Over the last 10 years I have been present at and part of many discussions concerning the future of the world of pro cycling. Some suggestions were a long way off the mark and others could very well be made possible. In general, every party involved saw the UCI’s main role as supervisory body of the rules within racing.

First, let’s identify the key players in pro cycling.

For one, you have the 22 Top Pro Teams. Why only 22 you ask? With 22 teams which each have 9 riders in the Grand Tours, you have 198 riders at the start. From a safety and organizational point of view, it’s almost impossible to accommodate more riders - as simple as that.

These teams should have the right to start in all races on their Pro Team calendar.

The two other stake holders are ASO (Tour de France organisers) and RCS (organisers of the Giro d'Italia).

Between them they organise the following races:

ASO: Tour of Qatar, Tour of Oman, Paris-Nice, Criterium International, Paris-Roubaix, Fleche Wallone, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Dauphine-Libere, Tour de France, Tour of Picardie, Vuelta a Espana, Tour L’Avenir, Paris -Tours.

RCS: Strada Bianche, Tirreno-Adriattico, Milan-SanRemo, Tour of Italy, Gran Piemonte, Lombardia.

If you include the Flanders Classics group (Gent-Wevelgem, Tour of Flanders, etc), Tour of Switserland and the organizers of Tour of California and co, you easily fill up 85% of the calendar.

The discrepancies between the opinions of teams and UCI have different grounds. The UCI is setting out a growing list of rules which many consider not thoroughly reflected on and some are simply difficult to police.

Let me give you one example of a cause for discontent by the teams.

For the future of corporate sponsored cycling it is vital that the teams know which races they will start the following season. You don’t get entrusted with the sponsorship bucks of some major multinational company if you can’t offer a solid guarantee of publicity in the most important races on the calendar.

As any team owner and marketing division will confirm, the teams need to know this 12 months beforehand and can't wait for the green ProTour light until the month of December (like Geox-TMC experienced last year).

In the current set-up, there are too many “what if’s” and important aspects left to mere chance and goodwill. Not one sponsor likes such a situation.

Another issue is the racing calendar itself.

By scaling down the program and the amount of racing days, it would become much smoother for all parties involved to, for example, negotiate TV rights and time.

Organizers and teams would have more guaranteed coverage and exposure, which again would benefit sponsorship interest. Teams would also be benefiting from a slice of the huge financial pie which the organizers now solemnly claim for themselves.

Teams could manage their racing calendar more efficiently and it would also make it easier for the fans to follow the sport and their stars.

Allow me to explain by analyzing an example in the current format.

You’re a team owner and you have Tour de France stars in your team, maybe a GC winner, the winner of the Young Rider jersey and you have won the team prize in last year’s Tour de France. You also won a couple of monument classics the previous season.

This means that you have 5 to 6 riders of a serious caliber in your team.

The current race calendar situation asks for the teams to contract a lot of those heavy-weights, simply to allow the team to race all the races spread over the season.

At the start of the year however, all your riders - 28/30 of them - need racing days to get in the right shape for the bigger events. So you send your stars to the different races run by the major organisers (in order to gain a start in their key event) and try to find smaller races for the other riders.

This then means that organizers of smaller races find it acceptable to place erratic demands on teams - and on the odd occasion a team might even end up paying to get a start in a small race held in the middle of nowhere - or a team finds an organizer denying them a start or penalising them because they will not or did not come with a team leader like [Tom] Boonen, [Mark]Cavendish or [Andy] Schleck.

Further down the season, your squad of riders gets thinned out due to illnesses, injuries or fatigue. Then, you have obligations placed on your shoulders to send enough riders to the next race organized by one of the big gun organizers and again, the teams lose out.

It’s hard to give a complete picture of the issues which need to be sorted in Pro Cycling in a single blog, there’s actually enough material to fill a complete edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport.

But what I want to make clear is that criticism toward the people driving the sport of cycling, the team owners and the riders is very much unfounded in most cases. For all parties involved it would be good to see changes for the better, not the worse.

I find it crazy to stop technological progress for the wrong reasons; these changes need simply to be guided. The sport needs to be moved forward, not backward. Is creating a new league the answer?