I guess it should be a busy transfer period for you. I expect more great things from Jura in your first season in PT
I'm indeed hoping for a busy period, but not sure about that. So far, selling riders hasn't worked for me, we'll see if that changes.
I guess quite some changes will be needed in order to do "great things" in PT - given the posted (un-)availabilities and a really awful FA market, not sure this is a good year to be new to PT tbh...
Some slightly unexpected availabilities, but when reading the reasoning behind it they're perfectly understandable. Looking at your renewals and a lot of guys in that 100/150k region you can really see your depth-scoring in numbers (again) I guess
Rekita (possibly) available is fun, will remember that.
Some slightly unexpected availabilities, but when reading the reasoning behind it they're perfectly understandable. Looking at your renewals and a lot of guys in that 100/150k region you can really see your depth-scoring in numbers (again) I guess
Rekita (possibly) available is fun, will remember that.
My understanding is that depth scoring doesn't work as well in PT as it does in PCT, which is why I'm looking for some "enhancements".
Sure, you can have Rekita, if Zmorka comes our way
Everybody wants a Rekita in their squad, could be a sneakily big price coming in for him. Curious as to what your transfer strategy is with some very nice riders set to leave - not sure I'm going to like it as a competing promoting team Not sure we've ever really been competitors in a market before so excited and nervous for that, hope we can both find success and stay away from each other's targets
24/02/21 - kandesbunzler said “I don't drink famous people."
15/08/22 - SotD said "Your [jandal's] humour is overrated"
11/06/24 - knockout said "Winning is fine I guess. Truth be told this felt completely unimportant." [ICL] Santos-Euskadi | [PT] Xero Racing
Everybody wants a Rekita in their squad, could be a sneakily big price coming in for him. Curious as to what your transfer strategy is with some very nice riders set to leave - not sure I'm going to like it as a competing promoting team Not sure we've ever really been competitors in a market before so excited and nervous for that, hope we can both find success and stay away from each other's targets
Well, if I see that Howson was traded for 700k last year, I'm not sure about a potential selling price for Rekita - trading him might be fine, too, however
Staying away from each other will be close to impossible, given the very, very slim FA market (and almost no useful Swiss available) ^^
But I sure hope both of us can be somewhat successful during transfers - even though I see my roster as the least PT-ready one (by far!) of the promoted teams, with all others having PT-ready leaders already. And you should have a shitload of cash to throw at riders given your insanely successful beast
Well, if I see that Howson was traded for 700k last year, I'm not sure about a potential selling price for Rekita - trading him might be fine, too, however
So Brunel really is more available than Page (the one still under construction) But I doubt he'll be in my financial range. But your transfers will be interesting to follow anyway, though it'll be the first season since I joined without you promoting.
Well, if I see that Howson was traded for 700k last year, I'm not sure about a potential selling price for Rekita - trading him might be fine, too, however
Name dropper!
Yeah, should have made that D.H., sorry Still a great deal for you, though
So Brunel really is more available than Page (the one still under construction) But I doubt he'll be in my financial range. But your transfers will be interesting to follow anyway, though it'll be the first season since I joined without you promoting.
There would certainly be ways, but none that you would appreciate
Always happy to talk, it's not excluded that we could find a good deal for both teams - but after his great 2023 season, it's clear that Alexys would be an interesting training target...
But don't forget that there are many other interesting riders available, who just led the team to 2nd place in PCT
And you're right, I'll have to postpone another promotion to next year...
There are other interesting riders indeed, but they are not on top of my list right now. But when all initial plans are crushed (probably around Monday morning) we surely will talk some options
Yes, we're late once again. We got caught up in many endless - and sadly unfruitful - negotiations, making us miss out on good deals. We got caught up with juggling numbers, only to scratch everything because the events rarely turned in our favour. We got caught up because of completely normal transfer madness.
But here we are, we finally find some time to summarize our transfer period. So far, it's a much, much shorter summary than what we were hoping we'll have to do, but it is what it is.
Going into transfers, we had a couple of primary goals. One of them was to take on loan one of the best young TTers. Therefore, we sent our offer to manager Mresuperstar right in minute 1 of the transfer window.
