It’s disaster o’clock at Picnic PostNL.
The Dutch team, once home to Marcel Kittel and Tom Dumoulin, survived the last WorldTour relegation cycle by the skin of their teeth, despite Oscar Onley’s Tour de France fourth place. This season, however, the men’s team sits in 28th place in the UCI rankings, the lowest of any team on the WorldTour level by far, and their points haul is lower than even the majority of ProTeams.
The team boast the smallest amount of UCI points by the mid-season mark since the system was revised in 2022. They’ve only scored one win so far this year, and they’re coming off one of the poorest Grand Tour performances seen in the modern era. On every possible metric, this is looking like the worst season since turning WorldTour in 2013. But is it the worst season in recent WorldTour history?
Let’s investigate.
A season of poor results
In the most recent UCI standings, Picnic PostNL were sitting on 1,434 points. That might sound like a lot, but it’s well below WorldTour standards. For context, Lenny Martinez alone has scored more points than the whole of this team, as has Jasper Stuyven, who hasn’t even taken a win yet in 2026.
Below, you can see Picnic PostNL’s month-by-month breakdown throughout 2026. They failed to score more than 500 points in one month, with the Classics and early-season stage races providing little return.
At the time of writing, the team have only scored three podium finishes in WorldTour races this year. They’ve finished inside the top ten of just one WorldTour Classic, but they have failed to reach the top ten in the GC at a single WorldTour stage race this season. In fact their best GC result all year has been a measly tenth at the AlUla Tour in February.
This placed them below Continental teams like Roojai Insurance Winspace and Li Ning Star by the end of April. I challenge you to name a single rider from one of their rosters. Yet, despite their Grand Tour invite, the Dutch squad are still just a few points ahead of these third-division minnows after the conclusion of the Giro.
A dismal Giro d’Italia
The Giro d’Italia offered Picnic a chance to score a decent points haul last year, with Casper van Uden a stage winner and Max Poole on the fringes of the top ten in GC. This year however Picnic PostNL’s Giro d’Italia campaign was terrible.
The team had brought two former Grand Tour stage winners in Warren Barguil and Casper van Uden, alongside breakaway card Frank van den Broeck, who almost won a Tour stage in 2024. Collectively they only managed to get two top tens, with a ninth place the best result from the three-week race. Sure, they were in some breakaways, but their presence at the Giro was easily forgotten.
Their tiny pool of UCI points there was one of the lowest we’ve seen at a Grand Tour since the revised coefficients were rolled out at the start of 2023. That translated to just €2,129 in prize money, which is the smallest pool of prize money that’s been pocketed by a Giro team in the 2020s. For context, it was just 40% of the second-smallest sum of prize money – €5,284 for Arkéa in 2024 – that we’ve seen at Giro d’Italia this side of the pandemic.
The worst team in recent years?
It’s time to face the cold hard facts.
The chart below shows the ten WorldTour teams with the smallest amount of UCI points by the week prior to the Dauphiné since June 2023. For context, we have only gone back to 2023, as the points system was overhauled that year, making previous years difficult to compare.
Picnic’s tiny 1,434-point haul is the lowest we’ve seen on the WorldTour level by June. As the chart above shows, the Dutch team take this mantle quite convincingly as they sit 700 points below the team formerly considered the worst WorldTour team in modern history, Astana Qazaqstan in 2023.
It’s not just an anomaly of 2026 either. The remaining teams appear to be on a normal points level in comparison to previous years, suggesting that there hasn’t been a general deflation in UCI points this year.
The damning metrics
While Picnic PostNL’s season might seem poor in isolation, it looks even worse when compared to previous seasons. To demonstrate that, let’s do a pretty simple comparison of the lowest-positioned WorldTour teams that we saw on the previous chart.
Lowest-ranked WorldTour team at this point in the calendar
- Picnic PostNL, 2026: 1,434
- Arkéa-B&B Hotels, 2025: 3,500
- Astana Qazaqstan, 2024: 2,872
- Astana Qazaqstan, 2023: 2,175
Since the points system was reset in 2023, Picnic PostNL find themselves with the smallest points haul at this time of year. That’s by quite some way, given that the Dutch team are the only WorldTour team to have not broken the 2,000 point boundary by the month of June.
Position of the lowest-ranked WordTour team*
- 28th: Picnic-PostNL in 2026
- 22nd: Arkéa-B&B Hotels in 2025
- 22nd: Astana Qazaqstan in 2024
- 22nd: Astana Qazaqstan in 2023
To make sure that this isn’t just a one-season blip, where the points have been hoovered by a small collection of teams, we’ve isolated the teams’ rankings at this point of the year. On this scale, we can see that Picnic PostNL are far below the poorest-performing WorldTour teams in recent years. In fact, Picnic find themselves below ten ProTeams, the most of any on this list.
