UAE Team Emirates-XRG have had a near-perfect season in 2025, spearheaded by talisman Tadej Pogačar‘s defence of Tour de France and World Championships titles, and compounded by the team’s podium finishes at the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España alongside several Monument and WorldTour stage race victories.
The top squad in the men’s WorldTour rankings smashed the previous best total wins record with time to spare, and equalled their own record when it came to strength in depth across their roster.
Of course, Pogačar takes many of the plaudits thanks to his long-range attacks and cannibal-like style of racing, but the four-time Tour winner isn’t the only rider responsible for the squad’s stellar season.
A season-long purple patch
We can’t start anywhere else but UAE’s record-breaking number of wins in 2025. Between the start and end of the official UCI 2025 calendar, the team scored 95 victories across one-day races, stage races, and national titles.
Isaac del Toro scored another two victories last weekend in the form of the Mexican National Championships road race and time trial titles; however, these are officially classed as the first two victories of the 2026 season due to the timings of the UCI’s calendars.
Nonetheless, the 95 wins put them 10 clear of the previous record holders, HTC-Columbia, who in 2009 set a record of 85 wins, thanks in large part to the sprinting prowess of Mark Cavendish, André Greipel, and Edvald Boasson Hagen.
But despite their domination in the bunch sprints, UAE Team Emirates-XRG knocked them off their perch with an 86th victory in the middle of September and almost a month of the season still to unfold.
As the month-by-month line graph below shows, Mauro Gianetti’s squad were firing on all cylinders in the early season and already firmly on track to surpass HTC’s efforts. UAE saw a drop-off in their win rate through May and were limited to just five wins at the Giro, Tour de Romandie, and Tour de Hongrie. Meanwhile, HTC won six stages of the Giro alone.
However, the two squads’ summer results were relatively similar between June and September, with HTC collecting 52 wins to UAE’s 46. If the season culminated on September 30, Gianetti’s men…
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