One of the biggest sporting events of any summer is the Tour de France, a gruelling three week cycling race covering 3,300km and 54,000m of climbing around France that kicked off, or maybe it’s better to say rode off, in Barcelona on Saturday.
Aside from questions as to why exactly a French bike race starts in Spain (answer: the big three-week races, known as Grand Tours, just do this year’s Giro d’Italia started in Hungary and the Vuelta a España will leave from Monaco with stops in Southern France
while next year’s Tour will even pass through Liverpool), for a lot of people the question will be hey, what’s this, then? (answer: a three week cycling race covering 3,300km and 54,000m of climbing around France)
Since we’re theoretically a Liverpool site, at least when it’s not the World Cup, but it’s the summer and there’s not a lot aside from sketchy transfer rumours to talk about (and also the World Cup with apologies to those who only want us to talk about things very strictly about Liverpool to which we should also apologize for this) so naturally the question is how to make the Tour de France about Liverpool. If you squint at it. Like really squint.
Answer: do a thing comparing Tour de France riders with Premier League football clubs. Yes, it’s dumb (again, sorry). But really it’s just an excuse, so let’s get to it.
First off, if you’ve never watched the Tour de France or generally given a damn about competitive (or non-competitive for that matter) cycling, who’s going to win? That one’s pretty easy. Assuming he doesn’t ride into a ravine, the winner of the 2026 Tour de France is…
Tadej Pogačar (Team Emirates) = Manchester City
Tadej Pogačar (sounds a bit like focaccia) is a sportswashing front for a human rights abusing petrostate. He’s also probably the greatest athlete the sport has ever seen. He will be wearing yellow at the end of the Tour de France (because yellow is the colour of the shirt whoever’s in the lead of the overall race gets to wear).
Anyhow. In competitive cycling, there are (to over-simplify it) three flavours of guy. There’s the sprinter guys who are relatively big with over-developed thighs who train for short quick-twitch busts. They try to win the so-called sprint stages (side note: most stages are around 160km +/- 40km regardless of type), stages that are mostly flat.
In these stages the teams with a good sprinter (aka sprint teams does what it says on the tin) will try to manage the race, closing down any breakaways (small groups of a few to ten riders who take off on their own while the massive main group of riders called the peloton stay bunched together and rotate riders to the front where they block the wind for everyone else and help the peloton maintain average speeds in excess of 50km/h).
Now, Pogačar isn’t a sprinter, so apologies for leading with that (I had to explain the three flavours of guy somewhere). So, at the other end of the spectrum are climbers. They’re the little dudes who because they’re so little have less weight to haul up the big ass mountains. They’re extreme endurance riders, and they win Grand Tours (the overall winner, also known as the GC winner for General Classification, is judged across the entire 3,300km and 54,000m of climbing and winning by anything more than a minute or two over that length is considered dominant) on the strength of their climbing while cagily riding to minimize time losses against perceived GC rivals in non-big ass mountain stages.
In the middle are the punchers. They’ll be the ones off in the breakaway early on sprint stages trying to beat out the sprint teams to the finish. And they’ll be the ones on longer hilly stages out at the front. And sometimes they might even be able to play their cards right and win in the big mountains. They’re often the most fun to watch but they aren’t generally suited to winning GC, and rather than something like the Tour de France their pinnacle are one day Classics races (for many the biggest single-day race is Paris–Roubaix, which includes dirt and cobbled sections and is often called The Hell of the North), often longer than any single tour stage and over moderate hills.
So, Pogačar. He’s won the Tour de France four times (so this will be number five) and is inarguably the best Grand Tour rider of his generation. Of any, probably. In service to that, he’s one of the top two climbers (and probably just clear at number one) any way you cut it. He’s also won basically every Classic (not Paris–Roubaix sorry, la), usually multiple times, and is now the best Classics rider in the sport (Mathieu van der Poel would have had a case for top spot in past years but given where they are in their careers at the moment Pogačar has probably eclipsed him).
You shouldn’t be able to be that good at both Classics and Grand Tours. Nobody has been going back to at least Eddy Merckx (think Pelé, I guess?), and the sport was far less professionalized and specialized back when he was making his greatest of all time case.