His conclusion was a first big success for us; he considered the combination of our offer and our roster to be the best fit for Ethan Vernon, who will spend the season with us. Why are we pretty excited about this? Well, look at his skills:
Rider
FL
MO
HI
TT
ST
RS
RC
CB
SP
AC
FG
DH
PR
Ethan Vernon
73
60
65
77
72
75
72
66
75
70
63
65
78
Even though he's only 24y.o., there are only 6 other U25 riders who can match his skills against the clock (or are even slightly faster). Which means he'll hopefully fight for a couple of U25 points this year already. Furthermore, he's just a perfect fit for our TTT lineup, meaning we didn't need to further invest into getting a specialist this year.
Ethan will obviously mostly ride our TT-heavy races, but will also get a chance to display his skills in at least one GT. Planning details will follow later - we're definitely happy to have him around, though!
Remember the days when we started the team, back in 2019? We had a primary sponsor from Ticino, who's still on board. Ticino Turismo, represented by the Centovalli railway. But whereas we had some Ticinesi on the staff - most notably DS Rubens Bertogliati - we didn't have a single truly local rider. Not in 2019, and not in the following years.
Finally, in our 6th year, this has changed! The price to be paid was that we lost our first-year signature rider, who in the meantime has become our best scorer in team history. Yes, Fausto Masnada indeed has left the team, and will ride for Kraftwerk Man Machine in 2024.
Alongside a decent amount of money, the deal also brought us Filippo Colombo! Yeah, it's not the Filippo who was our main transfer target this year, but still, we finally have a rider from Ticino in our lineup!
Filippo is a late bloomer, and actually enters his final year of the development process. He never will be a world beat, but he'll add some more competence on the cobblestones and should grow into a decent domestique on that terrain. Let's take a look at his current and future statlines:
Rider
FL
MO
HI
TT
ST
RS
RC
CB
SP
AC
FG
DH
PR
Filippo Colombo
72
64
68
67
73
72
64
72
71
72
71
71
67
2025
73
64
68
67
75
73
65
74
72
72
71
71
67
A farewell post for Fausto will follow later - he definitely doesn't deserve to leave anonymously, honour to whom honour is due! All we want to say right now is: Grazie mille, Fausto!
In all honesty, and with all due respect to Clément, we'd have preferred presenting a different name here. Filippo again, for example, with Ganna being our main target this offseason. But sadly, our very poor goal performance last year really came back to hit us here, as we just couldn't compete with some other teams.
And even worse, negotiations were taking so long that we missed out on some potentially great other deals. Eastman is one name, Phinney another one - even Powless would have been far better than... nothing.
At least we got the opportunity to sign a former World Champion, last year's 3rd in the PT individual standings, Lukasz Wisniowski. We concluded a deal that definitely was our biggest one in history so far, including 2M of cash plus a rider. Still, it again wasn't good enough. Another team jumped in and got Lukasz. And we? Empty-handed, still...
Well, not completely. In order to get in some additional funds, we decided to provide a loan-in place to Clément Berthet from Euskotren - another rider we had our eyes on pre-transfers already. Let's take a look at the Frenchman's skillset:
Rider
FL
MO
HI
TT
ST
RS
RC
CB
SP
AC
FG
DH
PR
Clement Berthet
65
75
74
60
70
74
66
60
62
73
72
75
60
Given that our uphill department doesn't have a lot of depth currently, loaning in Clément looked like a perfect fit to us. He'll get to race a lot, that's for sure! We're not so sure yet if he will also do a Grand Tour, because of his subpar recovery capacity, but he'll surely get his race days in shorter stage races! One GT should still be doable for him, too.
Despite not exactly landing the riders you aimed for I still think you have an awesome team! You don't particularly have any weaknesses, and you have a bunch of solid "duo-threat" riders like Küng, Schmid, Theuns, Groves and Chavanne, in which I mean riders that have strong specialist qualities, but also enough qualities in other facets of the game to potentially beat other stronger specialists.
I'm looking forward to see you in the best division. I don't necessarily see your team as being in any imminent danger of going back to the PCT.
Despite not exactly landing the riders you aimed for I still think you have an awesome team! You don't particularly have any weaknesses, and you have a bunch of solid "duo-threat" riders like Küng, Schmid, Theuns, Groves and Chavanne, in which I mean riders that have strong specialist qualities, but also enough qualities in other facets of the game to potentially beat other stronger specialists.
I'm looking forward to see you in the best division. I don't necessarily see your team as being in any imminent danger of going back to the PCT.
Thanks I do certainly have some good depth - in particular in terms of TTing - but the spearheads which seem to be so important in PT are pretty much absent. Maxed Theuns would've been one, now it's questionable how well he can still keep up. Groves will hopefully kind of repeat last year's success, although he doesn't have U25 points anymore.
