By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Jacques Monclar, one of the most prominent basketball personalities in France, urged the basketball authorities of his country to change course by speaking to the newspaper “L’Equipe”.
France is for the moment the only major European basketball country which seems commited exclusively to FIBA’s new club competitions and Monclar believes that this is a mistake: “The risks for the French basketball are multiple. The Euroleague Basketball offers excellence. Get cut off from it and it’s like being cut from ambition. What ambition we will give our kids? We will tell them to work like hell in order to play second or third European division? If we do that, they will all go to the US college or in Spain… The repercussions will affect the production of talent and can affect even the mational team team. Already we can not keep our prospects which must go through the Euroleague in order to grow. Now we will lose them on when they will be twenty-two years old, but when they are still seventeen or eighteen. There are president trying to mount large-scale projects in Limoges, or Strasbourg for example and they will lose their ambition. Tony Parker has the dream to make ASVEL a great European club, and finds himself playing in a “Pinpin Cup”. I’m not saying that this will be the Champions League, but if we follow the path taken today, how we will ensure continuity in our talent production, how we will recruit good players who want to demonstrate their talent? We will be part of the third or fourth market of Europe”.