Partizan and Zvezda secured three years of the Euroleague. The price is not as terrible as thought. Then again, with such silly conflicts of basketball competitions, no one is clean
Partizan i Red Star will play basketball Euroleague and for the next three years, it was decided by the competition.
Thus, the Belgrade giants will find themselves in a wider company that counts twenty teams and promises a killer rhythm of the competition - 38 rounds before the playoffs, ten of which are so-called double weeks, when they are played over two working days.
As they would say in "Alan Ford", the price is a real trifle. They will reportedly pay 750.000 euros per year of participation, and this is the result of bargaining, because at first the Euroleague asked for significantly more.
Digitron has spoken.
In the basketball bazaar, the classic Serbian spite arose, which came out at the story of the pope who gets angry at the village and does what he does. It was said that we should leave those Euroleague bloodsuckers and play in third-tier competitions, and hope for a miracle.
But, who knows how to count, I guess he realized that basketball became the main game in the city again when both rivals played in the Euroleague. Since then, the stands have been packed - there has never been a sporting event in Belgrade that is guaranteed to attract twenty thousand people week after week.
And who brings so much money into the coffers of the clubs, from tickets onwards, that we don't talk about "state money" and who Vučić "gave" more to.
There is no doubt that Partizan and Zvezda remain in, as sports commentators say, "the company of the best".
The Euroleague - by far the second strongest in the world - will gather the continent's best teams in due course. And for the local fans, who rightly consider Serbia to be the country of basketball, only the best can be good enough.
Rotten foundations
But that does not fix the rotten foundations on which the Euroleague stands. A league owned by thirteen clubs that share the cake with difficulty will remain a league of unequals.
And it will remain a low-earning league as such - according to their own, real income, Partizan and Zvezda are near the top.
There will also remain the "threat" of Fiba and the NBA that they will create some kind of outpost of the world's biggest basketball circus in Europe. It is still in the clouds whether it will split the traditional European clubs, or whether some Abu Dhabi, Manchester and London are being targeted as "markets" where you can't force people to follow basketball even with a gun.
What about the ABA League?
Furthermore, the three-year purchased license for Partizan and Zvezda reinforces the question of what the ABA league is for - a solid European league that has nowhere to go.
For this reason, from coach Svetislav Pešić onwards, only the tested Serbian measure - isolation - is offered in the bazaar. If we were to play only in the Serbian league, in which Partizan and Zvezda would not have competition. And that will strengthen the "basketball centers" and give birth to young talents who can't appear because of the ABA league.
So there are still a lot of question marks, but at least there won't be any tremors around the Euroleague for the next three springs. And with all the grumbling, the hall will be full.
Columns of citizens headed towards Slavija from six directions - from Novi Belgrade, Zemun and Čukarica, and a little later, columns also started from Studentski trg, from the building of the technical faculty on Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra and from Autokomanda.
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