By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Baskonia president Jose Antonio Querejeta talked to El Transistor about the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on sports as well as about the chances to complete the 2019-20 season.
His opinion is that it’s very hard and that the chances are much bigger for the Spanish League compared to EuroLeague. In fact, he’s not optimistic about the European competition at all.
“It seems very complicated to me. Each country has a different situation. For the ACB, there are more possibilities because you can play in one city. I understand that at a European level, with so many teams in so many countries, with such different situations, it seems more complicated to me. I am quite pessimistic about the resumption of the Euroleague.”
He also noted that the Spanish League will stay at 18 teams instead of increasing the lineup to 20: “All I know is that, at the last Assembly, the president of the ACB promised that there would be 18 teams. That is why, among other things, we reached an agreement to finish the competition in two groups of six. I imagine it will not be easy, but there are no dates, there is no economy, and there are no possibilities for a league of 20 teams. The competition’s own statutes do not allow it to be changed when it has already been voted on and has not gone ahead. I understand that next year, even if the Federation has said so, if there are two promotions, there should be two relegations.”
Querejeta is also the major stakeholder in the city’s soccer club, Deportivo Alaves, and he explained why the situation is much harder for basketball, especially financially.
“I am much more concerned with basketball because it has less capacity to generate resources than soccer. Soccer has a great advantage, and that is that television rights generate a lot of money. Basketball is not, that’s the reality. This year we have a budget of 17 million, but it is a very divided budget between commercial production, ticketing, payment, television rights – Euroleague and ACB -, etc. Television rights are not that important in our budget. So, in a situation like this, you suffer in all areas of resource generation.”