The Tour de France finished in Paris on Sunday evening, shortened and subdued, and within hours the sport stopped talking about who won and started talking about who is going where. The 2026 cycling transfer market has begun. This is the part of the season nobody sells tickets for and everybody watches. From 1 August the teams may formally announce their 2027 signings, and the deals that get announced then were mostly agreed weeks ago, in hotel car parks and on rest days, while the riders doing them were also trying to get over the Galibier. Around two hundred riders in the men’s peloton are out of contract at the end of this season. Most of them do not have a landing spot. Here is who is buying, who is selling, and who is about to find out that a good Tour is not the same thing as a job.
Why the second half of the season is an audition
Cycling has no transfer fees, no January window and no player union with teeth. A contract simply expires on 31 December and the rider becomes free, which sounds liberating until you notice the arithmetic: the number of WorldTour seats is fixed at eighteen teams of roughly thirty riders, and it has been shrinking at the edges. Arkéa-B&B Hotels folded. Wagner Bazin-WB folded. Lotto and Intermarché merged into one squad. Every one of those events took jobs out of the pool without taking riders out of it.
So the races between now and the end of the season — the Vuelta, the Canadian one-days, the World Championships, Lombardia — are not really races for a large part of the peloton. They are job interviews, run at forty kilometres an hour, in front of the only twenty or so people whose opinion pays a mortgage. A rider with no contract who crashes out of the Vuelta in the first week has not had bad luck. He has had his interview cancelled.
The buyers: who is spending, team by team
Decathlon CMA CGM are the most aggressive operators of this window, and everything they are doing points at one nineteen-year-old. The French team have reportedly signed Pavel Sivakov from UAE Team Emirates on a three-year deal, Laurens De Plus from Netcompany-Ineos on a two-year deal, and Ben O’Connor back from Jayco-AlUla on a three-year deal. Note what those three riders have in common: not one of them is a marquee name to sell jerseys. Sivakov spent the last two seasons burying himself for Tadej Pogačar. De Plus has eleven WorldTour seasons of doing the same job for other people. O’Connor is a proven Grand Tour climber who has finished fourth at this race. Decathlon are not buying stars. They are buying a mountain train, and they are building it around Paul Seixas so that he has no reason to look elsewhere.
Lidl-Trek already had the deepest roster in the sport this July — Mads Pedersen took the green jersey, Juan Ayuso and Mattias Skjelmose both finished the Tour inside the top seven — and they are still buying. Felix Gall is reported to be leaving Decathlon for the American squad, and sprinter Jordi Meeus is reported to be joining him. Igor Arrieta is linked from Netcompany-Ineos. A team that can put a green jersey, two general-classification riders and a Grand Tour climber on the same bus is not building for a single leader; it is building to have a card to play in every race it enters.
Tudor are the most interesting outfit in the market, because they are not even a WorldTour team and they are shopping like one. Arnaud De Lie, the Belgian classics sprinter who abandoned this Tour with a stomach complaint, is reported to be joining them from Lotto-Intermarché. So is Kaden Groves. Both are riders a top-eight WorldTour team would ordinarily have locked up. Tudor are betting that money and a clear leadership role will buy them results a ProTeam has no business getting — and, eventually, the ranking points that get you invited everywhere without asking.
NSN Cycling, already remade this season with Biniam Girmay leading the line, are reported to be adding Santiago Buitrago and are linked with Lennert Van Eetvelt. XDS Astana are reported to be bringing Aleksandr Vlasov back to the team where he first became a Grand Tour rider. Pinarello Q36.5, backed by billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, have Mauro Schmid arriving and are linked to a name considerably bigger than that. And Netcompany-Ineos, having lost De Plus and Arrieta, are reported to be close to a new deal with Egan Bernal and have Markel Beloki arriving from EF.
Three domestiques. One teenager.
Decathlon's entire transfer window is a message to a nineteen-year-old who hasn't signed anything
The sellers, and the ones standing still
Movistar are the clearest sellers in the men’s peloton: reporting puts eight riders out of contract, with Iván García Cortina, Gonzalo Serrano, Natnael Tesfatsion, Lorenzo Milesi and Davide Formolo all expected to leave or not be retained. That is a quarter of a WorldTour roster looking for work at the worst possible moment.
Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe are losing the biggest name of the window. Primož Roglič will leave at the end of the season — team boss Ralph Denk has confirmed the split — and the reason is not that he stopped being good. It is that the team has reorganised itself around Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz, and at 36 Roglič is now the veteran in a project that belongs to somebody else. Reporting says he wants what a man with four Grand Tours to his name might reasonably want: trust, a leadership role, control of his own calendar, and one more crack at the Tour de France in 2027. Bahrain Victorious have ruled themselves out. Pinarello Q36.5 are the team most persistently linked. Jai Hindley, seventh on the queen stage and out of contract, is reported to be re-signing.
Visma-Lease a Bike spent this Tour losing Jonas Vingegaard to a fractured collarbone in the Jura and Sepp Kuss to a pair of crashes on the Sarenne descent, and their transfer activity is almost entirely defensive: retain the core, and try to buy the future. Vingegaard, contracted through 2028, has publicly shut down speculation about a move to Netcompany-Ineos — “I don’t see myself changing teams” — and says he expects to finish his career there. UAE Team Emirates-XRG, who have just won a fifth Tour with Pogačar and the white jersey with Isaac del Toro, are losing Sivakov and doing very little else. When you have the best rider in the world under contract, the transfer market is somebody else’s problem.
