Gianni Bugno’s words hit the mark. Not because they are particularly harsh, but because they are realistic.
The WorldTour, as it has been built, has progressively centralized professional cycling, creating a system that penalizes everything below it. Smaller teams have been paying the price for years.
A closed model has taken shape, increasingly similar to that of Formula 1. This is not a recent phenomenon, but a drift that has been going on for a long time. And the consequences are clear: sponsors struggle to get involved, because the WorldTour requires enormous investments, sustainable only by large international groups.
This is one of the reasons why Italy, from a cycling perspective, is losing ground. We do not have access to capital comparable to what comes from Arabia or Asia, and without major sponsors it becomes impossible to compete. No company is willing to invest significant sums in a team that does not have guaranteed access to the biggest races: Grand Tours and Monument Classics.
The result is a system that suffocates Professional and Continental teams and, as a consequence, weakens the entire structure, all the way down to youth cycling.
Reducing the number of WorldTour teams, as Bugno suggests, may be a sensible proposal. But it does not address the real issue, the structural one: the total absence of meritocracy.
Since its creation – first as the ProTour, then as the UCI WorldTour – the system has never truly provided access based on sporting results. In 2021, some rules were introduced linking licences to a minimum level of performance, but these are marginal adjustments, more formal than substantial. The substance does not change: meritocracy is not the driving force of the system.
There is no clear pathway that allows a team to move up based on results, as happens in other sports. And this is no coincidence. The system was designed first and foremost to guarantee revenue.
To obtain a WorldTour licence, teams must provide very high bank guarantees, proportional to riders’ salaries: we are talking about €3–4 million per year, guaranteed for three years, because WorldTour licences are issued on a three-year basis. These funds remain locked as financial guarantees, but they are an integral part of the system’s economic balance.
In this context, meritocracy is not only not applied: it is not even предусмотрed.
There are no structured championships or competitions that allow Professional teams to compete on equal terms and earn access to the WorldTour on the road. The first level of selection is economic: how much money you have. Only afterwards are sporting results taken into consideration.
A different system would be possible. Annual licences, based first on results and only then on financial guarantees. A calendar designed to create clear rankings, with promotion and relegation mechanisms. In other words, a true “Serie A” of cycling, accessible through merit.
Today, instead, the WorldTour is not an open sporting ecosystem, but a closed economic system. And as long as it remains so, it will continue to compress and suffocate everything beneath it.
There is another question that is rarely asked: how is it possible that, despite the exponential growth of budgets at the top level of cycling, none of these resources are reinvested in youth cycling?
The Union Cycliste Internationale does not truly support the base of the sport. On the contrary, the imbalance towards the top has drastically reduced the resources allocated to youth development. Professional riders’ salaries have increased significantly compared to twenty years ago, while budgets for youth categories have more than halved.
If the system is still holding together, it is only thanks to the passion of volunteers, certainly not because of a long-term vision from those who govern the sport.
In the end, the issues are always the same: a meritocracy that, after more than twenty years, still does not exist. And a structure that should grow from the bottom up, but is increasingly designed from the top down.
And when the foundations are weakened, the future inevitably suffers. Undermining the base today means compromising the cycling of tomorrow.
