Bardiani, the team with the most Giro starts, will miss the 2027 race after finishing 31st in the UCI ranking
Only the top 30 teams in the UCI’s end-of-season ranking can be invited to a Grand Tour. The Italian squad has filed a complaint with the UCI and says it will carry on regardless.
Bardiani CSF 7 Saber, the Italian team that holds the record for starts at the Giro d’Italia, will not ride the race in 2027 after finishing 31st in the UCI’s end-of-season team ranking, one place outside the cut-off for Grand Tour invitations.
Under UCI rules, only teams in the top 30 of the ranking at the end of a season can receive a wildcard invitation to the Giro, the Tour de France or the Vuelta a España the following year. The ranking counts the points of each team’s best 20 riders under contract.
According to Domestique, it will be the first Giro without Bardiani in 18 years. Its start in 2025 was already its 43rd, a record for any team, Domestique reported a year ago, and it has won 27 stages of the race. It was invited again in 2026.
Beaten in the last weeks of the season
The fight for the final places in the top 30 went on until the last races of the season, many of them far from Europe. Euskaltel-Euskadi, the Basque ProTeam that has signed Mikel Landa for 2027, secured 28th place with 2,839 points after a strong final weekend in Panama, Domestique reported, where its riders scored 93 points at the Gran Prix de Chiriquí and won the two-stage Clásica Provincia de Chiriquí.
Roberto Reverberi, Bardiani’s sports director, told OA Sport on 21 October that the team was still ahead of MBH, Euskaltel and Picnic PostNL about a month before the end of the season. He pointed to points won by Picnic PostNL at the Tour of Guangxi and by Euskaltel at races in Algeria, which he said Bardiani had not known about. Bardiani itself had travelled to Serbia in search of points.
A top-30 place keeps a team eligible for an invitation, but it does not guarantee one. The organisers of each Grand Tour still choose their wildcards.
A complaint to the UCI
The team has lodged a formal complaint with the UCI, OA Sport reported, because it believes there may have been irregularities in the final part of the season. Reverberi did not specify what those irregularities were, according to the interview. He said the team had proposed scrapping the top-30 rule the previous year, and that the UCI had not taken up the idea.
Bruno Reverberi, the team’s veteran manager, criticised the system on Italian broadcaster RAI. “One team can ride 100 races, another 30 and another a WorldTour race, all with very different points awarded,” he said, as quoted by Domestique.
The Reverberis have made the same argument for at least a year. In October 2025, when Bardiani held 30th place, Roberto Reverberi said that the rule “forces you to race poorly, even tactically” and that “the points are unfair and poorly distributed”, Domestique reported. Teams, he argued, are pushed to chase placings at small races around the world rather than stage wins at prestigious ones.
Planning for 2027 without the Giro
Despite the setback, Roberto Reverberi told OA Sport that the team has no intention of stopping and is planning its 2027 calendar. It has signed the Colombian Juan David Sierra from Tudor’s development team, and he described Bardiani as a place for young riders passed over by the WorldTour teams’ development squads.
Other Italian outlets have since reported more pessimistic comments from Bruno Reverberi about the team’s long-term future. We were unable to read those remarks in full on a source page and have not included them.
