2025 season review | Cofidis: World Tour relegation the result of a difficult season

In our series of 2025 reviews so far, it feels as if many have been negative. Unfortunately, today won’t be the day that that changes. The 2025 season was a turbulent one for Cofidis. As a French UCI WorldTour squad with decades of history, the team entered the year hoping to solidify top-tier status, only to find itself drawn into a late relegation fight. There were sparks of hope early on in January and February, a handful of confidence-boosting wins, and the odd headline that hinted at brighter days. But as the year wore on, the gap between ambition and output widened, and the final reckoning left Cofidis with hard questions and a ProTeam license for 2026.

Cofidis is a pillar of French cycling, 2025 marked its 29th season overall and sixth straight at the WorldTour level. The team has long mixed experience and ambition, developing homegrown riders while fighting above its weight. This year’s roster included Bryan Coquard, Jesús Herrada, and Alex Aranburu, with veterans Ion Izagirre and Dylan Teuns providing leadership. Manager Cédric Vasseur, who has since exited the squad, assembled a squad built around sprinters and stage hunters. The blueprint was clear: Coquard’s finishing speed, Herrada’s hilly punch, and Aranburu’s versatility would drive results. The aim? Survive.

By season’s end, that plan had unraveled. Cofidis recorded nine wins, a modest return by WorldTour standards and mostly in smaller races. None came in cycling’s biggest events. The team ended the year 20th, second last among WorldTour teams, and a few hundred points short of safety. After a respectable 2023, the team’s trajectory has since tilted downward, culminating in relegation for the next license cycle. The numbers made it plain: fewer wins, fewer points, fewer reasons for optimism.

Ironically, the year began as if Cofidis were ready to surprise everyone. In January, Coquard sprinted to a victory on Stage 4 of the Tour Down Under, ending a long WorldTour drought and lifting morale immediately. February brought more: Valentin Ferron won GP La Marseillaise, Milan Fretin took the Clásica de Almería, then doubled up with a stage win at the Volta ao Algarve. By mid-February, four wins were on the board, a strong return that hinted at a renaissance. In April, Fretin added another success at the Ronde van Limburg, further validating the team’s early form.

But when the marquee Classics rolled around, Cofidis struggled to keep pace. In the Monuments, and there were no top-tens in any Monument, no podiums in WorldTour one-days, and Coquard’s sprinting speed failed to translate into a serious Classics result. The team lacked a true leader for these races, and despite solid participation, they were rarely visible in finales.

Still, there were flashes of class. Aranburu’s victory on Stage 3 of Itzulia Basque Country was one of the team’s finest wins of the year. Initially relegated for a supposed route infringement, he was reinstated after review confirmed his line was legal. That moment proved Cofidis could still punch above their weight. Yet aside from that and February’s hot streak, their spring campaign fell flat. Against deeper squads, Cofidis looked underpowered and overworked, a team with effort but not execution.

The Grand Tours exposed the full scale of Cofidis’s decline. Across the Giro, Tour, and Vuelta, they failed to win a stage or place a rider in the top 20 overall. Their combined points haul from all three races was less than some rivals earned in a single Tour.

At the Giro d’Italia, without a GC captain, the team focused on opportunistic racing. The Giro brought little. Sergio Samitier’s 52nd overall was the team’s top GC result, and most stage efforts ended short of contention.

The Tour de France, though, offered no such consolation. Coming off their stage wins in 2022 and 2023, Cofidis entered confident but left empty-handed. Emanuel Buchmann was tasked with leading the GC effort; his 30th-place finish summed up the campaign, consistent, but never close. Coquard battled among the sprinters, managing a seventh place on one flat stage, which would stand as their best Tour result. Team insiders called the Tour “dramatic,” not for fireworks, but for the lack of them. A total of around 150 UCI points from the race underscored the drought, and they were largely invisible.

The Vuelta a España completed the trilogy of disappointment. Herrada, a past stage winner, entered with hopes of redeeming the season, but lingering injuries kept him below his usual level. Coquard opened with a seventh on Stage 1 and never factored again. Samitier finished 31st overall, and no Cofidis rider reached a stage top-five. The team’s entire Vuelta haul was just 112 UCI points, and for the first time in years, they left Spain without a win or serious headline.

