There can be little doubt who the breakthrough rider of the 2025 season was: Matthew Brennan. Just one year ago, the Briton was a 19-year-old sprinter who had demonstrated potential riding for Visma-Lease a Bike’s development team in 2024, but beyond that he hadn’t attracted the interest of too many people.
But almost as soon as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve and 2024 became 2025, Brennan announced himself to the cycling world. Second on stage one of the Santos Tour Down Under, when Brennan returned to Europe he won four races in a row – the last one doubling up as his first WorldTour win, taking an impressive victory at the Volta a Catalunya. He won another stage in the same race, and would finish the year with a further 10 victories, taking his tally to 14. He was even off the front at Paris-Roubaix, mixing it with Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar. It’s been a long time since cycling witnessed a pro debut season like Brennan's.
“If we’re really honest, it was outside all of our expectations,” says Robbert de Groot, Visma’s head of development who personally identified Brennan’s talent two years ago and pushed for him to join the Dutch team. “He’s just turned 20 years of age [in August] and he’s shown extremely high potential. The truth is, Matthew is still in the development process and he will remain part of the ‘white jersey group’ [the name Visma give to their group of developing riders] to work on leadership and the other points he needs to develop. But at the moment, the outcome has been crazy good.”
To understand why Brennan has had so much success in his first year, De Groot believes many factors have to be highlighted, beyond his ability to ride a bike very fast. What De Groot immediately points to is Brennan’s personality. “His mental approach, and his decision-making, is super interesting,” De Groot says. “I was with him in a couple of races, and how he managed sharing leadership with Olav Kooij [at the Tour of Britain] and cooperating with Wout van Aert at the Tour of Germany was really impressive. You create momentum with tactical decisions, and also mental qualities. Matthew has a calmness about him, and that comes from a very calm, self-reflective confident base.”
Brennan took a stage victory at his home race, the Tour of Britain, in September.
The way Brennan rides, anticipating key moves or starting a sprint earlier than others, suggests he’s got a high natural intelligence for cycling. “I think that’s true, and it looks to be a little further developed than others – or a lot further developed!” De Groot laughs. “Winning a bike race is hard. Some people like Pogačar or Van der Poel make it look easy, but that’s not the case. Somehow, and somewhere, you need to be a bit special.”
Special is certainly the adjective to describe the Darlington-born rider. Versatile, too. Brennan and Visma have insisted that he should not be pigeon-holed into the box of just being a fast sprinter, and his results from 2025 are testament to that. “The timing and calmness to win stage one of Catalunya, I’ve never seen that before,” De Groot reflects. “He beat Kaden Groves there and Groves is world class on those types of finishes. It was similar at the GP de Denain – how he approached the last seven kilometres was tactically a very high level. His technical skills in both of those races were unbelievable.
“If you look at the whole picture of the Tour of Norway [where he won two stages and the overall] and the Tour of Germany [two wins], you see that he beat all of these Classics riders and top sprinters. I remember the stage he won at the Tour of Romandie, he went really early and afterwards he said, ‘Sometimes you have to surprise people’. And at the Tour of Cologne [in May], he only had the devo guys racing for him, and how he organised them and got them racing for him was brilliant.”
Aggressive racing is part of Brennan's make-up.
The message is clear – Visma are not going to clip Brennan’s wings and force him into Kooij’s replacement now that the Dutchman has departed. “It’s not the time in his career to say a certain direction he could go in as that would limit his options,” De Groot says. “We’ve still got so many skills to discover with this rider. That lies in shorter time trials, being part of a GC squad somewhere. Yes, more work on his sprinting, but he also should focus on the Classics. We use the word versatile and we keep our horizon wide instead of narrowing it down and saying he can only sprint from now on.”
As thoughts turn to the 2026 season, Brennan is acutely aware that everyone now knows who he is, and that brings with it new problems to solve. “Everyone is hunting him now, and he understands that he has to increase everything,” De Groot says. “The exciting thing is there’s a lot of space to do that because we’re not at the limit in terms of training, preparation and tactics. Matthew understands it’s very fluid, and if he’s not on top of things, he can easily lose form. That’s going to be a super interesting challenge in the upcoming period.”
What 2026 will bring no one knows yet, but De Groot insists that Visma’s management of Brennan will remain the same – they’ll continue to treat him as a rider still developing. “We really understand ourselves that what was shown last season was not normal,” he says. “So we have to highlight that and make careful decisions. He is, like I said, still part of our white jersey group, where young riders are elevated to race higher-level races, and they’re encouraged to try different things and to make mistakes. That’s still the case with Matthew. If there's going to be a Grand Tour or more Classics, we’ll see how that works out in the coming weeks as we’re in that process now. But definitely there’ll be a mix of opportunities for Matthew.”
