2025 BTP NET Ratings: Projecting How Each Team Will Stack up by the End of the Season
A macro-level 2025 pre-season prediction via the unveiling of the BTP NET Ratings
With the 2025 rosters finally set and the racing action coming thick and fast this weekend with the AlUla Tour, GP La Marseillaise, Challenge Mallorca, and CX World Championships (a Key Takeaways racing breakdown will be coming early next week), I am finally wrapping up the off-season content by releasing my annual BTP NET Ratings.
What Are the BTP NET Ratings?
Unlike most professional sports, there are no real advanced analytics to rate individual performers or teams as a whole, which makes objective big-picture analysis incredibly difficult. So, since an obsession of mine is attempting to figure out the most effective way to build a pro cycling team, I’ve created my own team in-house rating system, called the BTP NET Rating, that should let us project how much teams have gotten better or worse over the transfer window.
I created the NET rating by going through the sport’s top 25 teams, taking the total number of Pro Cycling Stats points from their 2024 season, and adding/subtracting the number of aggregate PCS points they gained/lost in the transfer market. This illustrates how the teams would rank if every rider currently on the roster had been on the team the year before.
This simple exercise has done a surprisingly good job of predicting performance for teams in the upcoming season despite two major blind spots:
Since riders don’t perform exactly the same every season and are subject to progression and regression based on age, experience, and opportunities, this system is obviously far from perfect.
Also, this exercise doesn’t consider that roughly half of a pro team might not even be attempting to get results, which, in turn, will generate points.
But, with teams increasingly taking riders who are able, or have in the past, scored personal results and turning them into domestiques, we can still get a decent overview of a team’s overall strength.
Overall, the NET Rating gives us a nice baseline from which to operate and a pretty clear picture of each team’s current personnel strengths and weaknesses. I also think it helps show an objective rating of each team’s off-season, which is important since there can sometimes appear to be a fundamental misunderstanding among pro cycling team managers on what makes a successful pro cycling team. This means that management teams with more numbers-based approaches can capitalize on the inefficiencies created by the number-blindness prevalent in the sport that tend to lean on high-powered agents to funnel star, or up-and-coming, riders into their programs, which means they end up paying riders for past results and fail to set themselves up for future success.
So, in the end, simply compiling PCS data for your roster and following the simple logic that riders who have performed well in the past tend to perform well in the future, while young riders tend to get better and older riders tend to get worse can help management build a successful pro cycling team.
2025 Team BTP NET Projections
Tier 1
1) Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe: 9,816
2) UAE Team Emirates-XRG: 9,804
3) Visma | Lease a Bike: 9,477
Tier 2
4) Lidl-Trek: 7,267
5) Soudal Quick-Step: 6,915
6) Tudor Pro Cycling Team: 6,619
Tier 3
7) Team Jayco AlUla: 6,400
8) XDS-Astana: 6,129
9) Alpecin-Deceuninck: 5,936
Tier 4
10) Israel-Premier Tech: 5,616
11) EF Education-EasyPost: 5,371
12) INEOS Grenadiers: 5,295
Tier 5
13) Bahrain-Victorious: 5,280
14) Movistar: 4,876
15) Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale: 4,591
Tier 6
16) Picnic PostNL: 4,531
17) Uno-X Mobility: 4,203
18) Intermarché-Wanty: 4,169
Tier 7
19) Groupama-FDJ: 4,135
20) Lotto: 3,731
21) TotalEnergies: 3,504
Tier 8
22) Cofidis: 3,409
23) Q36.5 Pro Cycling: 3,285
24) Arkéa-B&B Hotels: 2,657
25) Caja Rural-Seguros RGA: 1,512
Below is a spreadsheet showing how each team's BTP NET 2025 rankings compare to where they finished in the PCS rankings at the end of 2024.
2025 NET PCS Totals & Off-Season Ranking Change
Key Takeaways
1) A few unlikely teams posted massive gains while the sport’s best team hemorrhaged points:
PCS Points Gained/Lost Per Team During Off-Season
Tudor Pro Cycling Team: +3219
Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe: +2907
XDS Astana: +2745
Jayco AlUla: +1592
Visma | Lease a Bike: +1168
Q36.5 Pro Cycling: +1134
EF Education-EasyPost: +628
Israel-Premier Tech: +540
TotalEnergies: +415
Bahrain-Victorious: +346
Lidl-Trek: +250
Movistar: +190
Soudal Quick-Step: -54
Picnic PostNL: -173
Uno-X Mobility: -230
Intermarché-Wanty: -245
Cofidis: -357
Alpecin-Deceuninck: -431
Caja Rural-Seguros RGA: -711
Groupama-FDJ: -844
INEOS Grenadiers: -1070
Arkéa-B&B Hotels: -1604
Lotto: -1949
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale: -2090
UAE Team Emirates-XRG: -2676
This simple exercise gives us much more clarity than we would expect. For example, while the sport’s most dominant team, UAE, is still the sport’s elite team, for the second straight off-season, they have had a net outflow of PCS points after coming in dead last in the PCS plus-minus rankings.
UAE, at least so far in this young season, is still head and shoulders above the rest of the sport, but it is notable that they haven’t added to their roster strength as much as in years past (partly out of not having much more room to grow).
