This is the official end of the Israeli chapter in the World Tour peloton. After a 2025 season in hell, marked by neutralized stages and the boycott of key sponsors, billionaire Sylvan Adams ended up packing up, taking the team’s national identity with him. The structure was doomed to disappear altogether, until AndrĂ©s Iniesta came on the scene. Via his company NSN, the former Barça playing master smelled the market opportunity: buying a competitive sporting structure at low cost to relaunch it in a completely new form.
Iniesta buries Israel Premier Tech and creates the NSN Cycling Team
For Iniesta, the equation is clear: we must save the furniture but burn the sign. The break is complete. The team abandons its Israeli license to register in Switzerland, thanks to the support of the Stoneweg investment fund, and sets up its operational headquarters in Catalonia. It is no longer the team of a nation, it has become the “NSN Cycling Team” project. By recruiting a world star like the Eritrean Biniam Girmay, Iniesta sends a strong message: the project now wants to be international, neutral and focused solely on sport.
The definitive departure of the old leadership makes the movement less politically radioactive for Iniesta. It does not finance a state or a cause, it invests in a sports SME in difficulty. It is a purely entrepreneurial logic, similar to that of Gerard Piqué with the Davis Cup, even if the terrain remains more slippery. Iniesta is betting on the fact that the public will be able to distinguish between the riders – who have remained the same – and the banner they defend.
The shadow of the past still looms
Despite this complete façade renovation, the image challenge remains. You don’t erase years of history and a traumatic 2025 season with the wave of a magic wand. The risk for Iniesta is that activists or the general public continue, out of habit or out of conviction, to associate these riders and this staff with their old identity. “Whitewashing” for some, heroic rescue for others: the line is fine.
Iniesta will have to deploy all his legendary calm to manage this transition. If on paper, the team no longer has anything to do with Israel, the collective memory of the peloton dies hard. The success of this takeover will depend less on Girmay’s sprint victories than on the ability of the new management to normalize a team which has spent twelve months at the heart of the storm. The “Don” has the ball, it’s up to him to calm the game down.
