ROAD cycling's top teams are on a collision course with the sport's governing body the UCI and the Tour de France's owner ASO over how the sport is organised.

Under new president David Lappartient, the UCI is proposing several changes to its WorldTour series from 2020 but, at a meeting in Madrid on Wednesday, the teams will tell the governing body they want more fundamental reforms than those being suggested.

So, instead of the UCI's plans for budget caps, fewer top-tier teams and a promotion/relegation system, the teams want to bundle broadcast rights, gain a fairer share of revenues and have a much bigger say.

Some team bosses believe this can only be achieved if the elite calendar is run by a new, independent company.

Speaking to Press Association Sport, the president of the teams' organisation the AIGCP, Iwan Spekenbrink, said the teams, race organisers and the UCI have spent far too long "fighting over little technical details" instead of creating a viable economic model.

"We need to bundle rights and start selling them as a product," said Spekenbrink, the chief executive of Dutch star Tom Dumoulin's Team Sunweb.

"The UCI should facilitate us, the economic agents, to get on with that. If you look at the successful sports - the Premier League, F1 and so on - they pool rights and work together. They are co-owners of a bigger entity."

In the past, this idea has been blocked by the companies that organise the sport's most famous races, most notably ASO which owns two of the three grand tours, the Tour de France and the Vuelta, as well as several of the best week-long and one-day races.

And the UCI has maintained control by playing these two stakeholders off against each other.

"The UCI has been regulating the relation between teams and organisers when it should be facilitating us to create and run the right model," said Spekenbrink.

"Premier League clubs don't do the rules but they have a strong voice because they own the competition, or at least the commercial rights of it. But cycling is the only global sport where the teams and athletes don't have a voice, and yet we are specialists in finding revenue."

Spekenbrink added that the AIGCP, which represents 17 of the 18 current WorldTour teams and 27 second-tier teams, does not want to take any of ASO's cake, it just wants to bake a bigger cake.

The teams' united position comes at a time when details of Lappartient's plans are still vague but appear to be another set of tweaks intended to increase interest in the WorldTour, a 37-race series which runs from January to October, but without addressing the underlying issues.

At present, the teams invest £365million a year in the WorldTour, with 90 per cent of that coming from their sponsors. None of them makes a profit, however, as all of their turnover is eaten up by costs and wages.

This reliance on sponsorship leads to uncertainty, with at least one team going bust every few seasons, as happened last month with Irish outfit Aqua Blue.

Race organisers, on the other hand, invest an estimated £230million in the sport but make £90million in profit, with ASO taking the lion's share.

AIGCP vice-president Richard Plugge, who runs Team Lotto NL-Jumbo, describes cycling as a "sleeping giant" that embraced professionalism early but then "forgot to develop".

Like Spekenbrink, he wants "to fix the model first, then look at the rules" and, for him, this means creating a season-long narrative that broadcasters, fans, riders and sponsors can grasp and buy into.

"If PSV Eindhoven were to play a regular match against BATE Borisov, nobody in the Netherlands would care - they're just a small team in Belarus, right?" Plugge explained.

"But if you hear the Champions League hymn and see all the logos, you know instantly it's an important match.

"We have a nice calendar of races but nobody knows if a race like the Volta a Catalunya is part of it or not. It's important for the teams to win WorldTour points there but the fans don't get it.

"So you have to create a series and every WorldTour race should have the same look and feel.

"I want to see the stars of cycling in all the key races but we still have two or three different races on the same day.

"Cristiano Ronaldo might miss a Champions League group-stage game if his team had qualified but it's impossible that he would miss a knockout game. The stars of football are always in that series.

"If it's not clear to my mother that Catalunya is an important race then we'll never get that season-long narrative."