EuroLeague

• 1. Introduction

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  The EuroLeague was born in 1958, when a handful of national champions from across a divided continent gathered to settle a question: who plays the best basketball in Europe? Nearly seven decades later, that same competition draws crowds of more than 22,000 inside a single Belgrade arena, broadcasts into 201 countries, and reaches up to 800 million households weekly via satellite in China alone. It is the highest-tier men's club basketball competition in Europe, and by average attendance it ranks second among all professional basketball leagues in the world, trailing only the NBA.

  What makes those numbers remarkable is the path the competition traveled to get there. It began under FIBA's umbrella, ran for more than four decades, and then fractured in 2000 when powerful clubs broke away and started a rival league under a name FIBA had never bothered to trademark. That split nearly destroyed European club basketball as a unified enterprise. Instead, it produced something arguably stronger: a semi-closed league built on long-term licences, a corporate governance structure, and a €630 million media deal. Along the way, the competition passed through more name changes than most fans can count, survived a pandemic season that was cancelled outright, and, in 2025, held its Final Four in Abu Dhabi, the first time that event had ever left European soil.

  The story of how all that happened involves a legal oversight, a boardroom coup, back-to-back champions with the nerve to repeat, and a single-game scoring record from 1965 that still stands. What made the EuroLeague what it is today, and who shaped it most? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The FIBA Years

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  Rīgas ASK, a club from the Soviet Latvian capital, won the first three editions of the FIBA European Champions Cup in 1958, 1958-59, and 1959-60. No team has repeated that feat in any era since. The competition those Rīga players entered was a straightforward knockout tournament: national league champions competed against one another, finishing in either a single-game final or a two-game aggregate. In 1987-88, FIBA upgraded the climax to a Final Four format, and that structure lasted through the rest of the FIBA era.

  Real Madrid dominated those forty-three years more than any other club. The Spanish side won eight titles during the FIBA period alone, and their rivalry with CSKA Moscow and Pallacanestro Varese became the central drama of European basketball through the 1960s and 1970s. Varese, based in a small city north of Milan, claimed five titles during that stretch. In a compact area of less than 40 square kilometres, Varese, Olimpia Milano, and Cantù together accumulated ten FIBA European Champions' Cups and appeared in sixteen finals combined.

  The highest individual scoring performance in the entire history of the competition came from that era. Radivoj Korać of OKK Beograd scored 99 points in a single game on the 14th of January 1965, during the 1964-65 season, in a match against Alvik. That record has stood for more than sixty years.

  By the late 1990s, tensions between FIBA and the continent's biggest clubs had grown acute. Those clubs wanted more stability, more revenue, and less deference to national federations. Maccabi Tel Aviv won the final FIBA-era edition in 2000-01, and that championship effectively closed a chapter that had begun 43 seasons earlier.

• 3. The 2000 Split

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  FIBA had used the EuroLeague name for its competition since 1996, but it had never registered the trademark. That oversight proved decisive. In the summer of 2000, top clubs backed by ULEB, the Union of European Basketball Leagues, launched a rival competition and simply took the name. FIBA had no legal recourse, so it renamed its own top-tier event the FIBA SuproLeague and watched the 2000-01 season begin with two simultaneous continental championships.

  The clubs split unevenly between the two competitions. Panathinaikos, Maccabi Tel Aviv, CSKA Moscow, and Efes Pilsen remained with FIBA. Olympiacos, Kinder Bologna, Real Madrid Teka, FC Barcelona, and several others joined the new ULEB Euroleague. The absurdity of that season produced two separate European champions in May 2001: Maccabi Tel Aviv from the FIBA SuproLeague, and Kinder Bologna from the ULEB Euroleague.

  The duplication lasted barely a year. Euroleague Basketball negotiated the terms of reunification, and FIBA agreed. From the 2001-02 season onward, European club competition fell under a single governing body. FIBA retained authority over national team competitions, including the FIBA EuroBasket and the Summer Olympics. Euroleague Basketball took the clubs. As a concession to structural clarity, FIBA's old Korać Cup and Saporta Cup each ran one final season before Euroleague Basketball absorbed them into a new second-tier competition, the ULEB Cup, now known as the EuroCup.

  The first EuroLeague winner of the reunified era was Virtus Bologna, who beat Saski Baskonia in a best-of-three series in 2000-01, making them the inaugural champions of what would become the modern competition.

