With a lineup including Grand Tour winner Alberto Contador, as well as runner-up Andreas Klöden the results were good, but the team was on the verge of financial collapse in May 2009.

Initially, the new team was based in Switzerland under the holding company of Zeus Sarl and managed by former Tour de Suisse organiser Marc Biver.

Other prominent new riders for the 2007 season included stage race specialists Andreas Klöden, Paolo Savoldelli and Andrey Kashechkin, as well as Matthias Kessler, Grégory Rast, Thomas Frei and Spanish climber Antonio Colom.

Riding under a Luxembourgian license, the team also included other ex-Discovery Channel riders such as Tomas Vaitkus, Sérgio Paulinho, Chechu Rubiera, Vladimir Gusev and Janez Brajkovič, as well as American Chris Horner.

The Astana team was not invited to the 2008 Giro d'Italia based on failing to meet the criteria of ethics, quality, or internationality.

[2] Astana was able to field a team despite the short notice, and on 1 June, Alberto Contador won the Giro, finishing 11th on the final stage time trial to keep his pink jersey and take the overall victory.

Various team members also achieved several other top-tier results, and Ivanov, Paulinho, Vaikus and two of the Kazakhs won their national championships.

In a statement, Bruyneel said that while the results "do not indicate the use of banned substances, the team has therefore applied the contractual terms based on these physiological and biological abnormalities", and fired Gusev "with immediate effect.

[4][5] On 25 September 2008, it was confirmed that Lance Armstrong – at the time considered a seven-time Tour de France winner – would leave retirement to ride for the team in the 2009 season.

Armstrong's participation in the Tour was cast into doubt in late March, after he suffered a broken collarbone in the Vuelta a Castilla y León that required surgical repair.

[9] On 7 May Armstrong, riding for Astana on an unpaid basis, expressed his sympathy for employees waiting for their wages only days before the start of the Giro d'Italia.

[14] According to Bruyneel, the names of paying sponsors, such as Trek and KazMunayGas, were not blanked out, and the team would continue to "race with these shirts until everything, emphasis on everything, is fixed", as "the riders have only received two months of salary in 2009.

However, the funding battle may have been merely a skirmish related to the underlying issue: control of the Astana team after the expiration of the two-year doping suspension of Alexander Vinokourov on 24 July 2009.

"[21] On 21 July, with Contador, Armstrong and Klöden holding three of the top four places in the Tour de France, Bruyneel told Belgian channel VRT that Astana as currently constituted was "finished" and that he would be leaving the team, as Vinokourov and the Kazakh federation had discussed, at the end of the season.

Much of the rest of the team departed for RadioShack, including Armstrong, Klöden, Leipheimer, Zubeldia, Horner, Brajkovič, Popovych, Paulinho, Vaitkus, Rast, Rubiera and Muravyev (the only Kazakh to depart), which meant that eight of the nine members of the winning Astana team at the 2009 Tour de France moved to RadioShack.

In 2013, the team signed Valerio Agnoli, Andrea Guardini, Alessandro Vanotti, and Vincenzo Nibali, who immediately won Tirreno–Adriatico and the Giro d'Italia.

Then Nibali wore the leader's jersey more than any other Italian in the history of the Vuelta (13 stages out of 21), but lost first place to American Chris Horner (RadioShack-Nissan).

[30] On the eve of the 2007 Tour de France, Alexander Vinokourov confirmed he had received coaching from controversial doctor Michele Ferrari.

Following the doping problems of 2007, Astana's sponsors replaced Biver with Johan Bruyneel, the former directeur sportif of the defunct Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team.

Bruyneel introduced the anti-doping system developed by Dr. Rasmus Damsgaard, Head of Information for Anti Doping Danmark (ADD).

This meant that Contador was unable to defend his Tour crown, because his contract did not have an "escape clause" that covered Astana's current situation.

[41] In 2012, former Astana riders and staff including; Lance Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel, Levi Leipheimer, Dr. Pedro Celaya and Dr. Luis del Moral are heavily implicated in the mass doping scandal which surrounded the U.S.

[47] On February 27, 2015, cycling's governing body, the UCI, requested that the team's WorldTour licence be withdrawn following an audit of its doping controls by the Institute of Sport Sciences in Lausanne.

The UCI stated that the audit revealed a large difference between the team policies presented to the Licence Commission and reality.