Cofidis’s issues in the three-week races were structural. Losing Guillaume Martin meant losing a reliable GC engine, and the replacements couldn’t fill that void. Coquard’s speed wasn’t enough to outgun the elite sprinters, and their breakaway artists lacked the finishing touch. Injuries further eroded depth. In the end, the Grand Tours exposed everything that went wrong in 2025: no leadership clarity, no decisive punch, and no luck when it mattered.

Invisible is once again the best way to describe this sorry display for Cofidis in the grand tours.

After such a bruising year, Cofidis opted for a major reshuffle heading into 2026. Key signings include Alex Kirsch from Lidl–Trek, whose strength as a rouleur and lead-out man should help both the sprint and classics units. From the dissolved Arkéa team come Jenthe Biermans, a versatile Belgian, and French climber Camille Charret, joined by U23 prospect Louis Rouland. The marquee new face is Italian U23 champion Edoardo Zamperini, a 22-year-old puncheur signed as a cornerstone of what the team calls a “new era.”

Departures were just as significant. Jesús Herrada, a stalwart and three-time Vuelta stage winner, leaves after seven seasons. Anthony Perez, long a breakaway regular, is also out. Stefano Oldani departs after a quiet year, while Aimé De Gendt joins Q36.5 and Jonathan Lastra moves to Euskaltel-Euskadi.

The management structure also changed. With the relegation confirmed, Cofidis parted ways with Cédric Vasseur, signaling a broader reset. As a ProTeam, Cofidis will still receive automatic wildcards to major races in 2026, ensuring continued exposure at cycling’s highest level.

There’s no sugarcoating it, 2025 was rough. The team began brightly, banked early wins, but the season’s second half was defined by missed chances and mounting pressure. Grand Tours yielded zero victories and no GC relevance, and by autumn the points deficit had become irreversible.

A fair score for the year is 4 out of 10: credit for early successes and isolated highlights, but marked down for Grand Tour anonymity and an overall lack of punch. The mission for 2026 is straightforward. Reinforce the team’s structure, protect key riders deeper into races, and develop the new generation quickly. With automatic wildcards guaranteeing big-race access, Cofidis has the platform to rebound. Whether they can turn that into results depends on how fast the new signings settle and whether veterans like Coquard and Aranburu can anchor the next chapter.

Looking back, I can’t help but feel Cofidis’ 2025 season was a harsh but necessary wake-up call. They started fast, looked sharp, and then watched it all unravel once the real tests arrived. The early wins and Moniquet’s Giro jersey reminded me there’s still fight in this team, but the Grand Tours exposed how far behind we’d fallen. Losing WorldTour status will really damage them, there’s no way around that. But, if Cofidis learns from this year, 2025’s struggles might just be the foundation for something better.

I am not going to go in on Cofidis, because it is a French team, one that I assume keeps the same budget year after year in a peloton that on average increases every year. In a way a team stuck in time, but no longer able to compete at this level, it simply doesn't fit in the World Tour anymore and the relegation is logical. As pointed out, its 2023 season was quite decent and Victor Lafay was an absolute eye-catching breakthrough. 2025, I have one memory of Cofidis riding great and winning which was Aranburu's victory at Itzulia. Nothing else, nada, the team was by far the most absent from the action this year, not only lacking the results but also any big name that would capture attention.

If the context were to be ignored, you would have plenty to criticize. The team signed 13 riders, almost half of the entire team, and Aranburu is the only one who delivered. Emanuel Buchmann is no longer the same, Dylan Teuns was nowhere to be seen, and everyone else are riders who can perform in a more modest calendar, not in the same one as UAE and Visma. The money was invested in the wrong riders, and its lack of competitivness in the market seems apparent.

Grand Tours, nothing to point out at all, none of the team's climbers performed; in the sprinter field both Milan Fretin and Bryan Coquard had good starts to the season but after February they had 1 win in total; and there simply weren't memorable moments. Little exposure, little results, the lack of UCI points was so severe that even with Arkéa disbanding and Intermarché disappearing from the scene (meaning two extra spots in the World Tour) the team didn't make it. It was overtaken by Uno-X Mobility in the end, which until this year there probably wasn't almost any focus or chances it would succeed. The team will go back to ProTeam level where it belongs (this isn't criticism) and perhaps 2026 will be a better year. A Tour de France wildcard is virtually assured, and financial necessities perhaps smaller due to the lower division, so there won't be too many issues with that.