The bigger paid Euroleague is still by far the best option for Partizan and Zvezda. Into that chaos comes the expansion of the ABA league, more and more games, colleges that pay the kids handsomely and the European NBA division as a threat or an opportunity...
Years of follow-up European basketball they allowed the average hoops fan to create a sense of attachment to the sport and to realize what separates victory from defeat, but also to learn what are the only constants about basketball on the Old Continent - that no serious system exists and that justice simply does not win.
The basic problem of basketball in these European areas of ours is very simple, and it is related to money. Talent has always been in abundance, interest in a large part of the continent as well, but a serious organization that can generate money - not.
European basketball still rests on rich enthusiasts who invest their money, and a few clubs backed by football clubs, sports associations or - in rare cases - entire countries.
Of the national leagues, the strongest is Spain, the country that has the richest basketball tradition, but also a serious system and a powerful basketball association.
Turkey has two serious and powerful clubs, which have won three of the previous five Euroleague titles, while the rest of the league is constantly on a fine line between huge ambitions and bankruptcy.
Italy has well-filled stands and uncertainty, but it is far from the status and quality it had in the nineties, while the Greek league is marked by scandals, lawsuits, threats and fights between the two most popular clubs.
However, the expediency of national leagues has come under a lot of scrutiny lately, because participation in European competitions is achieved by promising to spend a lot of money and build a competitive team, after which you are usually required to pay a hefty sum for the so-called a "special invitation", with which you buy a place in a competition in which the judging is very biased, the prize fund is negligible, and the treatment is unequal.
However, there is still no smarter alternative.
The NBA case
The stories about the "European division of the NBA" have been around for a long time - they started more than 15 years ago - but they were made concrete only last year. The first hint of the seriousness of the whole situation could be sensed when Ergin Ataman (and who else?), dissatisfied with the refereeing of his Panathinaikos in a Euroleague game, threatened the league management, pointing out that the Greek giant could easily find an alternative to the Euroleague. After that, stories about the "NBA Europe" project became more frequent and more serious.
The NBA League saw the importance of the European continent, which gave it several of the best players in the previous period - Jokic, Adetokunba, Dončića - but also sniffed out the space for a project that could bring profit.
The EuroLeague, despite its many flaws and problems, has been functioning as it was for 25 years, so the Americans estimated that with their own technical know-how and the marketing machinery can do something the Europeans failed to do - make money.
First of all, FIBA was happy about this idea, which has been vultures around the Euroleague for years and collects disappointed clubs that fail to get a license or a special invitation to the strongest European club competition.
Ten years ago, FIBA created its own version of the elite competition - bombastically named the Champions League - which became a meeting place for the former greats of European basketball, now clubs with modest or no financial resources.
Where the visions of the NBA and FIBA completely diverge is in the types of clubs they want to attract to their ranks. In Europe, basketball has always been in the background compared to football, so the former basketball giants (such as Jugoplastika, Varese, Cantu, Huventud, Arisa, Limoges...) are mostly clubs from smaller areas.
FIBA, of course, wanted the strongest and richest participants in its competition, but it knew that this was not realistic in the near future, so - nobly or opportunistically - it targeted the fallen giants, who have tradition and a solid fan base.
In the meantime, they realized that they could not topple the Euroleague, nor could they preserve the tradition of basketball in Europe, so they also hosted various Tortona, Würzburg and Tenerife, clubs that do not have a rich history, but have quality and ambitions that significantly raise the level of the competition.
The NBA, on the other hand, is absolutely not interested in who won what in the past, nor how many coaches and players it created. Americans are only interested in marketing potential, which is not necessarily related to the number of fans, but to the place where the club comes from.
Therefore, cities are more interesting to the NBA than clubs, so much so that one very logical problem they encounter - the fact that, say, Manchester does not have a serious basketball team - they plan to solve by creating a new one.
