2025 season review | Movistar: Mas' injury and Gavria's absence harm team, but young Spaniards take responsibility

The 2025 road season has wrapped up, and for Movistar Team it felt more like a damage-limitation exercise than a sucess. Spain’s longest-running WorldTour squad mixed a few encouraging flashes with long stretches of frustration and near-misses. They avoided outright disaster, but rarely looked like the force they once were in Grand Tours and big one-day races. This review walks through their year from the spring classics to the three-week grand tours, then finishes with what their transfer moves might mean for 2026.

Movistar’s roots stretch back to the Banesto days, with the team historically built around Grand Tour contenders and strong Spanish climbers. In 2025 the clear leader remained Enric Mas, a Grand Tour podium specialist and four-time Vuelta a España podium finisher, who carried most of Spain’s overall hopes. Around him, management tried to flesh out a more modern, versatile squad.

Pelayo Sánchez added young climbing depth, Fernando Gaviria offered veteran sprint experience, and Iván Romeo arrived as a hugely promising all-rounder. Still just a young man, Romeo really did step forward, winning stages in races like Valencia and the Critérium du Dauphiné and hinting at future GC potential. On paper, it looked like a classic Movistar blend of established leaders and ambitious youngsters, but making that mix work consistently on the road proved much harder.

Strip everything back to the numbers and the story is pretty straightforward. Movistar Team took 9 victories in 2025, with a good chunk of those coming from national championships rather than big international wins. In the UCI WorldTour team rankings they slid to 15th, two spots worse than 2024.

More tellingly, a couple of ProTeams outscored them over the full season, Israel–Premier Tech, for example, finished ahead of them on points, while Movistar hovered just above lower-ranked WorldTour squads such as Team Jayco AlUla. For a team used to living closer to the sharp end of the table, that mid-to-low pack position underlined how much 2025 fell short of their old benchmarks.

Movistar has rarely been a pure classics juggernaut, and this year didn’t change that reputation. On the cobbles, Iván García Cortina once again had to shoulder most of the responsibility. He rode very well to finish 9th at the Tour of Flanders, a hard-earned top-10 in one of cycling’s toughest Monuments, and one of the better individual rides of Movistar’s spring. Beyond that, the team struggled to influence the biggest races.

At Milano-Sanremo they never really featured in the finale, and Paris–Roubaix was even more anonymous, with no Movistar jersey visible when the race split apart over the cobbles and nothing to shout about by the time the bunch reached the velodrome.

If the cobbles were harsh, the Ardennes and other hilly races didn’t offer much comfort either. The team normally expects to see more from its climbers and puncheurs on those punchy courses, but 2025 was, as one summary put it, “slim pickings” in the hills as well. Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège – Bastogne – Liège all passed without a serious Movistar presence in the key moves. Enric Mas never really got going there either, and later in the year his season was cut short by a vascular illness, leaving a big hole in the team.

Instead, the bright spots came from slightly smaller or less expected races. Barrenetxea took a very respectable 3rd at Eschborn–Frankfurt, one of the few WorldTour one-day podiums Movistar managed in 2025. Earlier in the year Javier Romo started strongly with 4th at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, hinting at good early-season form.

The pattern, though, was clear: tactical plans often came down to getting one rider into a break and hoping they could hang on, because the depth just wasn’t there. On the cobbles, Cortina regularly found himself trying to freelance in groups stacked with stronger classics squads. In the Ardennes, they lacked a punchy finisher to follow the very best on the decisive climbs. New signings brought in to help didn’t move the needle much either, and this was undoubtedly a quiet spring for Movistar Team.

For Movistar, Grand Tours are normally the heart of the project. In 2025 they were more a source of frustration than glory. Across the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España, the team did not win a single stagee, which is certainly an unusually barren return for a squad with such a deep three-week history.

With Mas pointing at the Tour, Giro leadership fell to Einer Rubio, and he quietly did a solid job. He rode himself into 8th overall in Rome, a proper top-10 in a Grand Tour and very much a step in the right direction for him. Yet even sympathetic analysts ended up calling his ride “pretty impressive but anonymous,” consistent and worthy of respect, but never really lighting up individual stages or threatening the podium.

The Tour was supposed to be Movistar’s main event. Mas had looked reassuringly on track, with podiums at Volta a Catalunya and Itzulia and a solid 7th at the Dauphiné suggesting he was ready to aim high in July again. Instead, almost everything that could go wrong did.

A crash early in the race, combined with the discovery of a thrombophlebitis in his left leg, left Mas a shadow of himself. He fought on well into the second week, visibly below his normal level, before finally climbing off in the Alps. Mas did spend some time alone at the front on the Mont Ventoux stage, but could not manage to hold on for victory and abandoned on stage 18. Losing their GC leader in that fashion ripped the heart out of Movistar’s Tour plans.

