Well, there you have it. I also recall LL Cool S winning a KOM which is probably worth more than either, but the point stands: Spanish PCT is trash. And it ain't getting much better with Igor Arrieta, Roger Adria, Raul Garcia, Pelayo Mayo and Xabier Mikel Azparren about to be signed to the WT.
Problem is Spanish ProConti was artificially boosted in the mid-2000s by Puerto and then destroyed entirely by two changes in short order: firstly the financial crisis which killed off or reduced race days significantly in the Spanish calendar - Vuelta a Aragón, Vuelta a Comunidad Valenciana, Setmana Catalana, Vuelta a Asturias and Vuelta a Madrid all went through periods of not running (in one case permanently), while the Vuelta a Castilla y León and the revived version of Asturias were on reduced race days, Vuelta a Murcía and Vuelta a La Rioja reduced down from stage races to one-day races, and also races merged, like Euskal Bizikleta folding into País Vasco, Subida al Naranco being incorporated as a stage of the Vuelta a Asturias, and lower level pro/am races like Cinturón a l'Empordà, Circuito Montañés, Vuelta a León and Vuelta a Extremadura either went fully amateur or folded.
In addition to this, for most of the 2000s, Spanish regions were almost all competing and bankrolling teams with local governments competing for pride and promoting their local areas. You had Contentpolis-Murcía, Andalucía-CajaSur, Extremadura-Spiuk, Burgos Monumental, Catalunya-Ángel Mir, Comunidad Valenciana-Kelme, Karpin/Xacobeo-Galicia and of course everybody's favourites, Euskaltel-Euskadi. Even regions that didn't have their own team would promote by sponsoring others - i.e. Fuerteventura-Canarias and Illes Balears. That all went out of the window during the financial crisis, as at a time like that regional governments were naturally going to be losing votes considerably if they were seen to be spending large amounts on frivolous items like cycling teams. Euskaltel and Xacobeo were able to live on a bit longer primarily because of the strong regionalist identities in País Vasco and Galicia respectively, and given these teams were heavily biased toward riders from their own region, this meant they were somewhat better supported. Plus of course they were the highest profile teams at the time that were tied to regional sponsorships - Euskaltel being a PT team and Xacobeo being a ProConti team, but in the last generation of strong PC teams, with a genuine Vuelta-winning threat in Ezequiel Mosquera.
After the crisis had finished gutting the calendar, though, there was just not a sufficiently strong calendar to sustain multiple ProConti teams there anymore, especially once the WT level teams started to disappear as well, leaving Movistar as the de facto national representatives at the top level just by virtue of being the last men standing. Changes to the ProConti rules in the wake of Cervélo and BMC rendering the ProTour licence an unnecessary expenditure (by using the money saved on the licence to sign riders good enough to get them invited to any race they liked anyway) meant signing riders who could be legitimate threats to win major races became mostly off-limits to teams at that level (plus the end of informal quarantine for doping and the lack of high profile busted riders returning to the scene who would be able to be picked up cheap by these teams), and changes to the World Tour rules meant that lopsided teams with cult appeal but for whom many WT races were a necessary evil kind of marginalised the likes of Euskaltel as well.
But that also meant less competition at the national smaller races, which they would often dominate unless one or two other elite teams turned up, and so it became increasingly slim pickings for the ProConti teams, and even more so the Spanish Continental level teams. Shorn of races like León, l'Empordà and Extremadura that were at the 2.2 level that they could get results at, and with reduced race days on the pro calendar and less money available especially for minor classifications that they would historically have targeted (plus expensive RFEC registration that made it harder for teams to go pro compared to neighbouring Portugal or France), in reality the Continental teams in Spain became worse quality teams than many of the amateur teams, as top amateurs could win their way back to the pro level, and the Continental teams tended to be for amateur journeymen who had given up on the dream of moving up and hadn't been interesting enough to the Portuguese teams or taken their chances abroad like the likes of Edu Prades, Ion Aberasturi who have then made it back, or the likes of Marcos García and José Vicente Toribio who've had a better career out of winning races on the Asia Tour than they could have done from staying as break fodder in domestic Spanish cycling.
