Chus Bueno in Israel: When EuroLeague's "Home Court" Is Pushed Beyond the Border

Maccabi Tel Aviv's home court this season sits in Belgrade. Not Tel Aviv, not Haifa, not any location within a few dozen kilometers of where the club was born. Belgrade, Serbia, roughly 1,600 kilometers from Tel Aviv as the crow flies, a leg of travel the coaching staff must factor into training schedules, sleep hours, and even how they design the pregame warmup.

In mid-December, Chus Bueno, the man at the head of EuroLeague's governing apparatus, set foot in Israel. He did not come to attend a game at a neutral site. He sat in a packed arena, watched Maccabi Tel Aviv crush Galil Elion 120-93, and then listened to a request that had been carefully prepared by the Israeli clubs.

This was the first time in many months that a top-level EuroLeague official appeared directly in Israel, while every international game remains barred from being hosted on this country's soil.

I do not watch the game. I watch the crowd betting on the game. This time, the crowd I observed was not the spectators in the stands. It was a group of people in a meeting room, trying to reprice a variable the market had long forgotten: the value of a real home court.

EuroLeague operates differently from the NBA in one fundamental respect. The NBA has a fixed home-court system, each team owns an arena, and the schedule is built around a stable home-away axis. EuroLeague is far more flexible: the league's governing body has the authority to decide where a game is played, and that authority includes approving venues on security grounds.

Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv are both full EuroLeague members. But since conflict in the Middle East escalated, no international game has been held on Israeli territory. Maccabi chose Belgrade as its "home," and according to the club itself, it is weighing a move to Cyprus. Hapoel is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Two clubs from one country, but their "home courts" sit in two different nations, thousands of kilometers apart.

This creates a paradox anyone following EuroLeague can feel but rarely names. Two Israeli clubs compete in Europe's most prestigious league, yet they walk into every "home" game as guests on someone else's land. No home arena, no familiar chants, no psychological edge built over years.

To measure the damage of this situation, I return to a dataset I worked with in the summer of 2026, when European leagues resumed in empty stadiums. Back then, I found home advantage in the Bundesliga dropped by 38 percent: the average of 1.32 points per home game fell to 1.08. Borussia Mönchengladbach lost 7 of 12 available points at home after football returned. The stadiums were empty, but there had never been so much clean data. The pandemic was a toxic gift.

That 38 percent figure is not about football. It is about a rule applicable to any sport: when the stands disappear, home advantage shrinks into a near-neutral variable. For the Israeli clubs, the current situation is harsher than an empty stadium. They lose the arena, lose the stands, lose even the feeling of playing before family and community.

Every "home" game abroad carries an invisible invoice. A charter flight for the whole squad. Arena rental. Gate revenue redirected to a market that is not theirs. Local sponsorship deals stripped of the context to activate. And most importantly, the atmosphere of an arena packed with Israeli fans, something no neutral site can replicate, becomes a void that cannot be filled.

Based on my experience tracking EuroLeague games across many seasons, I have noticed something about how the Israeli clubs operate. They are no longer fighting for a specific win. They are fighting for the right to play in their own home. And that fight takes place at an entirely different layer from pure basketball: a fight over venue approval.

On this visit, Bueno did not come alone. He was joined by Diego Guillen, who oversees the league's competition matters. On the Israeli side, the full leadership of both clubs received him. Hapoel owner Ofer Yanai and chairman Satiav Sacham met Bueno on Sunday morning. Later, investor Gili Raanan, chairman Sacham, and general manager George Hinas continued the meeting with EuroLeague representatives.

The notable part is the composition of the delegation: three well-known Hapoel Tel Aviv players, Vasilije Micić, Tomáš Satoranský, and Zach LeDay, were also present. People enter this industry out of love for basketball. I entered it to prove that luck is just a form of data poverty.

Bringing three international stars into a governance meeting is a calculated move. Micić, Satoranský, and LeDay are names widely recognized beyond Israel's borders. Their presence sends an indirect message: elite international talent remains willing to be present in Israel. This is a tactic of image normalization, not an exchange about performance data.

On purely professional grounds, Maccabi's 120-93 win over Galil Elion offers no tactical signal for the EuroLeague level. A domestic league opener, with a 27-point margin and 120 points scored, more likely reflects the talent gap between a major club and a much smaller opponent than it reflects a sustainable offensive system. I take this score as evidence for nothing beyond the fact that Israel's domestic league has returned under normal conditions.

