The Story Of Euroleague VS FIBA And What Can Teach Us About European Soccer

Today we’re going to talk about… the European Superleague! Yes, once again, another long and boring articles about one of the most imminent, most discussed and inevitable ─ as some people with much more knowledge on the world of soccer than I, and all of us, like Arsene Wenger, think ─ reforms in the world of European soccer that would completely change the structure, the face and the future of the sport at its highest level as we’ve always known it. But this article is going to be slightly different than any other article on the European Superleague because it’s not going to discuss the potential consequences of this that would be a revolutionary move in what is the most popular sport in the world, but it’s going to analyse something that already happened, that started from a very similar situation to the European Soccer’s one, even if with some key differences that will be explained later, and which ended up in a gigantic earthquake that completely changed the world of one of European biggest sports, and whose outcome could very well be the same of soccer’s one, a few seasons from now. I’m talking about the situation that involved basketball in Europe especially before the beginning of the 2016/2017 season and that ended up with the creation of two different top European competition, as it happened only during the 2000/2001 season, when Virtus Bologna won Euroleague and Maccabi Tel Aviv won FIBA Suproleague. And just like in 2000/2001 season on one side of this battle we had FIBA Europe, the European branch of basketball’s world federation, and on the other one we have continent’s biggest clubs, part of ULEB. This situation is particularly similar to soccer’s one, because we have on one side UEFA and on the other ECA, the club’s association founded in 2008, which comprehends 214 clubs, 109 of which are associated members, from Europe’s 53 leagues. This association was chaired first by Karl-Heinz Rumenigge until 2017, and then by Juventus’ president Andrea Agnelli. And strangely enough there’s an ECA involved also in this case. In the world of basketball the acronym ECA stands for Euroleague Commercial Assets, which is the limited liability company, registered under the Luxembourg law, part of the private company, Euroleague Basketball, which rules the renewed Euroleague and the Eurocup, and that is responsible to give the licenses that are necessary to play and compete in these two competitions.

But to fully understand what happened in basketball and what subsequently could change also in soccer, we need to take the not yet invented time machine in the laboratory of some creepy and crazy scientist living in a desolated castle in the middle of Europe and go back to that famous 2000/2001 season, which crowned two different European champions. At the beginning of that season ULEB, founded in 1991 by some clubs, unhappy with the way FIBA General Secretary Boris Stankovic was governing the sport, created its own Euroleague, which was FIBA Champions League’s competitor. At the end of that season the two parties involved found a decisive agreement, with ULEB taking care of the organisation of Europe’s two biggest competition, and with FIBA responsible only for the organisation of the tiny EuroChallenge, the third biggest competition in the continent. This seemed like a logical agreement, one finally for the good of the development of the game and not for the good of some entity’s personal interests, but then all changed when on the scene entered a new, unexpected character in the form of Patrick Baumann, the FIBA General Secretary from Switzerland who decided that he had bigger ambitions for his federation. He’s the main responsible for all the developments that came after, and exactly here lies the first and biggest difference between the basketball’s and the soccer’s situation: because while in both situation is the desire for more money the triggering factor, in basketball the clubs have been organising their own competition for years, and was the federation which tried to interfere and receive a bigger slice of the cake, while in soccer the Champions League is still organised by UEFA and the clubs would be the one, in case, to secede from the main competition.

In recent years Baumann entered in the world of European basketball like a wrecking ball trying to destroy, or modify following his beliefs, everything he could possibly find on his path. First he worked with David Stern, who at the time was still NBA Commissioner, in order to improve the quality, the importance and the economical value of a competition like the World Cup, modifying the structure of International tournaments like Eurobasket and the World Cup, which now are both played every four years like happens in soccer, then he also used soccer as a model for what regards the qualification process to those tournaments, with international windows dedicated to NTs during the season, which obviously prevents NBA players, and in some cases even some of the best Euroleague athletes, from taking part in it, and which a system that is commonly regarded, in soccer, as one of the worst, least interesting, and less exciting periods of the season (ok, that’s my opinion, I know many people that found it exciting, but I also know many people that see it as a waste of time). All of those choices clearly couldn’t make Euroleague, and its commissioner Jordi Bertomeu, extremely happy, because they represented basically a war declaration from the sport’s governing body, which then announced his plan to bring back Basketball Champions League from the dusty shelves of the memory of passionate middle aged fans from all around the continent.

