John Allert, the CEO of INEOS Grenadiers, left the British WorldTour team one day before the Giro d’Italia, The Athletic can reveal.

The Australian joined INEOS in 2021 in a consultancy role and was promoted to CEO in December 2023, tasked with reviving the fading team’s fortunes after several years of decline.

Between 2012 and 2019, Team Sky and INEOS Grenadiers won seven Tours de France, but the emergence of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard — who have won every Tour since 2020 — abruptly stopped the British team in its tracks.

In Allert’s first year, he presided over the team’s worst-ever season. They secured just 14 victories in 2024, while rival teams with similar budgets — around €50million per annum — won Grand Tours, Monuments and WorldTour stage races.

Things improved in 2025, with the team winning two stages of the Tour de France and three stages of the Vuelta a España, but the writing appeared to be on the wall for Allert when team founder and former team principal Sir Dave Brailsford returned in 2025.

Brailsford had stepped back from day-to-day management of the cycling team to focus on his role as head of INEOS Sport, which also included a major role at Manchester United when INEOS took a minority ownership but full control of football affairs in February 2024.

Upon his return to the cycling team last summer, the team insisted that Allert remained CEO but almost a year on have still declined to confirm Brailsford’s job title.

Any doubt whose team it was was dispelled in early May when Brailsford led the team’s relaunch at Netcompany-INEOS at an event in London. Danish software company Netcompany has committed to invest €100m into the team over the next five years, while also promising to bring on board additional investment to replace INEOS as a co-title sponsor. Sir Jim Ratcliffe still owns the team.

Multiple sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, confirmed to The Athletic that Allert left his job on May 8. In one email seen by The Athletic, Allert says that he had served “a lengthy period of notice.”

Brailsford during the Netcompany INEOS launch presentation in April 2026 (Alex Broadway/Getty Images)

Before his work in cycling, Allert worked in the motorsports industry for almost 13 years with McLaren as its chief marketing officer. It was the link-up between McLaren and the Bahrain-Merida team in January 2019 that prompted his move into cycling, when he became the joint managing director for two years of what then became known as Bahrain-McLaren.

Netcompany-INEOS confirmed Allert’s exit when approached by The Athletic, but refused to provide further comment.

What does this mean for the team?

Allert’s departure is not really a shock. Ever since Brailsford returned to the cycling team — reluctantly, according to one source — Allert was always operating in his shadow, even if he kept his job title as CEO.

It is typical of the team’s communication, however, that they have not formally announced Allert’s exit; a year into Brailsford’s return and he still doesn’t have a formal job title, with former rider Geraint Thomas, who is now the team’s head of racing, appearing most often on press releases. Brailsford was described as ‘team principle’ in slides shown during the team’s rebrand earlier this year.

Allert’s time with INEOS won’t be remembered too fondly. 2024 was the low point of the team’s existence, with the team securing just 10 wins outside of the various national championships. Only two of them came in Grand Tours, when Filippo Ganna and Jhonatan Narváez each won stages of the Giro d’Italia.

For a team that had grown used to winning the Tour de France every year and racking up a number of GC victories in other WorldTour stage races, 2024’s return was unacceptable.

Brailsford and Geraint Thomas, pictured here in 2014, are now stewarding the team (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

Allert’s man-management style was said to be based on the idea that everyone was part of a “tribe”, and anyone who didn’t fall in line would be moved on. This led to tension within the team, most notably with Tom Pidcock who left mid-contract in the fall of 2024 and dropped down a division to sign for Q36.5.

Not long after his exit, Pidcock said: “I signed my contract with different people who run the team now and that did create some difficulties, from what I imagined it was going to be like to what happened … things were just not going how it was originally envisioned at INEOS.”

Since leaving, Pidcock has excelled. Last year, he finished third at the Vuelta a España, his first-ever Grand Tour podium, and finished as a narrow runner-up to Pogačar at Milan-Sanremo earlier this season.

Last year was also a more successful period for INEOS, with 28 victories registered in total, a return to winning ways which has continued this season; only UAE Team Emirates-XRG (36) and Visma-Lease a Bike (24) have won more than INEOS’ 21.

How much of that is due to Allert’s influence is debatable. It appears that he was moved aside at INEOS sometime before his dismissal on May 8, with Brailsford and Thomas, as well as the performance director Scott Drawer, leading the team through its transformation.

Team sources have said that Allert left on amicable terms and that he is likely to even attend the odd race in support of the team, but it’s clear that with the new financial backing of Netcompany, and under the tutelage of the father-son-esque stewardship of Brailsford and Thomas, the British WorldTour team has turned its back on the Allert era.