By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Imagine it for a moment. The Telekom Center, Athens. The stands full to the bursting. Red and white everywhere — flags, scarves, faces painted in the colours of Olympiacos. The noise before tipoff is already something physical, something you feel in your sternum rather than hear. And somewhere in that arena, amid all of that suffocating expectation, Olympiacos has to find a way to stand tall under the weight of expectation.
That is the paradox of hosting the Final Four. The crowd that should carry you can just as easily drown you. The city that loves you most is also the city that will feel your failure the hardest. In the last 20 years — across every EuroLeague Final Four staged in Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Belgrade, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and beyond — only three teams have walked into that crucible and come out as champions on home soil. This year, online betting sites have made Thrylos the favourite to become the fourth.
The latest odds from 7Signs online sportsbook make Georgios Bartzokas’ men the clear 6/5 frontrunner to win the EuroLeague this season, with their closest rivals thought to be record champions Real Madrid at 7/2. So, can they join these three as a team that managed to claim the biggest prize in the European game on home turf?
Panathinaikos — Athens, 2007
Thousands of people packed the Olympic Indoor Hall the night Panathinaikos played CSKA Moscow in the 2007 EuroLeague final — and for three quarters, they watched their team get outplayed by the reigning champions. Theo Papaloukas, that year’s MVP, was conducting the Russian outfit like a maestro: 23 points, 8 assists, control in every possession. CSKA led going into the fourth. The city held its breath.
What happened next is the reason people still talk about this game. Panathinaikos — Obradović’s Panathinaikos, built around the intelligence of Dimitris Diamantidis, the clutch scoring of Ramūnas Šiškauskas, and the physicality of Mike Batiste — refused to fold in front of their own people.
They scratched. They clawed. And then they found another gear that CSKA simply couldn’t match when it mattered most. The Greeks would rally to win 93–91 in a finish so breathless that the arena barely knew how to process it. Šiškauskas top-scored with 20. Diamantidis, who had been named to the All-EuroLeague First Team and won the Best Defender award across a campaign that included a 5–1 Top 16 record and a clinical quarterfinal sweep of Dynamo Moscow, was named Final Four MVP. The on-court conductor had orchestrated the defining performance of his career in front of the city that shaped him.
For Obradović, it was a sixth EuroLeague title — claimed in an arena where he had already become a legend. For Panathinaikos, it was a fourth EuroLeague crown, more than any club in the Final Four era at that point. Their city. Their arena. Their crowd. Their trophy.
Real Madrid — Madrid, 2015
Twenty years. That is how long Real Madrid — one of the most storied sporting institutions on the planet — had waited for another EuroLeague title. When Pablo Laso’s squad walked into the Barclaycard Center in the Spanish capital in May 2015, they did so knowing that they had lost each of the last two EuroLeague finals, and they were determined to finally get over the line. Those back-to-back finals appearances made them contenders, no doubt — but the favourite? Not quite.
What Laso built was something different: not a team of superstars chasing individual glory, but a collective of relentless, tactically disciplined professionals who were harder to beat than almost anyone in Europe. They topped Group A at 8–2, dominated Group E in the Top 16 with an 11–3 record, and dispatched Anadolu Efes in the quarterfinals 3–1. The semifinal against Fenerbahçe — whose own Nemanja Bjelica had won the season MVP — was settled with a 96–87 win that left little doubt about which team was peaking at the right moment.
In the final, Olympiacos — who had upset CSKA Moscow 70–68 in the other semifinal — were dismantled. Real Madrid led from the second quarter, won 78–59, and Andrés Nocioni lifted the trophy as Final Four MVP. Laso’s players had absorbed 20 years of accumulated longing and converted it, in their own building, into the most clinical championship performance the Madrid crowd had ever seen.
Fenerbahçe — Istanbul, 2017
Much like Real Madrid before them, Fenerbahçe headed into the 2017 showpiece having lost the EuroLeague final to CSKA Moscow the year before. The wound was fresh, and Istanbul remembered. The 2016–17 season was the first under the competition’s revamped single-group format — 16 clubs, home and away, nowhere to hide — and The Yellow Canaries finished fifth among the eight playoff qualifiers with an 18–12 record, behind Real Madrid, CSKA, Olympiacos, and Panathinaikos. Nobody wrote the title preview with Fenerbahçe’s name at the top.
But Ekpe Udoh was leading the league in rebounds and blocks. Bogdan Bogdanović — who earned the April monthly MVP and a place on the All-EuroLeague First Team — was playing the best basketball of his career. Real Madrid’s Sergio Llull won season MVP, which said everything about where the competition believed the power resided. Then Fenerbahçe swept Panathinaikos in the playoffs with Bogdanović dominant throughout. Something was building.
In the Final Four at the Ülker Sports and Event Hall, they dismantled regular-season leaders Real Madrid 84–75 in the semifinal. Shockwaves. Olympiacos then toppled CSKA 82–78, creating a final that pitted two of European basketball’s great rivals on Istanbul soil.
What does it mean to win a EuroLeague title in your own city with your own crowd watching for the first time in your club’s history? Ask anyone who was inside that building when the fourth quarter began, and Fenerbahçe led 60–48. They weren’t letting go. They won 80–64, and Udoh was everywhere: 10 points, 9 rebounds, 4 assists, 5 blocks, named Final Four MVP. The first Turkish club in history to win the EuroLeague, and they had done it on their own patch.