It would be only fair to mention that this is almost entirely due to the fact that they are so good and have so much talent that they can’t continue adding stars. In fact, they have to start shedding either established stars who want more freedom to race for themselves or veterans who no longer fit into the team’s overall vision (Diego Ulissi).
For example, a significant reason for their deficit and Tudor’s increase is that Marc Hirschi, who finished 4th in PCS points rankings in 2024, switched from UAE to Tudor.
Additionally, they will likely outperform their points projection since Hirschi's departure, and the simple passing of time will give their young developing stars, like Juan Ayuso and Jan Christen, the space to rack up massive points hauls in 2025.
Meanwhile, UAE’s chief rival, Visma-Lease a Bike, had a busy off-season and bolstered its ranks to challenge the UAE.
The addition of Axel Zingle gives them yet another chance to develop a talented French rider into a Classics contender, while Simon Yates could provide vital support in their campaign to topple Tadej Pogačar at the Tour de France.
2) The transfer ‘winners’ list is made up of teams with a diverse list of goals: While it is clear that for the second straight off-season, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe has ‘won’ the off-season in an attempt to challenge the sport’s top teams, a handful of other teams, Jayco-AlUla, Tudor, and XDS-Astana have made improvements they hope will allow them to crack the sport’s upper tiers.
Tudor Pro Cycling: +3,219 PCS points & +15 ranking spots
For Tudor, they hope the addition of points-generating monster Marc Hirschi will land them in the top two positions amongst the second-division teams (ProTeams) to secure automatic invitations to all WorldTour races in 2026. And, failing that, the addition of French star Julian Alaphilippe should give them enough juice with race organizers to put together a strong schedule.
While it's still incredibly early, it is worth pointing out that after just a few weeks of racing, Tudor is fifth in wins.
XDS-Astana: +2,745 PCS points & +14 ranking spots
XDS-Astana’s incredible off-season likely won’t see them return to the sport’s top tiers or even qualify for the WorldTour when the three-year cycle wraps up at the end of 2026. However, they hope it will be enough to allow them to contend for the top two positions amongst the second-division teams (ProTeams), which will likely be critical to their survival as a team from countries (China and Kazakhstan) that lack a significant number of home races or any Grand Tours.
It is worth pointing out that they have already unleashed a points-blitz strategy. This strategy involves stacking as many riders inside the top ten as possible instead of chasing race wins in an effort to secure a spot in the top two.
Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe: +2,907 PCS points & +4 ranking spots +(4,990 & +8 spots over the last two off-seasons)
After a slow start to their partnership with Red Bull in 2024, the German squad made a serious push to overhaul its roster this past off-season. They hope this will be enough to see them crack the top tier in 2025.
While this transfer performance was good enough to land them in the top projected spot, I still expect Tadej Pogačar’s UAE team to outperform them in the coming season.
Jayco-AlUla: +1,592 PCS points & +6 ranking spots
The Australian team’s on-paper fortunes rose mainly due to the signing of Ben O’Connor, who they are hoping can match his impressive 2024 output to get them back in the single-digit tier of team rankings.
3) The ‘losers’ lists highlight how difficult WorldTour life has become for teams without massive budgets: In contrast, Arkéa-B&B Hotel, Lotto, and Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, all teams with modest to low-level budgets suffered a steep dropoff, with Arkéa, tumbling so far down the roster strength rankings that they landed below six second-division teams, and now sport one of the weakest rosters in cycling.
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale: -2090 PCS points & -9 rankings spots
Lotto: -1949 PCS points & -11 ranking spots
Arkéa-B&B Hotel: -1604 PCS points & -5 ranking spots
Groupama-FDJ: -844 PCS points & -8 ranking spots
4) Teams can significantly over-and-under-perform these rankings on a short-term basis, but, over the long run, they will eventually revert to the mean: Almost as though they are attempting to prove the fragility of this model, some of the teams that have scored incredibly high in projected rankings, like XDS-Astana, seem unlikely to live up to these on-paper expectations, while UAE is very likely once again to win the season-long team rankings despite their second-place projections.
But instead of crowning XDS-Astana a new Super Team and writing UAE off as washed-up, we should note that two of Astana’s top on-paper additions are 35-year-old Diego Ulissi and 37-year-old Wout Poels, who are likely to regress due to their age.
However, these initial overperformances underline an important point: While these rankings are a helpful tool, it is important to note that teams can significantly outperform their BTP rankings season by season.
For example, in 2024, Groupama-FDJ, Intermarché-Wanty, Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, and Soudal-Quick Step all finished five or more ranking points higher in the final standings than their pre-season projections would have suggested.
This is mainly due to all having stars who reverted to the mean after underperforming the previous year, along with highly productive young riders on their roster who could net more points than they had in previous years.
While this is great for these teams, this overperformance isn’t sustainable in the long term, as these mean reversions and improvements of talented young riders are baked into the team’s projection for the following season, which means the team will need to continue to add another batch of unknown young talents to continue to out-perform their ranking.
Interested in diving deeper into how some of the more surprising PCS points gains/losses occurred? Catch up on the most significant transfer moves with my Weekly Transfer Analysis Series:
RedBull-Bora-hansgrohe (+2907)
XDS-Astana (+2745)
Jayco AlUla (+1592)
UAE Team Emirates (-2676)