourth: 80
Fifth: 60
Points and mountains competitions
1st: 180
2nd: 130
3rd: 95
Monuments (placings down to 60th)
1st: 800
2nd: 640
3rd: 520
4th: 440
5th: 360
Major WorldTour Events
Santos Tour Down Under, Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, Gent-Wevelgem in Flanders Fields, Amstel Gold Race, Critérium du Dauphiné, Tour de Romandie, Tour de Suisse, Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec, Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal
Overall or one-day races (down to 60th)
First: 500
Second: 400
Third: 325
Placings in stage races (down to 10th)
First: 60
Second: 40
Third: 30
Medium WorldTour Events
Volta Ciclista a Catalunya, E3 Saxo Bank Classic, Itzulia Basque Country, La Flèche Wallonne, Clásica San Sebastián, Tour de Pologne, BinckBank Tour, EuroEyes Cyclassics Hamburg, Bretagne Classic Ouest-France, Strade Bianche
Overall or one-day races (down to 60th)
First: 400
Second: 320
Third: 260
Placings in stage races (down to 10th)
First: 50
Second: 30
Third: 25
Minor WorldTour Events
Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, UAE Tour, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Driedaagse Brugge-De Panne, Dwars door Vlaanderen, Eschborn-Frankfurt, Tour of Guangxi
Overall or one-day races (down to 60th)
First: 300
Second: 250
Third: 215
Placings in stage races (down to 10th)
First: 40
Second: 25
Third: 20
ProSeries events (down to 40th)
First: 200
Second: 150
Third: 125
Which points actually count?
Photo: Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images
Previously only the top ten riders on each squad counted towards their team’s total for each season, however for the 2023-2025 cycle that has increased to 20. The league table runs for the duration of the three-year licence period, meaning points scored across the 2023, 2024 and 2025 seasons are combined.
Who finished at the top and bottom of the table last time?
Jumbo-Visma were the clear winner over the three seasons with almost 38,000 points. Behind them were QuickStep Alpha Vinyl in second and Ineos Grenadiers in third, both of whom picked up over 35,000 points.
Relegated were Lotto-Soudal with a little over 14,500 followed by Israel-Premier Tech with just under 14,000.
Both of those teams were beaten out by the UCI ProTeams Alpecin-Deceuninck, with over 21,000 points, and Arkéa-Samsic, with close to 16,000.
Does the Women’s WorldTour have relegation?
Photo: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images
It does now. With the addition of Fenix-Deceuninck (previously Plantur-Pura) to the Women’s WorldTour, it is now full at 15 teams.
This is the first time there has been a full roster of women’s WorldTour teams for the first time, so the UCI has announced that at the end of this season, licences will be awarded for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, and from the 2026 season the Women’s WorldTour will be on the same three-year cycle as the men’s.
That means that in 2023 there could be a fight among the lower teams to get into the upcoming two-year cycle.
Think you’ve got your head around the UCI points system? Why not learn about the prize money on offer at the Tour de France?
Main image: James York
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