EF Education-EasyPost deserve a line of their own. Richard Carapaz went into this Tour with an expiring contract, won two stages on Alpe d’Huez in two days from two different roads, and took the mountains classification off Pogačar. Reporting says he has extended with EF. If the timing of that is a coincidence, it is a remarkably convenient one — and it is the clearest illustration in the whole window of what three weeks in July are actually worth.
The Seixas question, which is still not answered
The marquee negotiation of the year has not resolved, and it is worth being precise about what it actually is. Paul Seixas is contracted to Decathlon CMA CGM through the end of 2027. Decathlon manager Dominique Serieys has been flat about it: “We’re confident. We’re focused on helping Paul at the Tour de France and he has a contract for 2027.” So this is not a rider about to walk. It is a fight over what happens after that, and over whether anyone can make an offer large enough to prise him out early.
The reported interest is extraordinary: UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Visma-Lease a Bike, Netcompany-Ineos, Lidl-Trek and Pinarello Q36.5 have all been linked. The figure that set the sport talking — a reported €13 million a year from Glasenberg’s Q36.5, which would make a nineteen-year-old the highest-paid rider in cycling — comes from Daniel Benson’s reporting and is disputed: Serieys says Glasenberg denied making it. Treat it as a number in circulation, not a number on a contract. Visma’s Richard Plugge has confirmed his interest openly and pitched development rather than money: “If he decides to leave, we are the best team to train him to win Grand Tours.” Seixas himself, fourth overall in Paris at nineteen, sounds like a man who would like everyone to stop: “I don’t have social media, so I don’t see much. But there are quite a lot of things I have heard about that are false.”
Talks are reported to resume from mid-August through September. Whatever is signed will shape the next decade of French cycling, and France has been waiting for a home Tour winner since 1985.
The riders nobody writes a headline about
Here is the part of the transfer window that does not trend. When Lotto and Intermarché merged last winter, the combined squad came out at thirty riders — sixteen retained from Lotto, eight from Intermarché-Wanty, six mostly from development teams. Everyone else had to find something else. Nine riders were left on ProCyclingStats with no contract at all: Jarne Van De Paar, Logan Currie, Dion Smith, Louis Barré, Gijs Van Hoecke, Kobe Goossens, Kamiel Bonneu, Kevin Colleoni, Gerben Kuypers. Six more simply retired. Ten riders from the development squad had nowhere announced to go.
Tom Paquot was 26. He described himself as “a collateral victim” of the merger, and explained the problem in one sentence: “As soon as the first rumours surfaced in July, I made contact. But the collapse of Arkéa-B&B Hotels and Wagner Bazin-WB really complicated my search.” He was doing everything right. There was simply nowhere to go. Thomas De Gendt, who has watched this sport for twenty years, was blunter about the process: riders “still don’t know if they are in or out, even in November,” and for those riders “it’s a bit like being in hell.” His summary of the whole thing was two words long, and the polite version of it is “crap show.”
Nine riders. No contracts. No headlines.
one merger, one winter, and the part of the transfer market that never makes the front page
That is the real shape of this market. At the top, a nineteen-year-old is reportedly being discussed in eight figures. In the middle, a 26-year-old professional who has done nothing wrong is out of the sport because two teams he never rode for went under. Both things are true in the same week, and the second one is much more common than the first.
Who gains, and who loses, from here
Gaining: Decathlon CMA CGM, who have bought a genuine Grand Tour support structure and given their prodigy a reason to stay. Tudor, who are acquiring WorldTour-quality riders at a moment when WorldTour-quality riders have fewer places to be. Lidl-Trek, who are compounding an already frightening roster. And any rider under 23 with a pulse, because the one thing every team in this market is willing to pay for is time.
Losing: the thirty-somethings. Roglič at 36 is the famous version of a story being repeated a hundred times below him — a proven rider whose value to a team is no longer his ceiling but his experience, priced accordingly. Movistar’s departing eight. Every domestique whose job was to be reliable rather than remarkable, in a year when there are more reliable men than seats. And, quietly, the riders of the folded and merged teams, who are competing for the same handful of contracts as everybody else while carrying the extra burden of having to explain why they are available.
The second half of this season will be raced by two different pelotons wearing the same numbers. One is chasing results. The other is chasing employment. Watch the Vuelta breakaways in three weeks’ time and you will be able to tell, almost rider by rider, which is which — because the men with nothing signed will be the ones going up the road on stages nobody remembers, in front of cameras that might be pointed at the right person.
So what is a professional cycling career actually worth, when a good Tour buys one man a contract extension and a merger costs nine others their jobs in the same twelve months? And how many of the riders you watched in July will still be in the sport next spring?
Sources
- CyclingUpToDate — Rumours, renewals and moves for riders out of contract in 2027
- Cyclingnews — De Plus joins big-name domestiques heading to Decathlon CMA CGM
- Cyclingnews — ‘We’re confident’: Decathlon shrug off rival bids for Paul Seixas
- Escape Collective — Roglič seeks a new team and one more chance at the Tour in 2027
- CyclingFlash — Ralph Denk confirms Roglič will continue, but not with Red Bull
- Cycling Weekly — ‘I’m a collateral victim’: the Lotto-Intermarché merger fallout
- CyclingUpToDate — Thomas De Gendt on the chaos behind the Lotto-Intermarché merger
- Cyclingnews — Vingegaard ends speculation of a move to Netcompany-Ineos
Related reading
CyclingFreePress is a cycling news digest. This article summarises transfer reporting from independent cycling outlets; contract situations, reported fees and negotiations described here are as reported at the time of writing and may change quickly. Nothing here is confirmed by the teams beyond the statements attributed to them, and reported financial figures are explicitly disputed where noted.