Damn, essentially wasted all my scouting money saved this year, since the two riders I was after got the 2nd and 3rd highest bids. Guess I'll have to keep looking.

We got two promising youngsters in from our focus region, so we're quite happy. Can't beat cio for the best German talent now, can we?

Signed all the talent we wished to bring to the team (those we discovered anyway). Most of them if not all will ride for the U23 team, which will be created at the end of the season. And that offers the Salvadorian riders a home. Let's see how they develop there as well.

Damn Cadejo

Pleased with our one signing who is not only a strong 18 YO TT guy but also presents opportunities to develop as a rarely seen TT/Sprinter.

Signing pot 1, why

Great catch with our min wage pot 7, hope he develops well to blend good with our other top talents.

South America didn't look that great... Got a Pot 6, but already 20y.o. and only 65.7. Lost the second Pot 6 against greedy Cadejo; didn't expect to see 200+ bids there. One more lesson learnt I guess

I'm still not quite familiar enough with this regen system (and entirely inexperienced with the U23s) to confidently judge this decision from a neutral point of view, but it should be pretty unlikely to find a better German talent in the next 4-5 years, so Wilfurth was a must-get.

And 70 RES is an incredible starting point to boot for a climber - tied best with Torres in the past three seasons - while his one clear weak point, the ACC-DH combo, at least lowers his AVG rather nicely.
Don't ask me why he's the best prologue rider of the bunch though!


(also fun fact, he looked extremely average for the first couple of rounds of scouting, it was only very late in the process that he suddenly turned a 10% chance of pot6/7 into pot 7 and a 60-69 range into 69.0)

Yes, I know. However, the sponsors demand Salvadorian riders, to show our roots, and there are only 3 of them. I am perfectly aware that he takes the place of a more talented cyclist but we'll offer him 1 or 2 years to see how we can help him develop.

P.S. Don't say this to anyone but I believe he's the nephew of someone from the sponsors' board of directors.

@DarkWolf: Yeah, that checks out.

@cio: Bold bid, but very nice talent.

@bbl: McGuinness is fate.

@everybody, Bikex: How many are planning on adding a dev team, I'm a little worried, we were already near full capacity this season. What will we do if more than 24 teams sign up, Bikex?

I'd say look at the rankings and get rid of those who score bad every season. I said it in my U23 preview already, but there is at least one team only using the U23 competition to get more budget for their main team. If a new team want to take their spot, give it to them.

I plan on starting a U23 team. I hope it is possible, otherwise signing so many young riders could prove troublesome.

If the spots become an issue then I would really like to disband those U23 teams whose managers are not active and show very little interest in this game throughout the season, thereby we would already disband three, maybe even four or five. They can re-apply for U23 when they are more active again.

Making it based on the success of the U23 rankings is not good because managers may follow a pattern of keeping 18-19 year olds and then bringing them quickly into the pros, whereas teams like pure black or suntory make it a contest to win as much as possible with their youngsters, thereby focusing on 22 and 23 year olds.

I'll be surprised if he reaches 70 in anything but sure, try to make El Salvador the new Slovenia

a solution will depend on the number of exceeding teams, if there will be an high number (let say over 30 teams) we can think about a refoundation of the system, for example having an European tour and an Other tour where you can apply for the other races with a limited number of race days.
If the number of exceeding teams is just 2/3 it make sense to give the 25 wild cards to most active managers instead best classified, new teams don't have a background in U23 ranking, and some special focus (like cadejo) can have some issues against teams from italy/belgium/france...

I don't really like forcing anybody to disband their dev team. If that does happen I'd certainly recommend that during transfers talents can be sacked without penalty.

If we end up with say 26 dev teams, 2 over the limit, we could just add two more U23 races, bringing the total to 20, and more or less randomly Bikex will exclude two teams per race so every team still races 18 times in the U23.

Alternatively, we could promote Suntory Orangina to the CT, they can handle it.

And of course new teams will be excluded for the ranking comparison. I was talking about the teams who year after year fill their dev team with bad 100 wage riders only so their main team gets more budget.

LOL

Rather mediocre French talents this year, pleased that me and Marco didn't have to bid against each other for them.

@cio Great talent and good to see another manager matching my 505 bid for sprint pot 7 David Meyer a couple of years ago.

Dev teams give more progression to their talents and so I would support everyone who wants a team should be able to have one. With 25+ teams Avenir would have to be limited somehow, maybe by age or average.

The issue of only having a dev team to increase main team budget could be solved by automatically allocating any spare dev team budget to next years scouting budget?

maybe the bonus budget for Dev teams can be same amount of total wages up to 1000?