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.
With the record-breaking magnitude of the team's exploits in mind, we decided to crunch the numbers, analyse the data, and dig deep into the success of their 2025 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.
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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 would have eclipsed the record by just one win. Yet, in the 16 years between these two campaign, the road cycling season's expansion means there are plenty more opportunities, even as the leaves fall from the trees and the temperatures on the European continent drop.
While that shouldn't diminish UAE's outstanding form during 2025, the greater quantity of race days available to them can't be ignored when puting their new record into perspective, especially considering the nine victories they claimed in October to HTC's lone win at Paris-Bourges.
To put UAE Team Emirates-XRG's prolific achievement into perspective, comparing them against the next four top-performing UCI WorldTour squads by race wins in 2025, their dominance is clear to see. Only Soudal-Quickstep were able to rack up more than half of UAE's tally, and even then, that was only possible thanks to Paul Magnier's prolific end to the season as he scored eight victories in October.
The Belgian squad are another example of the season's expanding calendar, with 22% of their victories coming in the final 20 days of the season.
What's more, of UAE's 95 victories, 46 of them correspond to WorldTour events. The next best team on that list is Lidl-Trek, with 20 WorldTour wins in 2025.
Strength in depth, year after year
From the wins to the winners, UAE equalled the previous record, set by themselves in 2024, of the number of riders to win a race in one season, with 20 riders contributing to their historic win tally this season.
Pogačar, Del Toro, and João Almeida lead the way here, all hitting double figures with 18, 16 and 10 wins in UAE colours this 2025 UCI season. Of course, Pogačar also defended his World Championships road race title and added the European Road Championships road race to his palmères while representing Slovenia. However, it's a team effort with UAE seeing two-thirds of their athletes taking at least one win, and an average win tally across their squad of 3.24.
That depth of success also meant that Gianetti's squad had a win rate across the 2025 UCI season of 30.1%, winning just less than every third raceday they embarked on as a team.
The next closest men's squad to that level of efficiency was Soudal-Quickstep at an 18.7% win rate. Interestingly enough, despite scoring fewer wins across the 2009 season, HTC-Columbia actually had a marginally higher win percentage at 31.3% when compared to UAE's 2025 campaign.
Anecdotally, the most prolific Women's WorldTour team in 2025, SD Worx-Protime, makes UAE Team Emirates-XRG's look like an amateur squad by comparison, with a win rate of 45.3% across their campaign. Of course, vastly fewer race days and typically smaller fields mean that it would be unfair to compare the two squads' victory tallies like-for-like.
Grand Tour glory and one-day wins across the globe
Of their 95 victories in the 2025 UCI season, UAE claimed two-thirds of them, 63, during stage race events, whether that be Grand Tours or multi-day races. When totting up the total number of racedays at stage races during the season, that results in a win rate of 27% for the UAE-backed team.
As mentioned earlier, 46 of their wins came at the sport's top tier, just less than half of their overall count, while they claimed 19 wins at .Pro level, and 24 at .1 level races.
(Image credit: Flourish/Future)
Lastly, when looking at UAE Team Emirates-XRG's 2025 wins, it comes as little shock to see them concentrated around the cycling heartlands of Europe. Just shy of a quarter of the team's triumphs (23) came on Italian roads this season, with only two fewer occurring in Spain. It's little shock that France is next on the list, with team taking 12 of their 95 wins in l'Hexagone.
Elsewhere, Austria proved a happy hunting ground for the squad, with six victories in the Alpine nation, while Jhonatan Narváez delivered the team wins in Ecuador at his National Championships, two in Australia and a lone win in Germany alongside making the end-of-season trip to the Tour of Guangxi to win the award for most global squad member.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG won on five separate continents in 2025. That tally jumps up to six, and arguably all currently possible, if you include Tadej Pogačar's UCI Road World Championships road race victory in Kigali, Rwanda. A fitting statistic for the WorldTour's top team at the end of their record-smashing season.
Pete joined Cyclingnews as Engagement Editor in 2024 having previously worked at GCN as a digital content creator, cutting his teeth in cycling journalism across their app, social media platforms, and website. While studying Journalism at university, he worked as a freelancer for Cycling Weekly reporting on races such as the Giro d’Italia and Milan-San Remo alongside covering the Women’s Super League and non-league football for various titles. Pete has an undeniable passion for sport, with a keen interest in tennis, running and football too.
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