We've been threatening this for a while, and it's finally real. We built a fantasy Tour de France. Ours. For you.
Now, I know what you're thinking, because I thought it too: there are already fantasy cycling games out there. There are. Some of them are decent. But they're built for a general audience, they can be clunky, and none of them are tied to this — the community, the podcast, the lot of you who actually know who Lenny Martinez is and don't need a stage explained. So we made one for us. Free to play, simple to get into, and built around the thing that makes fantasy sport fun in the first place: beating your mates. Let me walk you through it.
What it actually is
It's straightforward, and that's deliberate. Across the 2026 Tour de France — 21 stages, Barcelona to Paris — you pick a squad of riders. You've got a budget, so you can't just buy all the stars; you have to make choices, balance a sprinter against a climber, gamble on a breakaway specialist, decide whether you can afford the favourite. That squad-building, inside a budget, is the whole game in miniature. It's where it's won and lost.
Then every day, your riders score points based on what actually happens in the real race. Win a stage, you score. Take a jersey, hold a jersey, get up the road in the day's break — points. You pick one rider as your captain, and he scores double, which means choosing the right captain for the right day is its own little puzzle: a fast man for a flat run into Bordeaux, a climber for the days the road points at the sky. And you're not stuck with your picks. You manage a limited number of transfers across the three weeks, so when a contender crashes out or someone's flying, you can react — exactly the calls a real directeur sportif is making from the team car.
That's it. Pick a squad, captain wisely, score off the real results, manage your transfers, and try to come out on top after three weeks. You don't need a spreadsheet. You need an opinion about who's going to be good, which most of you have in abundance.
Why we built our own
Here's the honest reason. The fun of fantasy sport isn't really the points. It's the people you're playing against. It's the running argument in the group chat, the lad who captained the wrong rider and won't hear the end of it, the friendly grudge that lasts the full three weeks.
A generic fantasy game can't give you that, because the people in it are strangers. But the Roadman community can. So we built the game to live inside the community, where you can set up a mini-league with your actual club, your actual WhatsApp group, your actual café-stop crew, and settle it among people whose opinions you actually care about beating. That's the part the big generic games miss, and it's the entire reason ours exists.
It's also built for the way we watch the Tour. If you've read how to watch the Tour like a coach, you know we're into the tactics, the positioning, the breakaway maths. This game rewards exactly that kind of watching. Having a rider in the day's break suddenly makes a "boring" transitional stage the most gripping three hours of your week. It turns you into a fan of riders you'd never normally follow. It makes the whole Tour better.
How to build a squad that scores
I won't give you a formula, because half the fun is working it out and arguing about it. But a few principles will keep you from making the rookie mistakes, and they're worth a minute before you pick.
First, balance the squad across the kinds of days the Tour throws at you. Twenty-one stages aren't twenty-one of the same thing — there are flat sprints, lumpy breakaway days, brutal summit finishes and a time trial or two. A squad that's all climbers will sit on its hands every time the road's flat; a squad of pure sprinters will haemorrhage points the moment it goes uphill. You want riders who cover the different days, so there's always someone in your team with a reason to score. If you've read what the 2026 route actually demands, you already know the shape of it — back-to-back Alpe d'Huez finishes, a Pyrenean opening, plenty for the fast men in between.
Second, don't blow the whole budget on the galácticos. You can't afford all the stars, and chasing them leaves the rest of your squad threadbare. The riders who win you a fantasy league are often the mid-priced ones who quietly score week after week — a rider who's both a GC threat and a stage danger gives you two ways to earn from one pick. Value, not just star power.
Third, think about your captaincy before you pick, not after. Since your captain doubles his points, your squad needs at least one rider you'd genuinely back to deliver on a big day, and ideally a couple, so you've always got a strong armband option. A squad with no obvious captain is a squad leaving points on the table.
And finally, don't spend all your transfers in week one. The Tour is three weeks long, riders crash out, form swings, and the rider nobody fancied becomes the must-have. Keep something in reserve so you can react when the race turns, the way a real team manager does from the car.
The dates you need
Three things to put in your calendar, and the first one's soon.
Team picking opens on 26 June. That's when you can build your real squad for the Tour. Get in early, have a proper look at the start list, and don't leave it to the last minute — the budgeting takes some thinking.
Scoring starts with Stage 1 on 5 July. That's when it gets real and the points start counting. Your team is provisional right up until the racing begins, so you can tinker, change your mind, and react to the team presentations and any late news before it locks in.
And here's the one for the keen: early access is open now, with the code "roadman". If you don't want to wait until the 26th, you can jump in straight away, build a provisional team, and — more importantly — set up your mini-league so it's ready and waiting when your mates arrive. Be the one who started the league, not the one who joined it late.
How to get in
This is the easy part, because the whole thing is free and it lives where the community already is.
The Roadman Fantasy Tour is free to play through our Skool community. No entry fee, no catch, no upsell — it's a community game, not a product launch. If you're already in the free Roadman community, you're sorted. If you're not, joining is free and takes a minute, and it gets you the game plus everything else that goes on in there. That's where the mini-leagues live, where the daily arguments happen, and where the bragging rights get cashed in come Paris.
So the move is simple: join the free community on Skool, use the code "roadman" for early access if you want to get a head start, build your squad, and pull a few mates in to make a league of it.
One last thing
I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn't, because I'm allergic to over-selling things.
It isn't a serious training tool. It won't make you faster. It's not going to change your FTP. It's a bit of fun — a way to make three weeks of brilliant bike racing even better by having some skin in the game, and a reason to needle your club mates for the back half of the summer. That's all it's meant to be, and that's exactly why I think you'll love it.
We've put real care into building it well, because doing things properly is the Roadman way. But at its heart it's the same thing as the bet you'd have on the Grand National or the sweepstake at the office: a small, daft, sociable bit of competition that makes you care more about the thing you already love. The Tour's the best three weeks of the cycling year. This just gives you a dog in the fight.
Team picking opens 26 June. Get your squad ready, drag your mates in, and let's see who actually knows their stuff when the racing starts.
Join the free Roadman community on Skool to play — early access is open now with the code "roadman". And to get your eye in before the Tour, read what the 2026 route means and what the contenders' preparation tells us.