Sport organizations and the leaders who head them cannot isolate themselves from the rest of the environment and build their own reality, they have a higher responsability. Euroleague has spent years despising any competition other than its own, often without considering other realities that clubs, players, coaches, and fans demand.
The end can never justify the means, because these are usually dangerous and short-term paths. For the upcoming season, Euroleague is once again proposing a new expansion, revealing a perverse logic that completely ignores player health: from 24 teams playing 31 games in the 15/16 season, we moved to 18 teams with 41 games, and now they reach 20 teams while maintaining that brutal competition load with 47 games. The equation is devastating: fewer teams than at the beginning, but 10 more games per player.
The underlying problem doesn’t change: it remains a voracious, excessive, and non-consensual calendar, that seems designed to maximize revenue, regardless of the physical integrity of athletes despite numerous warnings from UBE and each of its associations appealing to common sense and respect for the player.
Euroleague is not an entity that exists alone in basketball and can consider itself the only relevant actor. We believe that economics cannot take precedence over any other aspect. From UBE, we have requested to be heard and taken into account as we represent the players and understand their reality.
Unilaterally increasing the calendar will bring other consequences that must be taken into account:
– Serious and direct harm to athlete injury risk: it is unfeasible to play at the highest level for nearly 100 games per season. If we add training and travel to the competition load, where is the rest?
– Players’ mental health: if the claim is “every game matters” and the number of games is increased in an uncontrolled manner without sporting criteria, we are pushing players into situations of extremely high stress that will end up affecting their mental health, as we are unfortunately seeing with the construction of hyper-stressed environments.
Sport and basketball need unity and common sense. Imposing more games, more travelling and more stress in the long run risk only to bring poor consequences, starting with Euroleague itself.
UBE – Union Basketteurs D’ Europe
www.ubeplayers.com