Here we come to a fundamental misunderstanding of Americans. The Euroleague also tried to revive London, Paris and Berlin as big markets, but it didn't achieve God knows what kind of results. Simply put, European basketball orbits around clubs (and fans) and not players like the NBA, so attempts to create Manchester City, PSG or a certain Athens club behind which, presumably, Giannis Adetokunbo would stand, would most likely be doomed to failure.
And before economists jump in and make a remark that the NBA is a serious organization and a ``money making machine'', which it certainly is, it should be seen that many of its side projects (such as the development league, the summer league, the women's WNBA league, the African NBA) experienced financial failures and unsuccessfully tried to raise interest among fans.
Euroleague of 20 clubs
The EuroLeague reacted in the most painless way - it expanded the competition and charged participation from clubs that are not owners/shareholders.
The fact that there are 13 clubs that have privileges - from collecting money from TV rights to voting on every decision related to the competition - and that the other seven clubs will pay to participate and thus cover the league's expenses (travel, hotels, referees, employee salaries), one could call unethical and absurd. And you would be right.
However, there is no alternative for ambitious clubs, or at least not a good enough alternative. Italy's Trapani, which is backed by a controversial businessman and has a very limited fan base, still has nothing to look for in the Euroleague, and neither does Alba, which adheres to strict German regulations that require it to spend as much as it can (which, it turns out, is not enough to be competitive), so they decided to play in the FIBA Champions League.
Partizan and Red Star, on the other hand, have already accustomed the fans to participation in the elite rank, so anything below that would be disappointing and lead to much lower attendances at matches, and therefore less money from sold tickets.
According to the managers of Partizan, this club generates between 8 and 10 million euros only on the basis of tickets sold at the level of one season, which until recently was an unimaginable figure. When this is taken into account, then the decision to pay 750 thousand euros for one Euroleague season is only logical financially.
However, the Belgrade clubs are not only expected to participate, but to fight for a high ranking. For such a thing, it is necessary to secure a large budget, and the money that the Euroleague gives as a prize fund is miserable and, on average, it does not manage to cover the salary of even an average player, let alone a top one. And with 20 clubs in the league and 38 rounds on the schedule, a team that wants to go far will need a huge player pool, and therefore a huge budget.
It is eye-popping and contributes to the negative sentiment towards the Euroleague that one-year-old clubs, such as Dubai, can buy a license and at the same time get a five-year license, unlike the Serbian clubs who got (that is, bought) a three-year license.
ABA vs. national leagues
Just as the Euroleague has a threat in the form of the European NBA league project, the regional ABA also fears the national leagues of the countries in the region. And just as the European competition has to calm down the furious owners of (primarily) Greek clubs after they lose a few games, so the regional league has the thankless task of ensuring normal functioning and reducing tensions between the great rivals.
Unlike the years when the ABA league title secured a spot in the Euroleague – or at least the championship right to receive a special invitation – now the title of the regional champion brings nothing but the championship cup. It remains to be seen whether the new situation in the future will bring an easing of tensions, or a reason to disband the competition.
These days there is a current story about the expansion of the ABA league from the current 16 to 20 clubs. Thus, the regional competition would do a similar thing to the Euroleague - it would collect money from the clubs that want an invitation (Vienna, Cluj and Hapoel Tel Aviv are mentioned) and gratify the rest of the league with a financial injection that they would not get from the national championships.
However, a league of 20 clubs would create hell in the schedule of three (or four) ABA Euroleagues, so the most likely solution is to form two conferences of 10 teams each, which would at least slightly reduce the number of games played.
As in the case of the Euroleague, the question arises as to why the league of clubs from the former Yugoslavia would accept participants from Austria, Romania, the UAE and Israel. The reason is very simple - the quality and marketing potential of the league is significantly increased, and precedents have already been set with the participation of Maccabi, Nymburk, Solnok and Levski from Sofia.
In addition, clubs that do not participate in European competitions will have the opportunity to play against foreign teams and three or four Euroleague players, as many as the Adriatic League will contain next season. And finally, the best thing for the clubs struggling to close the financial structures - the entire travel, accommodation and referee expenses are not borne by them, but by the ABA League.
