Furthermore, there are a number of stupid reasons this won't work in cycling.
1: The wages are not high enough to justify switching riders mid-season and forcing them to move or throw over their entire schedule.
2: Riders switching bikes, outfits, food-sponsors mid-season? Yeah, that's not going to affect them.
3: Pretty sure it collides with a number of European labor laws, atleast I can name 5 Belgian ones to start with.
4: Imagine the top draft prospect being a Belgian Classics guy, and the worst performing WT-team being Movistar, you want to force him to ride on a *** Classics team for 3 years, whilst Movistar gets very little sponsorship return on investment? "Yeah, but they should have drafted somebody else" is going to be the argument then, but if they did we would all go "Oh, they should have drafted rider X".
5: Imagine getting drafted to DSM
Even if it didn't cause legal problems with European labour laws, you simply have the problem that it cannot work until the top level is fully locked. This would mean that the WT teams
cannot enter races where teams outside the WT compete (otherwise it offers unfair opportunities to gain points), and that teams outside the WT
cannot enter races where the WT teams compete lest they prejudice the WT competitions.
Only then could they enter a draft situation. And then you're going to have the problem of, who is eligible for the draft? People like Peter Sagan, Juan Ayuso, Tadej Pogačar and Arnaud de Lie have shown that holding the draft post-espoirs, like NFL, is simply too late, because you can't put those guys through years of U23s when they're clearly ready to go up earlier. But if you hold the draft at, say, 18 or 19 when they come out of juniors, then you're going to need a whole system to be implemented of affiliate teams and loan contracts to help riders develop as they don't develop at the same pace, more akin to hockey, where teams will draft players, and they will stay with junior teams, go to college, or stay with their teams outside of that system (usually applicable to Europeans and any other KHL types, though I don't recall too many drafted Kazakhs or Chinese from KHL teams) until they're ready to hit the main team. Even then, almost all NHL teams have at least one, usually two, lower league affiliate teams that they shuffle players around.
It would probably render the ProTeam level irrelevant because either they just do their own thing and some of their riders are just loanees from WT teams who have a say in how they use them, or they end up just signing up to be affiliates to WT teams who just stockpile their lesser riders and espoirs there.
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