The other problem is of course that Movistar have, inadvertently, become a division killer in Spain. Their position as the sole representative of the country at the top level has meant they have a key interest in top Spanish talent, of course, and until recently when talents like Juan Ayuso and Carlos Rodríguez have gone overseas early, they have cherry-picked out of the Spanish amateur scene and also any time somebody starts to show promise from the Spanish ProConti ranks, preventing those teams from realistically improving. A few years ago Caja Rural were a team of good young promising talents, but increasingly their talented riders get poached - primarily by Movistar - and their big brothers round the corner (both teams are based close to one another) repay their neighbours by palming off used toys and veterans.
Since Caja Rural went ProConti in 2011, Movistar have signed the following riders from them:
- José Herrada in 2012 (at age 26, while also signing his brother as a neo-pro), Caja's 2nd best CQ points scorer the previous season
- Javier Moreno in 2012 (at age 27), their best CQ points scorer the previous season
- Rubén Fernández in 2015 (at age 23), 8th best Caja points scorer in 2014 but coming off winning Tour de l'Avenir
- Carlos Barbero in 2017 (at age 25), 5th best Caja points scorer the previous year
- Jaime Rosón in 2018 (at age 24), easily the best Caja points scorer the previous year (though these results have been wiped for biopassport violations)
- Lluís Más in 2019 (at age 29) - 6th best Caja points scorer the previous year, although this is a much lower bar than previously since he had less than 1/3 the points Barbero had as 5th best two years earlier.
- Gonzalo Serrano in 2021 (at age 26) - 2nd best Caja points scorer the previous year, but the totals are nosediving - this is less than Fernández had to be 8th best in 2015
- Oier Lazkano in 2022 (at age 22) - off barely any points at all, but still in the top half of points scorers on the team!
Movistar have repaid them with the following:
- David Arroyo in 2013 (at age 32) - obviously the 2010 Giro is an outlier but he was waning from his bottom-end-GC-top-10 heyday, being Movistar's 7th-lowest points-getter in 2012
- Ángel Madrazo in 2014 (at age 25) - having not kicked on as anticipated, Movistar's 9th-lowest points-scorer in 2013, and that includes the mis-step with Argiro Ospina
In addition to this, Caja Rural have also been poached of (excluding Kwiatkowski as they were still a Continental team when he rode for them, and the Luís León Sánchez anomalous year at the lower level in 2014 as he was a long-established WT pro standard rider):
- David de la Cruz in 2013 (at age 23) as their 2nd best scorer
- Omar Fraile in 2016 (at age 25) as their 4th best scorer
- Pello Bilbao in 2017 (at age 26) as their 2nd best scorer
- Zé Gonçalves in 2017 (at age 27) as their 3rd best scorer
- Hugh Carthy in 2017 (at age 22) as their 4th best scorer
- Álex Aranburu in 2020 (at age 24) as their best scorer
- Cristián Rodríguez in 2021 (at age 25) as their 4th best scorer
That's just the relationship between one pair of teams (I focused on those as they've been going throughout the period, I know Burgos in their various guises have too but for much of it they've been an also-ran team or a Continental team, whereas Caja Rural have been the main Spanish alternative to Movistar for much of this period. I also omitted a couple of less noteworthy moves between domestiques, such as Sebastián Mora who had a season at Caja splitting time track/road before going to Movistar to join old track running buddy Albert Torres because they had lost all their rouleur domestiques). For a while Sérgio Pardilla's ongoing middling GC results were enough to sustain them while they continued to lose talents, but the problem is, that is the lot of a ProConti team now. In the late 2000s/early 2010s, they might have been able to keep one or two of those names and build a season around focusing on them. Yes, a few of them have turned out to be problematic - Rosón, Gonçalves - but those are also the type of rider that sustained ProConti teams in the previous generations, with one significant rider who could ride for GC at the home tours and then a supporting cast for the local scene and selected races in the local area, so for a Spanish team you'd say Portugal, southern France and maybe a few races in Italy or further afield like Turkey or Latin American early season races.
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