NCAA as a threat to everyone
In the equation with a large number of unknowns, college basketball, more precisely the NCAA league, has recently joined, which threatens to significantly disrupt the state of the already fragile basketball ecosystem.
American universities are now able to pay student-athletes, this time legally and legally, and not under the table as was the custom. Moreover, college basketball players receive multi-million contracts, five to ten times more than they would receive in European basketball, where they would mostly sit at the end of the bench and wait for the coach to have mercy and give them a few minutes on the court, usually in already decided and uninteresting games.
The general exodus of young men from these areas to American universities has already begun, where they will get the opportunity for progress, time and freedom in the game, top training conditions, a university degree and socializing with peers from all over the world. All in all, they will get much more than they would get here - both basketball-wise and financially - so it should not be surprising that young basketball players increasingly decide to go across the ocean.
This leaves a number of clubs in Europe in trouble - not necessarily the Euroleagues, who didn't give young players a chance anyway - because it significantly narrows the number of (domestic) options on the market. There will also be fewer Americans, as they will choose well-paid studies at home rather than an uncertain professional future in Europe, Japan and Australia.
Even the NBA will be affected, as top college players will rather stay at their university for a few more years than be picked in the second round of the draft and released not long after.
The future of national basketball
Finally, the future of national basketball remains to be assessed. It is clear that the next representative windows will be played without players from the Euroleague, because with the expansion of the competition, the schedule will become even more crowded and without weeks off. Ten double rounds and 38 games in the regular season means huge spending, so clubs will become even more disinterested in letting players (who pay a lot of money) play for the national team and thus risk injuries.
This should bring a number of surprises in terms of the results of the qualifying matches, so we could once again see the basketball superpowers struggling to make it to the main tournament.
An increasing number of games - and this is inevitable, because a greater number of games also brings more income from TV rights, tickets, marketing presence - could also bring a large number of injuries, so it should not be surprising if players from European basketball, like their colleagues from the NBA, choose to spend the summer resting and recovering their bodies, instead of playing for the national team.
All things considered, it's clear that there are no good guys and bad guys in this story - all stakeholders are fighting for their own self-interest, with little regard for those who the sport is supposedly played for, the fans. For now, it is certain that the Euroleague will continue to be played in an expanded composition, most likely the ABA league, while the commissioner of the NBA League, Adam Silver, stated that their European project is realistically feasible only in a few years.
If nothing else, fans will get a large number of games from their favorite teams, but the question remains whether their clubs and players will pay a high price for such a thing.
In the elections on May 5, 1935, the government and opposition lists were voted on. Before the elections, the government intimidated teachers and scholars with dismissals and arrests, called opposition candidates Ustasha allies and accused them of organizing the assassination of the king, prevented foreign journalists from reporting...
As if by pattern, the same thing that is happening now on Novoj.rs, happened on Television Novi Sad in October 1990.
Vesna Lalić, an excellent photographer, has passed away. She photographed all the most important social and political events in Serbia, as well as seemingly ordinary everyday moments.
It sounds incredible, but it's true - AI worms could soon spread through home devices
"The one who remains stuck in the sphere of traumatic experiences, who constantly thinks that, here, while we are talking about the book, someone is given the wrong diagnosis, someone is sloppily operated on, someone is receiving therapy that they do not need, someone is losing their hair, that person has a problem because living in fear is not life, and psychotherapy is an expensive thing."
There is, literally, no difference between the one who claims it is day in the middle of the night, or the one who claims to be a giraffe, from the claims we read on billboards: that Vučić is working to unify Serbs and that Serbia is doing better and better day by day.
The pre-election arrests due to the alleged "overthrow of the state" testify to the regime's panic. The bad news for them is - they can't arrest the whole people who decided to defend themselves from progressive beatings and election theft
The ring that tightens around Ćaciland Student list is getting narrower. Because there are more and more spoiled people who see the false prophet for what he is: a street obscener who is fighting Serbia
The archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