It’s not even remotely normal to do what Pogačar does. Also, you know, he’s with Team UAE. Because they don’t have to hide the sportswashing behind a club name in cycling, they just are that team. And because they’re Team UAE they spend way more than anyone else and have like half a dozen riders who would be GC contenders on other teams except instead of doing that they’re being paid twice as much to carry water and block wind for Pogačar before he rides off on his own for 70km and wins again.
Jonas Vingegaard (Team Visma) = Liverpool
Jonas Vingegaard (sounds a bit like ????) is the only guy who has ever really kept up with Pogačar from a GC standpoint. When Pogačar and Vingegaard start a race, that’s the order they finish in. When only one of them is in a race, they win it—without anyone else really coming close. For a time, it even seemed like maybe it would be Vingegaard coming out on top in a battle of generational GC riders but then Vingegaard rode into a ravine and almost died which kinda set him back for a year or two (these are things that happen in cycling).
The resultant dynamic has been locked in a few years now, and in addition to being second best (and occasionally maybe better on the absolutely biggest mountains where Vingegaard might have just a hair more endurance and heat tolerance than the man he’s chasing) what the Dane (red and white flag is Liverpool coded) has is probably the team with the consistently best tactics and ability to execute.
Cycling can seem like a solo sport, but beyond the peloton bunching together with the guys out front burning matches (that’s kinda like leaving it all out on the pitch for your teammates) and pushing themselves to go 50-whatever km per h while everyone else sits in their slipstream, there can be a surprising amount of team tactics in the sport.
A team that works well together, that is tactically smart, and that knows when to burn their matches to give the team leader an edge heading into or up a final climb (or in the case of the sprint teams to get their guy to the final drag race so he can quick-twitch to glory) can make a big difference, and while Visma have consistently been the fourth or fifth highest spenders in the sport in an era of Team UAE dominance, they have thanks to Vingegaard and consistently being the smartest tactical team been the only ones to consistently challenge them (and every now and then even beat them).
Jürgen Klopp might not be Liverpool’s manager any more, and Pep Guardiola may have moved on as well, but taking all that into account a Liverpool site can’t rightly tie Vingegaard and Visma to anyone else.
Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull) = Tottenham
Remco could a super fun Classics-style rider, a punchy stage hunter who picks his spot and puts on a show. Sometimes he even is that, and when he is he is a joy to watch ride. What he can’t be is Tadej Pogačar. And it sometimes feels as if more than anything that Remco and his fans are desperate for him to be Tadej Pogačar.
What Remco is is an elite puncher who’s good enough to just about keep up with the climbers in the mountains and across the length of a Grand Tour, and can even win a shorter multi-day tour depending on what opposition there is. But when pitted against not just the likes of Pogačar and Vingegaard but even just the best of the rest top GC riders, he’s gonna get dropped when the climbing gets tough.
At this point, he’s rather made a habit of fighting like hell to stay in the GC fight for the first two weeks of the Tour de France (or whatever Grand Tour he shows up at) only to run out of gas and implode completely in the final week. Usually at some point he will have a very public meltdown aimed at teammates/his bike/the sporting directors/the weather/who the fuck knows what and it’s probably 50:50 whether he finishes in the GC top ten or drops out of the Tour de France before the end.
This might not be an issue except that he’s Red Bull’s star rider, their highest paid cyclist, and he and literally everyone around him seem to think he’s gonna magically turn into Pogačar if they just believe hard enough and keep trying. It’s also an issue because…
Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull) = Arsenal
Red Bull have another guy at the Tour de France who is a better GC rider than Remco. Only rather than working for Lipowitz and opportunistically trying to win stages he’s suited for, Remco will ride for his own GC chances and with Red Bull having chosen a co-leader strategy (it never works for anybody but maybe it’ll work for us!) they will also be burning the matches of their other support riders to keep Remco’s GC hopes alive. And also they’ll be trying to help Lipowitz at the same time (seriously, maybe it’ll work for us!).
I’ll just be honest, there’s really no good reason to have Lipowitz as Arsenal (he’s 10cm and 5kg bigger than Remco which is kinda big for a serious GC contender so meatwall I guess?) but if Remco is Tottenham and the most significant thing his GC efforts at the Tour de France can probably achieve is destroying his teammate’s GC efforts? The Spurs need their Gunners and if they can’t win at least they can screw over their rivals, is I guess what I’m saying. If Remco melts down early and Lipowitz gets support, he certainly has a shot at the podium given he finished third last year (before Red Bull went and signed Remco because of reasons).
