"It felt like playing ProCyclingManager in real life" - Bas Tietema compares the process of building the 2024 roster to a videogame

Not content at the Continental level, TDT-Unibet will make the step up to the ProConti ranks in 2024. This has meant expanding their team, learning lessons from less than 12 months of racing and setting lofty ambitions for 2024 and beyond - in an experience likened to "playing ProCyclingManager in real life" by team co-founder and boss, Bas Tietema.

"We don’t have the WorldTour budget and because we also have to decide how to split our money between the sporting and the media side, this has implications for how much we can spend on riders’ salaries or other stuff. We need to be creative and use our knowledge to get the best riders onboard," admitted Tietema in an interview for GCN.

And so the team was tasked with building a PRT team from pretty much a scratch. "It felt like playing ProCyclingManager in real life over the past couple of months. We were in a little scouting group where I was involved, Julia as general manager and Aurélien (a statistician on X going by the handle @LPDouces)."

"From April, we were looking forward to selecting the best riders as possible for our 2024 campaign and we wanted to have Continental riders that were the best climbers at that level, the best Classics riders, and we wanted to put them together with the ideology that they all wanted to get the best out of themselves, instead of having ProConti or WorldTour riders who feel like they are stepping down."