EuroLeague and ELPA at the Same Table: Three Pillars Rewriting European Basketball

On September 10, in a meeting room with no tactics board and no video analysis screen, Tornike Shengelia sat down as President of the EuroLeague Players Association (ELPA). He is still an active professional player. Across the table were representatives of Euroleague Basketball leadership, and beside Shengelia sat Bostjan Nachbar, a former player in both the NBA and EuroLeague who is now tied to ELPA's executive structure. There was no scoreboard. There were no efficiency metrics. Only three phrases kept recurring: the EuroLeague Framework Agreement, the three-year Strategic Business Plan, and the expansion of the franchise model.

For anyone who follows European basketball, this is the kind of meeting that, if ignored, leads you three years later to wonder why the league changed without your noticing. Applause echoing in an empty gym is news too. This time, what echoed in that room was not applause but the sound of pages turning on a contract being rewritten.

A league that does not run like the NBA

EuroLeague is Europe's top club basketball competition, but it does not operate on NBA logic. There is no hard salary cap, no luxury tax, and no reverse draft to redistribute talent. Each club builds its roster with its own budget, its own academy, and a transfer network stretching across the Balkans, the Baltics, Spain, Turkey, Greece and Israel. That creates a distinctive labour market: players move constantly, contracts are usually short, and many spend a decade-long career playing in three or four countries.

The competition's structure was historically open. EuroLeague places came from domestic league performance and the EuroCup, forming a two-tier system with a ladder up and a risk of falling down. That model nurtured competitiveness but made long-term planning difficult for big owners, because revenue depended directly on staying in the top tier. Relegation meant losing sponsorship deals, losing regional broadcast rights, and losing the ability to retain the most expensive names.

Alongside that sits ELPA, the body representing player interests, established in 2026 according to the association's own public information. In European basketball, the players' union voice was far quieter than the National Basketball Players Association in the NBA. Building an organisation that can aggregate the will of hundreds of players from dozens of countries, speaking dozens of languages and signing hundreds of different contract types, is no small achievement. A dorm room once recorded; now the whole world listens. That story repeats across many small basketball nations, except this time it is happening at the level of a continental league.

Three pillars on the table

The first pillar is the EuroLeague Framework Agreement, known as the EFA. It functions close to a collective labour agreement: it sets revenue sharing, determines salary tiers, handles player movement rules, and defines dispute resolution. The post-meeting release confirmed both sides had updated each other on negotiations for a new EFA. The more interesting detail lies elsewhere: players are at the table during the design phase, before the text is finalised. For most of European basketball history, rules about money and rights were negotiated between league leadership and club representatives, while players were simply notified of the outcome.

The second pillar is the three-year Strategic Business Plan, paired with expansion of the franchise model. The nature of that change needs stating plainly. If EuroLeague shifts gradually toward a North American-style franchise system, member clubs would hold near-permanent places, less dependent on domestic league results. Broadcast revenue becomes more predictable, club valuations rise, and long-term investors gain a reason to fund academies rather than buying players season by season. In exchange, the ladder for smaller clubs narrows. The EuroCup turns from a gateway into a waiting room, and the gap between licensed clubs and the rest of European basketball widens every year.

The third pillar is Euroleague Basketball+, a digital platform described as an integrated home for the competition, content, technology and commercial opportunities. This is the part easiest to underestimate in a news brief, yet it may change the viewer experience most. When a league runs its own direct distribution channel to fans, it no longer depends entirely on regional broadcasters, who negotiate according to national market logic and often pay wildly different sums for the same product.

Those three pillars do not stand alone. They lock together through a single financial thread. The EFA decides how much of the growth players receive. The franchise model decides how many sources that growth comes from and how stable it is. The digital platform decides the pace of growth. If one link slips, the other two come under pressure immediately.

In more than a decade of following European basketball from a small apartment in Miami, I learned something rather simple: quiet meetings tend to leave longer marks than loud games. A press conference announcing a new broadcast deal may be forgotten, but the minimum salary in a Framework Agreement shapes the careers of thousands of players for an entire decade. Based on my experience covering games and transfer windows, the biggest changes in European basketball never came from a three-pointer at the buzzer, but from a clause added on the thirtieth page of a legal document.

Behind the praise

Statements after the meeting were uniformly positive. Euroleague Basketball leadership stressed listening to players' perspectives. Shengelia spoke about the value of open discussion. The release closed by affirming that players will continue to play an important role in the league's future development. This is the standard language of a successful working session, and it is also the required language while both sides remain at the same table.

Two things need separating: harmony in labour relations and balance in competition. They do not automatically travel together. A league can have the smoothest labour relations in Europe and still have a standings table clearly split between a group of six big spenders and everyone else. A labour deal that is good for players currently in EuroLeague is not necessarily good for players in the EuroCup, in domestic leagues, or waiting for a bench spot on a twenty-team roster. The latter group's voice is quieter, and in any collective labour model, the group with a seat at the table always speaks louder than the group outside the door.

One more detail about the agenda is worth noting. The entire meeting revolved around structure, commerce and governance. There was nothing on the congested calendar, nothing on load management, nothing on the number of games per season. For a league whose players must play both club and national team fixtures within the same year, the absence of physical workload from the top priorities says a great deal about the current order of priorities.

The contrarian angle: expansion may be a defensive move

The franchise model is presented as a step forward. It may not be one. Viewed through organisational history, the franchise model is a tool a league uses to fence off its own risk. When places depend on on-court results, league leadership cannot control who appears next season, nor which region's revenue arrives. When places are granted, they control both. This is closer to a four-man defence being repeatedly broken through and then pulled back into a low-sitting block of three: the change is not made to be better, it is made to be criticised less. Physically and organisationally, a crowded block always carries a cost, and that cost usually falls on the young, the lesser-known, and the unfavoured lines.

The second blind spot sits on the other side. ELPA has a seat, but a seat in the room is not a veto. In collective labour agreements around the world, the distance between being consulted and being consented to is the distance between a positive press release and a strike. Clubs remain the payers. If the franchise model raises club valuations while the share going to players does not rise correspondingly, harmony in relations does not resolve inequality in distribution.

The third blind spot sits in the digital platform itself. Building a direct-to-consumer platform is strategically right in the long run, but it is a bet on changing behaviour. European basketball fans are used to watching through familiar channels, commenting in their own language, and often attaching to one specific club rather than the whole competition. A league platform hoping to replace that habit must offer both good content and localised pricing in each market, a far harder problem than signing an all-inclusive broadcast deal.

And when both sides have interests tied to the platform's success, one thing worth watching emerges: if the platform misses revenue targets, that pressure flows back into salary negotiations. Empty or full, the ball's rules stay the same, only the players change. Here, the players will be those signing contracts next summer.

What to watch

The first milestone is ratification of the Framework Agreement. Until that text is approved by both sides, every compliment remains an intention. The second milestone is the list of clubs receiving new franchise places, if any. A new name from an untapped market would confirm the expansion strategy is genuinely running. The third milestone is Euroleague Basketball+ user figures after its first operating season.

Every podcast episode is a conversation; every game is a reply. But some replies do not come from the court. They come from a meeting room on September 10, where an active player sat at the same table as the people deciding his future and the future of those who follow. If in three years European basketball has a fixed tier of clubs, a shared continental digital platform, and a first labour agreement written together with players, the starting point is here, in a meeting where nobody scored.

What is worth waiting for is not whether both sides keep a positive tone. What is worth waiting for is whether the final text states the percentage of revenue that belongs to players, or merely states that players were heard.