Cian Uijtdebroeks (Movistar) = Man United
Movistar are the ultimate banter team. Other teams might be a mess but other teams at least sometimes win things. Movistar at this point seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding new and increasingly embarrassing ways to lose. They made an in-house documentary a few years ago about a past Tour de France that made them look so incompetent you could swear it was a hit piece. And they liked it so much they made a sequel.
Since Tottenham are off the board, that means they’ve gotta be Man United who yes had a decent 2025-26 but we’re all fairly certain that’s just to set up things going off the rails again. As for Movistar, they really should be better than they are. They spend enough to win a lot more than they do. They’re an outfit that historically has had success. On paper they should be pretty good.
Meanwhile they’re out there shooting themselves in the foot. Mechanical failures, terrible tactics, infighting. When Movistar see a chance to turn victory into defeat they grab it with both hands. Unless your definition of “matter” is “everyone laughs at these guys” then they do not matter.
Anyhow, Cian Uijtdebroeks seems fine. He could get in the top ten for GC and it wouldn’t be a shock. But with Movistar it also wouldn’t be a shock if he doesn’t get the top ten and none of their other riders win a stage, which simply shouldn’t be possible when you’re talking about Movistar I mean this is Movistar we’re talking about it’s Movistar United this is Moo United we’re talking about here.
Antonio Tiberi (Bahrain) = Newcastle
There are a bunch of teams in cycling that are basically soft power plays by oil rich micro states (and also Kazakhstan?) and Bahrain Victorious sorta get to fly under the radar because they don’t spend as much as someone like UAE and also they just generally don’t seem to be quite as good at it which makes them more likeable in that way where nobody’s sure if they’re actually likeable or if that’s just how everyone processes them not being an all-conquering sportswashing machine. Anyhow, Antonio Tiberi is their GC guy and you probably don’t need to know a lot about him and they’re hoping to finish in the top ten in GC and maybe win a stage somewhere along the way so yeah that’s very Newcastle I guess.
Paul Seixas (Decathlon) = Chelsea
The Great French Hope of cycling is a 19-year-old who rides for the French Team that rather than being an extension of state power is just a vehicle for boring-ass corporate branding (in this case by a French Company) though the owner of Decathlon the company has been known get a little hands-on with Decathlon the team to their occasional detriment, so that can be fun. Anyhow, like most very French sports things, they wear blue (Chelsea also wear blue in case you forgot).
Meanwhile, Seixas (he’s French and an adult you’re allowed to have a little laugh about the name but just do it in a French way maybe?) is basically everyone’s pick to finish third (because ain’t nobody finishing ahead of Pogačar and Vingegaard unless, you know, ravine) but it’s all based almost entirely on promise and talent and projection and he’s never actually won anything yet that would make it reasonable to expect he’s going to finish third here, at least not with the certainty everyone seems to have.
So basically he’s a talented kid who could finish third. Or he might not be ready for the big stage just yet and finish seventh. And the owner might stick his head in at some point because he knows better than all the people he pays to know more than him about cycling. All of which feels vaguely Chelsea with their army of young stars on long contracts for whom maybe this really will be the year (or maybe they’ll finish seventh). Also blue.
Anyhow. There you go. Tour de France riders as Premier League clubs. Some of whom maybe make more sense than others but really this was all just an excuse to do some a Tour de France explainer and preview thing.
Maybe it’ll help as that for people who have no idea about the Tour de France or pro cycling generally. Or it might just piss off any Remco fans who happen to be hanging around (sorry). Alternately (maybe most likely) nobody is gonna even get this far. But anyhow. Here’s the official site if you want info on stages, dates, and current results, and here’s their list of global broadcasters in case you want to try to watch.
Highlights of completed stages can be found on the Tour’s Youtube channel.
After the first leg in Barcelona (a short team time trial you know what I’m not gonna try to explain it don’t worry about it Vingegaard won but the 12 seconds he earned vs. Pogačar isn’t going to change opinions on the overall race) on Saturday we get another Spanish stage from Tarragona to Barcelona and then on Monday the race goes from Granollers just north of Barcelona and travels to Las Angles in France, with the final stage ending in Paris on July 26th.