Gap between last and second-last ranked WorldTour team*
- 2,892 points between Picnic and EF in 2026
- 145 points between Arkéa and Intermarché in 2025
- 1,356 points between Astana and Cofidis in 2024
- 1,430 points between Astana and Arkea in 2023
The gap between last and second last looks equally bleak. They sit 2,892 points behind EF Education-EasyPost, the second-lowest team. That gap is twice as large as any seen at this point in the calendar since 2023. It’s not a negligible gap either. That gap to EF is double the total amount of points actually scored by Picnic. That is disastrous.
*All compared with the final rankings before the Dauphiné/Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
Who is even scoring the points?
Twenty riders have contributed towards Picnic’s small 1,434-point haul, but Pavel Bittner accounts for 33% of the team’s point haul this year. The Czech sprinter has featured in the top ten more than any other Picnic rider this season, having made the top ten on six out of his 20 race days. He’s also scored the team its best one-day result, with second place at the non-WorldTour Scheldeprijs and a sixth at the WorldTour Ronde van Brugge.
However, Bittner’s 485-point total for 2026 is by far the lowest of any top division team’s top scorers. For example, if he moved over to EF – the WorldTour team with the second-worst placement in the WorldTour – he’d be the team’s fourth-best rider. More to come on that.
Otherwise, new recruit Frits Biesterbos, a man who was in the sport’s third division previously, is Picnic’s second-best rider in the UCI rankings – and by some way. He finds himself far up the rankings thanks to an underwhelming 2026 for sprinter Casper van Uden, who has cracked the top ten on just three occasions this year, despite his 51 race days.
If you look at the team’s distribution of points compared to EF, the closest-ranked WorldTour team. Picnic’s average points score is much lower at 71.7 for starters, in comparison to EF’s 219. Soberingly, Picnic have only two riders above the EF average. On the other hand 75% of EF’s roster is above Picnic’s average UCI point score from 2026.
EF are also far less reliant on one rider to bolster their points, which is a much more sustainable strategy for a lower-ranked team. We saw that in the previous relegation cycle with the likes of Astana and Uno-X, but Picnic seem not to have learnt. Or, they haven’t managed to hire more consistent point scorers like their opponents.
Why is this team performing so poorly?
Is it an annus horibilis or a predictable downturn for Picnic-PostNL? I’ll side with the latter.
The team lack any big hitters who could get them wins – or even podium finishes. As we lamented earlier this year, they’ve also lost some key point scorers. Oscar Onley and Tobias Lund Andresen, both of whom left over the winter, scored over half of the team’s points last season.
The team also have no cash. This was made evident in a report published by Money In Sport on Substack, which echoed rumours held about the team’s cash-flow issues. The UCI then gave Picnic PostNL a one-year deal on the WorldTour level, contrary to every other team’s three-year agreement. This was down to financial means, given the team were late to submit their bleak financial papers, but given the high level of ProTeams these days such as Tudor Pro Cycling and Pinarello-Q36.5, it will be hard to justify Picnic’s WorldTour inclusion if the current struggles continue.
To add insult to injury, the team has also failed to bring in much talent. The riders they have signed have often underperformed too.
The team spent a lot of money bringing in Fabio Jakobsen in 2024, choosing him over Olav Kooij at the time. Jakobsen has won just once over the past three seasons and he has failed to even reach the top ten of a sprint this year. That has translated to just 393 UCI points during his time at Picnic PostNL, and an almost 50% DNF rate from WorldTour races.
James Knox, a man who had previously climbed to top ten finishes at the WorldTour level, was signed from Soudal Quick-Step last year too. Since joining Picnic, he has scored just ten UCI points.
This isn’t a new discovery either. Picnic have been on a downward turn since 2023. The chart above demonstrates that in terms of UCI points, again taken from the week of the Dauphiné.
From a victory perspective, there’s also a clear trend to be noted. The team’s one win ties them (with 2021) as the least victorious season in this squad’s history. As a tiebreaker, the 2026 roster is yet to score a WorldTour win, and they haven’t gone this long without a top-level win since their days as a Pro Continental team in 2012.
Where do they go from here?
Is there any avenue for Picnic-PostNL to remain positive?
The team’s biggest points scorer Pavel Bittner suffered a heavy crash in France at the beginning of May, which could place his Tour de France entry into question. He’s already missed some points-scoring opportunities, but it shouldn’t just be down to him to score top results. To further rub salt in the wound for Picnic, Bittner is also touted to be making a move in 2027, with Tudor Pro Cycling among the names linked.
Max Poole was seen as a GC prospect for the team, similar to Oscar Onley, but the 23-year-old from Yorkshire has been suffering from Epstein-Barr virus and has been sidelined by Picnic since February, so has missed a heap of stage races and could be ruled out of the Tour de France.
Even if the pair were in good health, the 2,000-point gap needing to be plugged seems well beyond their reach.
The team aren’t linked to many big names for 2027 to fill the void either, and their WorldTour status isn’t guaranteed. With such poor results from 2026 and reports there isn’t much in the bank, it’ll be hard to convince riders to join them.
The future of Picnic PostNL doesn’t look bright. Let’s hope they can find a spark soon.