By Aris Barkas
It’s been more than a decade when basketball in Europe was divided by two rival club competitions, the ULEB Euroleague and the FIBA Suproleague. The sport seems to be in a similar collision course again, but this time the problem is the national team competitions calendar.
FIBA is asking from FIBA Europe to organize the European National Team Championship, commonly known as Eurobasket, every four years and not every two summers, as it is customary until now. FIBA Europe officially denied the four year cycle proposal, but FIBA is insisting.
A lengthy interview of FIBA president Yvan Mainini was posted in the official FIBA website and he seems unfazed by FIBA Europe’s initial denial: “We needed to re-think our whole system of competition. We have to provide national teams with official games in their countries, look at things globally, provide some coherence to the FIBA calendar – by creating clear pathways (Road to) to the FIBA Basketball World Cup and to the Continental Championships – and enhance the primacy of the World Cup overall. In essence, we need to get the base for our future long-term stability and sustainable growth. The main change is the potential number of official games played around the world that will make up the qualifying process for FIBA’s four-year cycle – from one FIBA Basketball World Cup to the next. Under the new system of competition, there can be up to 1,600 games played by up to 130 national federations over a period of 18 to 24 months. This is double the number of national teams that are currently involved in the qualifying process for FIBA’s leading international tournaments. Most of these games will be played in a ‘home-and-away’ format but it could also be done within tournaments of proximity in places such as Africa. The same could apply to Zone Championships, thus creating a lean four-year plan”.
In this four year plan, there is place for only one Eurobasket, as Mainini explains: “This calendar takes into consideration the players: in any sport, they are the key value, the capital. If you give them too many games, it can lead to them getting injured and suffering exhaustion. We value quality over quantity and therefore players will have one summer of rest in every cycle. Because the qualification process will be continuous throughout the year, we expect national teams to use a larger pool of players, which means more players will get to represent their countries and we should, in the long-term, produce more talents. It probably will be that players have to travel more, but at the same time they will require less preparation time as they will not be coming together with their national team just once a year as is the case right now. There will be more continuity with players and their national teams”.
And last but not least, this is the straw that, maybe, is breaking the camel’s back: “Finally we will always play the FIBA Basketball World Cup a year after the football World Cup, starting in 2019 (instead of 2018). Today the rivalry between the two events is very detrimental to us in terms of exposure and partnerships. I don’t think we can go in that direction anymore”. In the current FIBA Europe calender 2019 is a Eurobasket year.
Already there is support from Europe to the new FIBA Calendar, as Yiorgos Vasilakopoulos, former FIBA Europe president and current Greek Basketball Federation president, said in Greek radio station “SKY” and to our dear colleague Rigas Dardalis. “The players are facing exhaustion, playing every summer without a year of rest”, said Vasilakopoulos.