We'll see how it goes; one thing I'm missing is playing with race selection, as that's a pretty important strategic element in PCT. I'll do my best to hopefully stay up, but there's obviously no guarantee.
Transfers Wrap-Up | Gabby
He's back! Indeed, it's him - it's Gabriel Chavanne who joins us for his final prime year! Gabby already was on our roster in 2022, where he won two stages and a green jersey for us.
And in fact, he'll very likely be our rider with the highest skill stat - and even though the prologue skill may be the least important of these, due to the low number of suiting races out there, it's still great to have such a strong rider. Let's look at his full statline:
Rider
FL
MO
HI
TT
ST
RS
RC
CB
SP
AC
FG
DH
PR
Gabriel Chavanne
75
58
64
65
71
76
74
57
76
76
53
67
82
Gabby actually is among the world's Top 5 prologue riders one more season, and given that he doesn't have any TT skills - unlike the others - he really can fully focus on these races. Winning will be tough, given that there's one outright #1, but if he can net us a couple of stage podiums, that would be aweseome!
Gabby scored more than 200 points in last year's PT season, which definitely is great for a rider with a 70k wage. Let's hope he'll be able to repeat this one more time, before he'll definitely drop down one level next year.
I hope so Besides Bol (with 80 Rec), he's our only "red stat guy" signed so far (although you probably know there will be another one), so I hope the other riders will accept him and not be jealous
Transfers Wrap-Up | Fabio
Fabio, who? Felline? Aru? Jakobsen? Silvestre? None of them! However, the latter two at least are the correct rider type - as we welcome Fabio Christen, Switzerland's next top sprinter!
Fabio was our main target in this year's free agency. After having missed out on Switzerland's top talent in 2023 - Elia Blum signed with UBS - it now was our turn again. Yet, it wasn't straightforward to get Fabio to sign his contract.
He actually was already on the way to our HQ to sign, but some mysterious manager waited for him just outside - and somehow convinced him that he should ride for another team, pulling Fabio into his car. With an Austrian license plate.
Fortunately, our intern was once again late for work, and observed the proceedings. Thanks to his description, we could quickly identify which other team Fabio was heading for - and after a hefty raise of 100k compared to the offer we initially agreed on, he decided to still come back and finally sign his work contract!
And so - despite asking some questions about the rider's character traits - we would like to warmly welcome Fabio Christen! Do you wonder why we're so excited about his arrival? Well, let's look at his current skills - and one potential development path:
Rider
FL
MO
HI
TT
ST
RS
RC
CB
SP
AC
FG
DH
PR
Fabio Christen
66
63
65
65
66
69
63
57
69
71
65
65
71
2027
74
63
68
68
69
76
77
57
79
79
65
68
79
Admittedly, Fabio may not have the potential to become one of the world's fastest and most consisten sprinters. But he'll definitely be the fastest Swiss sprinter in three years already - and he'll be a strong prologue rider on top of that! Given that Switzerland traditionally isn't a country of sprinters, we think we've found an amazing talent in Fabio, and we're looking forward to develop him alongside Hugo Page, with whom he should form a great sprinter duo for quite some years to come!
Given that the highest level of racing isn't the best suited one for neo-pros, we decided to be on the other side of a 1->3 loan for once, sending Fabio down to PCT, where our successors as the CT title holders, Lotto-Caloi, will take care of him. This one year of development costs us half a million - but we'll sure he'll pay that money back in terms of points very soon!
Congrats on Christen, I think his back up stats will serve him well and not too bad in the hills either. Good to see the famed TTT unit get some added reinforcements.
Christen is a great signing, with his energy and prologue stats he should become a contender for Tour of Qatar after some training.
Also cool to see you got Chavanne back. I'm sure he will cross paths with Leung a lot this season again. Last year Gabby was mostly the one ahead, I hope to change that for this season.
Ethan Vernon, who will spend the season with us. Why are we pretty excited about this? Well, look at his skills:
Fausto Masnada indeed has left the team, and will ride for Kraftwerk Man Machine in 2024.
Filippo Colombo! Yeah, it's not the Filippo who was our main transfer target this year, but still, we finally have a rider from Ticino in our lineup!
Clément Berthet from Euskotren - another rider we had our eyes on pre-transfers already. Let's take a look at the Frenchman's skillset:
