2023 Season in Review: Breaking Down the UCI Team Rankings
What the final UCI Team point rankings tell us about which outfits over, and under, performed during the 2023 season
Programming Note: BTP will be doing an in-depth breakdown of the 2024 Tour de France route, which was released today, later this week for premium subscribers.
With the Tour of Guangxi finishing last week and marking the end of the 2023 WorldTour racing calendar, I’ve been reflecting on the trends we saw emerge in the past season and planning out the BTP off-season content. To kick off this reflection and re-examination, I wanted to step back and take stock of how each team stacked up in terms of the UCI point rankings.
Below are the top 23 teams (18 1st division + 4 PT) in order of the UCI points they gained from their top 20 point-scoring riders throughout the 2023 season (aka the UCI point rankings). Here is a link to an in-depth scoring guide, but the simple rule is that the closer your team’s riders get to 1st place, and the bigger the race, the more points your team gets.
2023 Season Top 23 Team UCI Point Rankings
Notably, Team UAE Emirates, after an incredibly focused points-scoring campaign, topped Jumbo-Visma to take the top spot in the UCI rankings for the first time, with Soudal-QuickStep, after a few down seasons, shrugged off seemingly constant off-road distractions and financial issues to bag an impressive third place.
When we take a look at the win standings, Jumbo-Visma’s status as the sport’s best team starts to emerge, while UAE finishes a strong second over Soudal-QuickStep, who, after winning ten straight win titles from 2012-2021, fails to win but comes in third well ahead of Ineos, who, despite a massive budget, continues to struggle to win at a rate higher than teams with much tighter payrolls like Alpecin and Lidl.
2023 Wins, Podiums & Top Tens per WorldTour Teams
Below we can see how my pre-season BTP NET projection model stacked up against the post-season UCI Team Point Rankings, and which teams over and under-performed their points-based projections.
Final UCI Point WorldTour Ranking Positions Compared to Thier 2023 Team BTP NET Projections:
1) UAE-Team Emirates (BTP NET: 1)
2) Team Jumbo-Visma (BTP NET: 2)
3) Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl (BTP NET: 5)
4) INEOS Grenadiers (BTP NET: 3)
5) Lidl-Trek (BTP NET: 11)
6) Bahrain - Victorious (BTP NET: 8)
7) Groupama - FDJ (BTP NET: 7)
8) Alpecin-Deceuninck (BTP NET: 6)
9) Lott-Dtsy (BTP NET: 18)
10) Bora-Hansgrohe (BTP NET: 4)
11) EF-Education First (BTP NET: 13)
12) Movistar Team (BTP NET: 12)
13) Jayco-Alula (BTP NET: 17)
14) Cofidis (BTP NET: 9)
15) Intermarché-Wanty (BTP NET: 14)
16) Israel-Premier Tech (BTP NET: 19)
17) DSM-Firmenich (BTP NET: 20)
18) AG2R Citroën (BTP NET: 15)
19) Arkéa-Samsic (BTP NET: 10)
20) Astana (BTP NET: 22)
21) Uno-X (BTP NET: 21)
22) TotalEnergies (BTP NET: 16)
Who Under & Over Performed Their 2023 BTP NET Rating:
Lotto-Dtsy (+9)
Lidl-Trek (+6)
Jayco-Alula (+4)
Israel-Premier Tech (+3)
DSM-Firmenich (+3)
Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl (+2)
Bahrain - Victorious (+2)
EF-Education First (+2)
Astana (+2)
Movistar Team (0)
UAE-Team Emirates (0)
Team Jumbo-Visma (0)
Groupama - FDJ (0)
Uno-X (0)
INEOS Grenadiers (-1)
Intermarché-Wanty (-1)
Alpecin-Deceuninck (-2)
AG2R Citroën (-3)
Cofidis (-5)
Bora-Hansgrohe (-6)
TotalEnergies (-6)
Arkéa-Samsic (-9)
Four Key Takeaways:
1) UAE may have won the standings, but Jumbo-Visma is the sport’s best team
Despite finishing atop the UCI points standings (thanks in part to an extremely aggressive points-hunting strategy), the pronouncements from Team UAE Emirates that they were 2023’s top team are, without a doubt, false.
