A former Barcelona and Spain midfielder has reportedly beaten INEOS Grenadiers to one of the biggest names on the cycling transfer market. Richard Carapaz, Tokyo 2020 Olympic road race champion and 2019 Giro d’Italia winner, is said to be ending his time at EF Education-EasyPost a year early to sign with NSN Cycling Team, the squad whose sporting project is overseen by Andres Iniesta.
The report was originally published by Dutch cycling outlet Wielerflits and picked up by Domestique, which says the 33-year-old Ecuadorian still has twelve months left on his American deal. EF, when approached, did not confirm the move.
A 2026 too good to leave on the table
Carapaz is coming off one of the strongest years of his career. He won two mountain stages in the French Alps at the 2026 Tour de France, took the race’s mountains classification for the second time after 2024, and was named its most combative rider. He then finished fourth at the Vuelta a España in September.
Financial pressure at EF, combined with Carapaz’s wish to cash in on that form, is reported to have opened the door to an early exit. The move would end his four-season spell at the American team, which he joined from INEOS Grenadiers in 2023.
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INEOS, where Carapaz raced between 2020 and 2022, had been considered a front-runner to bring him back for 2027. Iniesta’s project has moved faster.
An Israel-Premier Tech rebuild with football money behind it
NSN Cycling Team is the rebranded Israel-Premier Tech. The structure was acquired in November 2025 by Never Say Never, a sports and entertainment agency co-founded by Iniesta, together with Swiss investment platform Stoneweg. The team races under a Swiss license and operates out of Barcelona and Girona.
The takeover followed a turbulent 2025 for Israel-Premier Tech, who were targeted by pro-Palestinian protests at the Vuelta a España and excluded from the Giro dell’Emilia on public-safety grounds. The old sponsor name has gone with it.
Carapaz would join an already loaded 2027 roster
If the transfer is confirmed, Carapaz slots into a line-up that NSN has been building aggressively for next season:
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- Santiago Buitrago: Colombian climber, signed from Bahrain Victorious on a three-year deal through 2029
- Kasper Asgreen: Danish classics specialist, former Tour of Flanders winner
- Lennert Van Eetvelt: Belgian stage racer
- Biniam Girmay: Eritrean sprinter, retained as the team’s commercial headline act
Neither EF Education-EasyPost nor NSN Cycling Team has officially announced anything. The length of the reported agreement has not been disclosed.
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