• 4. Licences and Control

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  The most consequential structural change the new Euroleague Basketball introduced was not the format but the licence system. Under FIBA, participation had been earned annually through domestic league performance. Under ULEB and then Euroleague Basketball, top clubs could hold multi-year guaranteed spots regardless of how their national seasons went. Those licences, originally set at three years, reshaped the economics and the politics of European club basketball.

  In 2009, Euroleague Properties S.A. was created, and Euroleague Basketball under Jordi Bertomeu took full operational control, reducing ULEB's role significantly. That year, 13 clubs held A-Licences. By 2012 the number had risen to 14. The trajectory was toward ever-greater concentration: in 2015, eleven clubs signed long-term licences running until 2026 and simultaneously became shareholders in Euroleague Basketball itself, leaving only five spots for other teams.

  FIBA pushed back in October 2015, approaching eight major clubs, including Panathinaikos, Real Madrid, Barcelona, and CSKA Moscow, with a proposal for a new 16-team FIBA Basketball Champions League offering long-term licences. The clubs rejected it. Within weeks, those same clubs presented an almost identical plan of their own under Euroleague Basketball's structure instead.

  In July 2019, the EuroLeague made the closed-league structure official, announcing that from the 2019-20 season no team could earn direct access through domestic competition. By the 2025-26 season, 13 shareholder clubs hold permanent places, ASVEL and Bayern Munich having joined in 2021-22 to bring the total to that number. New 3-year licences for non-shareholders carry a fee of 5 million euros in total, roughly 1.7 million euros per year, evaluated by the Board of Directors composed of those same 13 shareholders.

• 5. Champions and Records

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  Real Madrid's eleven titles make them the most decorated club across both eras of the competition. CSKA Moscow follows with eight, and Panathinaikos with seven. Panathinaikos holds a specific distinction within the modern era since 2001: five trophies, more than any other club in the Euroleague Basketball period.

  Back-to-back championships have been rare in the modern era. Only three clubs have managed consecutive titles since 2000: Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2003-04 and 2004-05, Olympiacos in 2011-12 and 2012-13, and Anadolu Efes in 2020-21 and 2021-22. In the longer FIBA era, KK Split won three consecutive titles from 1988-89 through 1990-91, a run that remains the only three-peat in the Final Four era. Rīgas ASK achieved the same in the pre-Final Four era.

  The widest margin of victory in a Finals game occurred in 2004 in Tel Aviv, where Maccabi Tel Aviv defeated Skipper Bologna by a score of 118-74, a 44-point difference. The highest single-game attendance in the competition's history is 22,567, recorded at the Belgrade Arena on the 5th of March 2009, when Partizan hosted Panathinaikos in a Top 16 match during the 2008-09 season.

  In the modern era, the highest individual scoring performance belongs to Nigel Hayes of Fenerbahçe, who scored 50 points on the 29th of March 2024 against Alba Berlin during the 2023-24 season. In Finals play specifically, Žarko Varajić of Bosna holds the record with 47 points on the 5th of April 1979 in a game against Emerson Varese.

• 6. Going Global

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  The 2023-24 season averaged 10,383 spectators per EuroLeague match, the fifth-highest of any professional indoor sports league in the world and the highest outside the United States. Žalgiris, the Lithuanian club from Kaunas, posted average crowds above 14,000 in multiple recent seasons, including 14,872 in 2024-25. Crvena zvezda and Partizan, both Belgrade clubs, have driven some of the most striking individual game figures, with Partizan hosting the top five best-attended matches in the competition's history, all above 21,000.

  Television coverage extends to up to 201 countries and territories for regular-season games, rising to 213 for the Final Four. Since 2023, the playoffs have been broadcast in the United States through the ESPN networks, following a period on FloSports starting with the 2017-18 Final Four.

  In November 2015, Euroleague Basketball and IMG signed a 10-year joint venture valued at €630 million guaranteed, with projected revenues reaching €900 million, covering all global media and marketing rights. That deal coincided with the shift to a true league format, in which 20 teams each play every other team twice in a double round-robin regular season, for 38 games, before the top eight enter a five-game playoff series and four winners advance to the Final Four.

  The geographic footprint of the competition expanded formally in 2025, when the Final Four was held in Abu Dhabi, the first edition outside Europe. That same year, Dubai Basketball received a 5-year licence, becoming the first team from outside Europe to compete in the EuroLeague. In September 2025, a four-year partnership with the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism and Etihad Airways replaced Turkish Airlines as the league's main naming partner, ending a 15-year relationship that had begun in the 2010-11 season under a deal initially worth €15 million over five years.