Instead, Jumbo-Visma, who had the best season from any team (at least one that I could find) in the history of the sport by winning every grand tour and leading the season in total wins, takes the crown.
2) UAE once again failed to win the Tour de France and struggled to look like a cohesive team throughout large parts of the season, but produced their best season ever
Finishing atop the 2023 UCI standings confirms just how far the team has come since being a one-man band with Tadej Pogačar as its leader, and is even more impressive considering they bested Jumbo-Visma during a season when it won all three grand tours, and completed a podium sweep at the Vuelta a España.
This accomplishment, outside of their season-long strategy to maximize the number of UCI points they could collect (i.e. sending talented and fit squads to all the late-season Italian races), is a testament to the team’s impressive recruitment over the past few years, which has seen them collect solid veterans like Adam Yates, as well as high-production youngsters like João Almeida, Brandon McNulty, and Marc Hirschi.
While they don’t always do the best job of racing as a team, especially when Pogačar isn’t present, UAE does a great job of finding talented riders, getting them in the door, and giving them the freedom to produce individual results (even if it doesn’t always produce the best team performances).
3) The overperformers have work to do in the transfer market
Behind the herculean feats of the Galácticos, the modestly funded Lidl-Trek, and Lotto-Dtsy teams impressively outperformed their pre-season BTP NET Rating. Since the rating objectively measures their talent, outperforming it by nine and six spots is incredibly impressive.
It should be noted that not all out-performances are created equal. While Lotto-Dtsy racked up an incredible amount of UCI points at lower-level races, with only two of their 21 wins coming from WorldTour events, Trek got a good chunk of their points by going head-to-head with the sport’s best riders at the biggest races, racking up eight WorldTour wins in 2023 with their three stars (Mads Pedersen, Giulio Ciccone and Mattias Skjelmose).
While not at the same level, Jayco-Alula and Israel-Premier Tech put together solid seasons due to having young-and-coming riders like Filippo Zana (Jayco) and Derek Gee (IPT) greatly surpass their expectations.
Interestingly, Astana may have suffered through a rough season, finishing last in the WorldTour and behind two second-division teams, but they actually outperformed their BTP NET Ratings by two spots.
While these out-performances are great for these teams, Intermarché-Wanty, who outperformed their 2022 projection by a whopping ten spots in the final 2022 UCI rankings before falling back down to earth in 2023, showed that even the most plucky teams will inevitably revert to the mean if they don’t upgrade their squad in the off-season.
4) Bora’s underperformance could have influenced their decision to spend big on Primož Roglič
Astana may have taken the title as the worst first-division team, but digging deeper, Bora-Hansgrohe, TotalEnergies, and Arkea-Samsic all had much worse seasons relative to their roster expectations.
Bora’s struggles are the most interesting case study since, despite sporting a strong roster and a solid backroom structure, they underperformed due to having no riders capable of high-volume points scoring.
While Bora has a lot of high-ceiling talented riders like Aleksander Vlasov, Jai Hindley, Lennard Kämna, and Cian Uijtdebroeks, all of them struggle to get a high volume of wins at a consistent rate.
For example, Jumbo had six riders score more points than Bora’s top performer (Vlasov), UAE had four, and even Lidl-Trek had three.
This ‘missing leader’ issue is likely one of the main reasons the setup felt compelled to invest such a massive amount to recently acquire Primož Roglič’s hugely expensive contract from Jumbo (rumored to be a €3 million buyout fee and € 6 million per year salary).
After breaking down the 2024 Tour de France route later this week, I will be getting into the usual BTP off-season content of digging deeper into team results and trends from the 2023 season in more depth, restarting the Weekly Transfer Analysis, performing my annual State of the Nation analysis on Americans in the WorldTour and attempting to project 2024 performances with my BTP NET series after the rosters are set in January. An important note is that if you want access to every post, you must be a paying BTP subscriber.