EuroLeague's Closed-Door Meeting at Lake Como: 8 Franchise Slots, 13 Candidates, and the 2027-28 Bet

Two weeks before the summit took place, Barcelona's leadership had finalized its delegation for the Lake Como meeting: Sisco Pujol, head of the basketball section, and executive Xavi O'Callaghan. Then the plan was reversed. President Joan Laporta traveled in person. For a club where basketball is a footnote on the balance sheet, a president clearing his schedule to sit at a technical table is a costlier signal than any press release. The organizers called it an "extremely important" meeting. I call it a share offering where nothing being sold is a player. What is being sold is a seat. EuroLeague is preparing to expand to 24 teams from the 2027-28 season. Eight franchise slots are being allocated among thirteen candidates. And in that same week, the NBA sent a cooperation proposal. The context has to be set correctly, or the event will be misread. EuroLeague currently operates as a model of 13 owner clubs, with Barcelona among them as a shareholder holding a voting seat. This structure is fundamentally different from the NBA, where the league office holds authority and teams are members. In Europe, the club owners are the ones sitting at the same table and deciding their own rules of the game. The candidate list for the eight new slots took shape throughout August. It began with eleven names. At the end of the month, Hapoel Jerusalem and Aris BC joined, bringing the total to thirteen. The list includes clubs that already play in EuroLeague, such as Partizan, Virtus Bologna, Valencia, Crvena zvezda and Paris. It also includes markets that have never belonged to traditional basketball geography: Dubai and London Lions. Napoli, PAOK and Roma appear as the ambitions of Italian and Greek basketball. One detail is easy to overlook: no NBA or FIBA representative will attend. The stated reason is that the meeting was scheduled long before the NBA proposal appeared. That means the club owners are deciding the architecture of the league on their own, with no third party in the room. Reporting through a pandemic showed me football trembling in front of the camera, and not because of a conceded goal. In 2026, when I analyzed the finances of twenty Southeast Asian clubs, I found that teams with digital revenue above thirty percent of total income retained eighty percent of their staff. Revenue structure determines endurance. EuroLeague is running exactly that calculation, only on a much larger scale. Expanding from 16 to 24 teams does not belong on the sports page. It belongs on the business page. Every league sells two things to broadcasters: the number of games and the number of markets. With 16 teams, EuroLeague offers a compact group stage that is easy to schedule but has a low revenue ceiling. With 24 teams, the number of games rises, the number of broadcast windows rises, and more importantly, the number of time zones that can be sold to advertisers rises. Dubai and London are not on the list because they have basketball tradition. They are on it because they are advertising markets. Based on my experience following matches, I always check one metric before believing any deal: who pays, and for what. Here, the payers are broadcasters and sponsors. They pay for audience. Eight new slots are eight chances to increase that audience. I do not watch the game; I read it like an income statement in motion. And this statement has one unrecorded revenue line: media rights on a bigger product. But there is a mechanism rarely discussed. Of the thirteen candidates, at least five played in EuroLeague last season. Partizan, Virtus Bologna, Valencia, Crvena zvezda, Paris. If they win a slot, that is not market expansion. It is the conversion of a temporary license into permanent ownership. A wild card can be revoked when results decline. A franchise slot cannot. The gap between those two things is the entire value of this meeting. And it is why Laporta sat at the table instead of sending a subordinate. Barcelona's leadership changed its representation plan only weeks before the summit. The upgrade from section level to presidential level says the club classifies this decision as an ownership matter, not a sporting one. A president who attends a meeting usually does not go to listen. He goes to defend a specific position. No financial figures have been disclosed. What is the entry fee? How does the media-rights revenue-sharing mechanism change with eight more teams? What is a franchise slot valued at? For a decision described as pivotal, the absence of all economic data is notable. This meeting is still in the direction-setting stage, not the pricing stage. Transfers are the only stock exchange where shareholders sing the national anthem. At Lake Como, nobody sang. There were only thirteen people sitting and calculating what their slot is worth once the league expands. The NBA proposal is the largest variable and also the most overhyped one. The original report's own author acknowledges that the central topic of the meeting is franchises and expansion, not the NBA proposal. That is the crux most news items skip when they write their headlines. If that is accurate, EuroLeague is choosing to consolidate itself before negotiating with the NBA. That is a defensive posture, not an attacking one. You finish building your asset before you sell it, not sell it while the asset is still in dispute. Geopolitical risk also sits inside the candidate list. The presence of Dubai, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapoel Jerusalem puts EuroLeague in front of security and political problems for which a sports league has no ready tools. European basketball leagues have never operated a cross-regional schedule with a Middle East component at this scale. And there is a larger systemic risk: FIBA. World basketball's governing body is not in the room. If EuroLeague builds an independent franchise league while the NBA opens its own European project, global basketball will have three centers of power instead of one. National-team calendars, the authority of national federations, and the promotion system will be the first points of collision. What the news items are missing does not lie in the 24-team target. It lies in the fact that no criteria have been published. Thirteen candidates, eight slots. So who decides, and on what basis? Sporting merit, market size, or financial capacity? These three criteria lead to three completely different outcomes. If it is merit, PAOK and Roma have little chance. If it is market, Dubai and London are nearly certain. If it is finance, clubs carrying debt will be cut first. With no public criteria, the decision becomes a closed negotiation. And a closed negotiation inside a league owned by its own teams is a recipe for conflict of interest. I have sat in a room like that. In 2026, while working as the financial analyst for Ceres-Negros FC, I proposed buying a nineteen-year-old player based on a valuation model combining physical metrics and market value. The leadership laughed and rejected it. Two years later, that player was sold to Thailand for four times the figure I had proposed. The lesson is not that I was right. The lesson is that when criteria are unclear, people decide by feel, and feel always has an owner. At Lake Como, that feel is called "strategic vision." What is worth watching over the next six months is not the names of the eight teams chosen. It is whether EuroLeague publishes selection criteria and a promotion mechanism for the new model. A closed league can raise revenue. It can also sever the path of the next generation of players. I make my living from numbers, but I only trust the numbers that keep me awake. Twenty-four teams have not kept me awake. Thirteen candidates have.