The proposal from Baumann’s FIBA was a tournament in which eight spots were guaranteed to the “big 8” of European basketball, four spots to the national champions of Lithuania, Italy, France and Germany and the remaining spots of the sixteen teams competition to be awarded through the qualifying system for teams from other leagues / teams that didn’t won their league. It was a proposal that even if it was economically leaning heavily towards Europe’s biggest clubs ─ that would have received twenty-four of the thirty millions collected by the tournament ─ it didn’t maximise the possible economical advantages for those teams. In fact, almost immediately after FIBA’s announced Champions League revamp ECA arrived at a table going all-in with the most lucrative proposal in the history of European basketball, also thanks to the help of IMG, one of the biggest company in the world of sports marketing, that also owns the international TV rights for Serie A, which signed with ECA a contract worth almost nine hundred millions in ten years. This proposal, which then became the official format of Euroleague, consisted of sixteen teams, eleven with a decennial licence, one being the winner of Eurocup, also reformed by ECA that season, one the winner of the Qualifying round and three being the three teams national champions in one of Europe’s top leagues still not awarded a licence for Euroleague/Eurocup. Then the counterproposal from FIBA, knowing that none of the top teams in Europe would have opted for their version of the Champions League, was announced, and consisted in a thirty-two teams tournament which consisted of twenty-four teams qualified through their own leagues, like it happens in soccer, and the remaining eight teams being chosen by a preliminary twenty-eight teams tourney.

This started months of war between the teams, the leagues, the various national federations and FIBA which created a lot of misunderstandings and resulted in a strong announcement by the European branch of the international federation, disqualifying immediately from all the competitions organised by FIBA Europe all the leagues and the federations which would have allowed their teams to take part in tournaments not organised by the governing body itself. And while the Italian federation succeeded in keeping “the full barrel and the drunken wife”, as an old Italian proverb use to say, allowing Olimpia Milano to take part in Euroleague because of previously signed contracts with ECA, and not allowing Sassari, Reggio Emilia and Trento to regularly join Eurocup ─ until last season ─ other federations had truly a frontal collision with FIBA Europe, with Spain being even disqualified by taking part in Rio 2016 Olympic Games in a first moment.

Two years after that bloody war a lot of things have changed and the situation is much more stable and less poisonous than it used to do just a few months ─ which seem to be years considering how much changes there have been ─ ago, but still it’s important to analyse what happened in basketball because European soccer is going to be soon basically in the same situation basketball was in 2016 and the same things that impacted this war between ULEB and FIBA are the same that are going to impact whichever contrast between UEFA and the ECA ─ European Club Association, the soccer’s one, not the basketball’s one ─ is going to develop in the upcoming months, or years. It should made be very clear from now that this is all about the money, because professional sports in 2018, at that level, can only be about money. And is important to underline this because it’s pretty sure that when, and not if, European clubs are going to pull the trigger and try to create their own Superleague, UEFA, just like FIBA did, is going to drop the “sporting merit” question even if, in this situation, sporting merit really isn’t a part of the discussion. Is important to understand that when UEFA, like FIBA did, is going to say that “if we want leagues to have value, we should consider league standings in order to award the participation to European competitions”, they’re going to refer to a vision of the concept of “sporting merit” that is tied to a world in which we don’t live in anymore, the world of twenty years ago, ignoring or refusing to acknowledge that the economical side of the game is today as important as the mere sporting side. And if that happened in basketball, is surely going to happen also in soccer, which is the most popular sport and the one with deepest roots in the population not only in this continent, but also in the rest of the world, and which is the one with most the most conservative fans, as all the discussions about VAR prove almost weekly. And I know that for many fans it may be hard to accept it, but this is the reality we live in, and pretending otherwise it’s like pretending that a guy who’s been drug dealing for ten years has no criminal record. “Sporting merit” isn’t just finishing first in the league standings. It’s also having a committed ownership with a long-term plan for the growth and the development of the team, having the right structures that are required for a top team level. This is the kind of sporting merit Euroleague has been researching for years before the war with FIBA, and this kind of sporting merit is the one that allowed the competition to grow at an incredible rate during the years, with an audience that grow more than 1000% since the first edition of the tournament.

Whenever the European Superleague is going to be created and if ever there’s going to be a division between the best clubs in Europe and the European federation, that is going to happen because of money, because one of the parts in contention will consider that there’s a way of doing business that they believe is much more sound and which grants them more money than the one they’re in, which is exactly the reason why European basketball lived such a turbulent moment during 2016. What happened in basketball can and will probably happen also in soccer simply because the starting point of both the situations are incredibly similar and the only big difference between the two situations is that in soccer there are much more money than in basketball and that can mean that the war could be much more hard than the one we’ve seen between ULEB and FIBA. For all of this to not happen also in soccer a lot of at the moment unpredictable and unimaginable changes would be required, and now it seems only a question of when all of this will happen. But while we wait for this that would be an epochal change it can be extremely useful to learn what happened in which is probably the second most important team sport in Europe, because it could really help to preventively understand what will be going on with European soccer.