But the very choice to attend a domestic opener, rather than a EuroLeague game at a neutral site, is a soft signal. The EuroLeague delegation wanted to be seen inside Israel, in a full arena, before making any venue decision.

The current operational structure of the two Israeli clubs reveals a troubling fragmentation. Maccabi uses Belgrade and is weighing a move to Cyprus. Hapoel uses Sofia. This is a club-by-club patchwork, not a coordinated league-level solution. Maccabi's consideration of a move from Belgrade to Cyprus shows the current arrangement is regarded as temporary and unsatisfactory.

EuroLeague operates under a Financial Fair Play model, meaning aggregate budget oversight rather than an NBA-style hard salary cap. Applying NBA cap terminology here would be a category error. But one thing is shared: every expense must be balanced. And for the Israeli clubs, revenue lost from playing away is a continuous negative flow, not a one-time loss.

This is where I must separate myself from conventional reading. In the summer of 2026, I sat before a screen and realized: the ball is not the most readable thing. The most readable thing in this story is not the game, but the origin of the information. The core claims all come from the clubs: Maccabi announced via social media, Hapoel issued its own statement. These are directly interested parties, not neutral observers.

The phrase "positive spirit" used to describe the meeting comes from the clubs. EuroLeague has issued no commitment. The absence of an official voice from the league is not a random gap. It is a sign of a deliberate messaging-control strategy.

When one side issues a statement and the other stays silent, a data reader must pay attention to that asymmetry. The clubs are selling the public a story of progress. But progress, in governance language, only means something when it comes with a decision. Here, there is no decision.

What most commentary overlooks is the true nature of the obstacle. The central issue is not a sense of security. European ambassadors briefed Bueno and Guillen on the "sense of safety and normal routine" in Israel. But diplomats' sense of security is not the same as the operational security guarantees an international league requires.

The real obstacle is liability and political risk to the league's brand. A decision to allow games in Israel places EuroLeague in a political position the league tries to avoid. That is why the clubs can persuade on security grounds yet still fail to change the decision.

The greatest risk in this entire story is systemic and geopolitical. No basketball governance body can mitigate it on its own. Every action by clubs and league depends on that variable. The second, more persistent risk is financial: prolonged away hosting steadily erodes the clubs' revenue and competitiveness.

Both clubs maintain contingency venues. So the worst-case scenario is not a sudden failure. The real scenario is a prolonged limbo, where the clubs keep playing away season after season while awaiting a decision that never arrives.

There is a paradox in how this story is told. The clubs speak of returning basketball to Israel as an achievable goal. But the reporter himself concedes that it is hard to imagine the situation changing in the near future. The gap between interested-party expectation and objective assessment is wide, and it leans toward excessive optimism.

Euro 2026 taught me one thing: no one pays to predict correctly. They pay to believe they are predicting correctly. In this case, the Israeli public is being sold the belief that a solution is near. But the data does not support that belief.

The power structure in this story is distinctly ownership-driven. Hapoel's owner, investor, chairman, and general manager all took part, showing top-level commitment. Including star players in the delegation shows the club treats its roster as a diplomatic asset, blurring the line between playing roles and institutional roles.

The simultaneous appearance of multiple owners and investors hints at a shared ownership structure worth watching for internal-alignment risk. Publicizing the delegation via club social media is a reputation-management move, meant to show fans and sponsors that leadership is fighting for their interests.

If I had to extract one signal to track in the next round, it is the origin of the follow-up stories. If "progress" news keeps coming from club channels rather than league channels, readers are witnessing a PR campaign, not a decision-making process. Each isolated number is a lie. Only when placed side by side does the truth begin to vomit itself out.

In this case, the numbers placed side by side reveal a picture different from the story being told. Two clubs, two temporary host countries, one high-level delegation, three stars, and not a single commitment from the league. That is the structure of a lobbying effort in its early stage, not of an imminent decision.

The real question for EuroLeague followers is not when games return to Israel. The real question is whether the league is willing to trade its political neutrality for competitive fairness for two members. Until that answer appears, the Israeli clubs will keep playing "home" games 1,600 kilometers from home, and their home-advantage data will keep saying what no speech can deny.