By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
Players changing agents is nothing new. However, Georgios Dimitripoulos, the senior director of Octagon Europe, asked via twitter from European basketball media to investigate allegations made by him and his collaborator David Carro against Buducnost VOLI.
It all started when David Carro posted the following tweet on the 12th of February: “As the agency of Blagota Sekulic we urge the president of Buducnost VOLI to stop embarrassing his organization and his fans doing late night calls to gentleman type players trying to do sneaky business with the agency he prefers. One known for acting unethically. Disgusting“.
Eurohoops asked from Buducnost, FIBA, the EuroLeague, the two agents, and the EuroLeague players association to comment and clarify the whole situation.
As a result, the Montenegrin club sent the following letter to Eurohoops, denying any wrongdoing: “We are appalled by inappropriate and misleading allegations made by agent David Carro. Without cause and no real reason, we have been dragged into a war between basketball agents, who by any means use players for their own financial benefit.
All allegations against the management of Buducnost Voli, made by the agent with whom we have never been in contact, are completely incorrect.
For many years we have been working with various agencies and agents and this is the very first time we found ourselves in this kind of situation. It is an attack on the reputation of the club and its management.
In the future, we will not comment on these or similar unsubstantiated claims and attacks, which in the future will be proceeded by our attorneys who will protect the integrity and the reputation of the club“.
However, Dimitropoulos and Carro insist that Buducnost is acting as a mediator for specific agents and also clarify what they meant by their tweets: “You could speak of “Agents Wars” when agencies fight for some players, one trying to “steal” from the other. FIBA prohibits it but practically its IRs (Internal Regulations) in this matter are de facto void. At the end of the day, players can choose themselves if they want to switch agency as long as they honor their contracts the same way they expect clubs to honor them. But that’s not the case here.
Here we saw a Euroleague player like Omic who was FORCED to sign to a Euroleague club like Buducnost with another agency, according to his OWN words, in writing! That’s called blackmail, could actually be a matter even for investigation by the police. That’s also unfair competition, especially if you take into consideration that accidentally that other agent had nine players in this club…
And common sense told us that it would therefore also be a Euroleague and ELPA matter. They both replied to us that there’s nothing they would do, with their own arguments.
And now Buducnost president repeats it with another player, Sekulic. And who knows if he’s done it with others too. We call it a disgrace.
One more thing. Luckily enough we have come to a point that we are somewhat strong in the market. But imagine a young agent, giving his life for an x player and suddenly ending up destroyed by a probably hidden deal between president/gm and another agent, in order to force his player to fire him and sign a deal with the new agent. And completely helpless by all major institutions. That does not lead us to a better world”.
While FIBA and EuroLeague are aware of the allegations, there’s little they can do. FIBA can’t even comment on an issue that’s not officially brought up their institution and the EuroLeague can’t regulate the private relationship between players and agents since the agents have no relationship with the league and they get their license from FIBA.
The final word belongs to Bostjan Nachbar, managing director of the EuroLeague players association: “It is in our agenda, to better define and regulate relations between players and agents. For this, obviously, an agreement would have to be in place between ELPA and EuroLeague, namely the CBA. We have spent our first few months presenting the tasks of the association to players and collecting their information on various issues. We have been discussing many on and off the court improvements with EuroLeague and we can confirm that “agent regulation” has been one of the topics. It all depends on the desire of players to support our initiatives in this area and if we feel that this will become one of the priorities for players, we will present it as such to the EuroLeague with the aim to achieve better protection for the players.”