Chus Bueno in Israel: The Home-Court Problem of European Basketball

On Saturday night, the scoreboard in an arena in Israel stopped at 120-93. Maccabi Tel Aviv beat Galil Elion on the opening night of the domestic league. A game like that usually says nothing: a mismatch in class, a fast pace, loose defence, and a smaller opponent. What matters is not the scoreline but the two men in the stands — Chus Bueno, the EuroLeague's chief executive, and Diego Guillen, the league's competitions manager. They did not fly to Israel to watch a basketball game. They came to see something else: a full arena, a country still keeping to its everyday rhythm, a living argument for what the Israeli clubs have been demanding for months.

Where the ball rolls, we begin the story.

For European basketball, Israel has long been a market with a name but no address. Because of the situation in the Middle East, no international games are held on its territory. Maccabi Tel Aviv must play its “home” games in Belgrade, Serbia, and is considering a move to Cyprus. Hapoel Tel Aviv is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The two most storied clubs in Israeli basketball enter every EuroLeague season without a single square metre of genuine home court.

They remain full members of the league. They play the full schedule, they earn points, they chase playoff places like everyone else. But the one thing every tactical analysis assumes as a given — home-court advantage — is precisely what they lack. In basketball, that advantage is anything but abstract. It is five to ten thousand people screaming as the opponent steps to the free-throw line. It is a short flight instead of a long one. It is a familiar song in the referee's ear in the closing minutes. Strip all of that away and a team can still win. But it is no longer itself.

Bueno and Guillen's visit should be read as a lobbying trip, not a courtesy call. According to the clubs themselves, Hapoel Tel Aviv hosted the delegation: owner Ofer Yanai and chairman Satiav Sacham met the EuroLeague chief executive, followed by owner Gili Raanan, general manager George Hinas, and the players Vasilije Micić, Tomáš Satoranský and Zach LeDay. Maccabi Tel Aviv announced the visit on social media on Sunday. Both sides described the conversation as “positive”. But the EuroLeague issued no statement of any kind.

That matters. In a negotiation, the side that speaks more is usually the side that needs more. Here the press releases come from the clubs, not from the league office. National ambassadors were invited to brief the delegation on the “sense of security” and the “full routine” of life in Israel. Three international stars were brought into the meeting. Every participant is a directly interested party, and every one of them is pointing in the same direction. Every touch of the ball in that room was deliberate.

The revenue structure explains the urgency. Every “home” game in a third country means a chartered flight, a rented arena, and gate receipts left behind. No packed stands, no local sponsorship activated, no community served. For a EuroLeague club, gate income and home sponsorship are the two largest revenue lines outside broadcast rights. Playing in Belgrade or Sofia is not merely inconvenient travel — it is a financial leak repeated every single round.

One small detail strikes me as more important than the rest: Maccabi is weighing a move from Belgrade to Cyprus. No reason was given. But a club willing to relocate for the second time in a year is telling you it regards the current arrangement as temporary rather than settled. Cyprus is closer to Israel, easier for fans to reach, and feels more “like home” than Belgrade. That is a geographical compromise, not a solution.

The competitive consequences run deeper than they appear. The EuroLeague operates on a home-and-away balance: each team plays one game at home and one away. When a team has no home, that balance breaks at both ends. The Israeli clubs lose an advantage they should have; their opponents gain more of one than they normally would. Compounded across 34 rounds, that distortion is enough to reshuffle seeding — and sometimes an entire season's fate.

Based on my experience covering these games, I have learned to distrust heat maps and optimisation charts. They present something tidy while ignoring the hardest variable to measure: circumstance. A player who shoots 38% from beyond the arc in Sofia and 38% in Tel Aviv will show the same figure in the box score, but not the same experience. Basketball is a sport of habit — the same locker room, the same stands, the same route to the arena. On the pixel screen I can hear the heartbeat of the court; that heartbeat lives in no data cell.

There is a counter-reading I find more convincing. The story is told as though what is missing is a EuroLeague decision, and Israel is ready. But that is not where the real barrier sits. The real barrier is a question of legal liability and political risk that no ambassador can sign away on the league's behalf. The league must weigh insurance contracts, security guarantees for players and referees, brand exposure, and broadcaster relationships. None of that is resolved by a goodwill meeting. Ambassadors can speak of a “sense of security”; a diplomat's sense of security is not the same as the operational guarantee a competition requires.

The biggest blind spot in this whole affair is collective memory. European fans remember Maccabi as a fortress in Tel Aviv, remember scorching European nights in a domestic arena. They assume that once things calm down, it will all return as it was. But a home court is not a room waiting to be reoccupied. It is a collective habit built over decades — and habits can erode. Every season played in Belgrade or Sofia writes a new layer of memory over the old, in a place nobody wants to remember.

That is why I do not think the real question here is “when will the EuroLeague return to Israel”. The real question is: when basketball returns, how much of the old house will still be standing? A generation of young supporters has grown up without ever seeing their club play a European game on home soil. A group of international players has signed for a club with an address in Tel Aviv and a schedule in Sofia. Those gaps do not fill themselves when a press release goes up.

The memory of a court is not a static archive; it is kept alive every week by the sound of feet on hardwood, by the smell of popcorn in the corridor, by a child holding a parent's hand walking into an arena for the first time. Israeli basketball is fighting to earn the right to record those memories at home. And perhaps the most worrying thing is not whether Chus Bueno's visit leads to any decision at all, but whether anyone still has the patience to wait.