From there, the team scrambled to chase stages, but the breakthrough never came. Romo and young Iván Romeo both got themselves into promising breaks in the mountains, only to fade in the final climbs or be outgunned in the last kilometres. The Tour de France ended with no stage wins, no top-10 on GC and a lot of “what if Mas had been healthy?” conversations.

The Vuelta has often been where Movistar salvages a season, notably with Enric Mas. In 2025, without Mas and without any clear replacement for his GC role, it offered no such rescue.

Again, Orluis Aular was the most reliable source of hope. He racked up multiple top-5s and top-10s, including a painful second place on Stage 15 behind Mads Pedersen. On the climbing days, youngsters like Pablo Castrillo and Romo gave it a go from breakaways, especially in the mountain stages, but every time someone else proved stronger or better-timed. Without Mas anchoring the GC, their best overall rider finished outside the top 10, well short of the podium standards the team has become accustomed to at their home race. Judged as a whole, the Grand Tour campaign was miles away from Movistar’s peak years.

Given all that, it’s no surprise Movistar is shaking things up. The headline move is the arrival of Cian Uijtdebroeks, the 22-year-old Belgian climbing prodigy. He’s widely regarded as one of the top Grand Tour prospects of his generation, and bringing him in from Visma is a statement of intent. For the first time in a while, Movistar will go into Grand Tours with two genuine GC leaders on paper: Mas and Uijtdebroeks.

They’ve also added Roger Adrià, a punchy climber who can shine in week-long races and hilly classics, Juanpe López as another strong mountain domestique with upside, and Raúl García Pierna joins the ranks too.

To make room, there has been a sizeable clear-out. Riders such as Gregor Mühlberger, Will Barta, Mathias Norsgaard and several veterans including Fernando Gaviria and Davide Cimolai are moving on. The risk is that Movistar loses a layer of road wisdom and depth, the hope is that the new, hungrier names will more than compensate.

But, if Uijtdebroeks can live up to his potential, he could be one of the best singings the team has ever secured.

Put everything together and 2025 was clearly below Movistar’s own standards. Yes, they had bright moments, but in the biggest races they rarely dictated anything. No Grand Tour stage wins, no GC podiums, no major classics trophies: it all adds up.

It was a hard season, but not a lost one. With Uijtdebroeks and other reinforcements incoming, Movistar has given itself a chance to reset. Now they have to turn that potential into results, or 2025’s struggles might start to look less like a blip and more like a trend.

Looking back at Movistar’s 2025 season, I can’t pretend it was anything but underwhelming. For a team with their history, going winless in all three Grand Tours and barely influencing the big races felt flat. Even the bright moments couldn’t hide how often they came up short. But the one thing that genuinely gives me hope is the signing of Cian Uijtdebroeks. That’s a real swing ,a rider who could change the entire trajectory of the team. If he develops as expected, and can avoid the strange injuries he has suffered in the last 18 months, Movistar might finally have the spark they’ve been missing.

Just not a whole lot to mention of Movistar is there. Enric Mas did start off his season strong, podiums in Catalunya and Itzulia are not to ignore but his second half of the year was a disaster due to health reasons. He was not racing the Tour at his real level and then an injury ended his season, he did not race the Vuelta and Italian classics where he usually performs best, leaving the team without its headliner for a meaningful part of the year. In his absence, a few riders stepped up, but for a World Tour tam, it was just enough to get by.

Movistar's story resembles a few others in the World Tour, such as INEOS but at a lower level. Budget and quality sort of remains the same, but many teams have taken a step up. Javier Romo and Ivãn Romeo have both performed very well this year and have put in some very strong rides, but there's only so much they could do to save the team's season. Einer Rubio actually showed a very good level at the Giro and Tour, but the same applies. Pablo Castrillo teamed up with Romeo almost all year long and honestly it's a group of Spanish riders that have really taken responsibility for the team's top performances, which does provide some good hope.

Orluis Aular also rode quite well this year, but again, not enough to put the team near the top. Fernando Gaviria was completely absent from the action, only hitting the front about 200 meters before the moment he should in just about any sprint he contested; Jefferson Alveiro Cepeda didn't follow up on his brilliant 2024 after coming from Caja Rural; Ruben Guerreiro and Pelayo Sanchez; Nairo Quintana didn't deliver on the hopes and the team's reputation isn't the very best taking into consideration he and Michel Hessmann were both signed after their anti-doping suspensions.

The team can look well into the future however, with Gaviria's departure certainly freeing up budget that is well used: The team's signing of Cian Uijtdebroeks was a power move, and the potential is high. Roger Adrià has the potential to be a new leader in the team, Raul García Pierna was signed after showing his best ever legs at the Vuela, Pavel Novak is a proper quality under-23 rider and Juan Pedro López can both deliver on the popularity and exposure side but if he has a good year, performance is also possible.