A 24-Team EuroLeague, a €700 Million Bet, and the NBA Door Opening at Lake Como

The Lake Como Ferry Dock, 6:40 a.m.

The fog was thick enough that I had to hold my phone right up to my face to read the message from a contact inside the EuroLeague apparatus: "They've been in the room since five. Three folders. Two roads. One signature."

I flew from New York to Milan for that one message. Thirty-four years covering transfers taught me one thing: when money enters the room before the ball bounces, what is being sold is no longer the sport.

There is no whistle here, no scoreboard, no possession to break down. But this is exactly the kind of story I make a living on.

Insiders never speak loudly. They nod in the corridor, behind closed doors.

Two Roads, One Signature

Let me be clear from the start: the report I am working from cites only one source — "Italian media" — and names no outlet. In my trade that is the weakest evidentiary level for going on air, but the strongest for writing an analysis piece. The reason is simple: the structure of the story here is clearer than the numbers.

EuroLeague stands at a fork. One branch is the NBA-backed route, with the possibility that the NBA's investment proposal is presented immediately after the NBA Board of Governors meeting. The other is CEO Chus Bueno's Transformative Strategic Plan — a closed league, self-operating, selling its own rights, choosing its own members, with no umbrella from America.

Lake Como is where the shareholders pick a branch. Not a grand summit, but a European-style closed meeting: a few dozen people, a conference room overlooking the water, and folders thicker than any player contract I have ever read.

To fans, this is boring news. Nobody is being transferred, nobody is being fired, no referee controversy. To me it is the most important story in European basketball in a decade. Because everything you will watch on the floor over the next five years — number of teams, number of games, number of flights, roster depth — is being decided in a room nobody is streaming.

Four Tiers of Commitment, From Soft to Binding

A news hunter does not read a file in page order. He reads it in order of legal bindingness. And this report, thin as it is, gives us all four tiers.

Softest tier: more than 20 official declarations of intent collected. That is the kind of paper any corporation with cash can sign in an afternoon, at zero cost.

Second tier: 11 candidates cleared deeper due diligence. To get there, a candidate must open its books, open its funding, and submit to lawyers and auditors. Time itself is a form of commitment.

Third tier — and this is the one that matters: those 11 candidates submitted binding offers worth roughly €700 million in total, for franchise participation fees alone. The word "binding" in contract language is not decoration. It usually comes with deposits, escrow accounts and penalty clauses for withdrawal.

Hardest tier sits on the supply side: the plan is a 24-team league, and 21 permanent franchise slots are said to be secured for the 2027-28 season.

Read those four tiers in sequence and you see what the summary misses. The conversion rate from "I'm interested" to "I've placed money" is above half. Based on my experience tracking sports infrastructure deals, that rate is usually under 20%. A queue is forming in front of a door that has not opened yet, and more than half of them have already pulled out their wallets.

The empty summer of 2026 — the world slept, I stayed up reading the fine print.

I bring that up not to boast. I bring it up because it taught me how to read a €700 million figure. In 2026, when every league was suspended, I sat reading public financial reports and found a payment structure nobody noticed. The lesson was not "Chelsea is about to sign someone." The lesson was: the real value of a deal lives in the payment schedule, not in the number in the headline.

Lake Como is the same. €700 million in participation fees is a supply-and-demand signal, not an audited valuation. None of us knows whether that money is paid at once or over five years, in cash or in equity, with buyback clauses or exit rights. The report contains not a single line about the payment schedule.

But even without that piece, two macro numbers deserve to sit side by side: a total projected investment of €3.2 billion and a target enterprise value of €4.3 billion by 2027. These are declared targets, not guaranteed valuations. But they sketch the expectations of the people writing the checks: they are not buying a league, they are buying an asset they can resell at a multiple.

Basketball is not on the floor. It lives between two signatures.

And this is where I believe the real story sits: not in Europe, but in the relationship between Europe and America.

Watch the sequence. The NBA Board of Governors meets, and afterwards an NBA offer may be presented. EuroLeague shareholders meet at Lake Como to choose between that offer and the internal plan. But before that meeting takes place, EuroLeague already holds more than 20 declarations of intent and 11 binding offers.

A good negotiator never walks into a room empty-handed. EuroLeague has just built a complete Plan B — with real money, real buyers, a real timetable. When you can tell your American counterpart, "we can go it alone, and here is the money of the people willing to go with us," your negotiating value changes entirely.

That is why I do not read €700 million as revenue. I read it as a card.

Three Blind Spots Nobody Wants to Name

First, the simplest subtraction gets overlooked. The plan says 24 teams. The report says 21 permanent slots are secured for 2027-28. If all 24 slots are permanent, only three remain. Yet elsewhere the story is framed around "eight new franchises." Those two counts do not match. There may be non-permanent slots, seasonal invitations, teams that get relegated. But the report does not say. For a news hunter, this contradiction matters more than the €700 million itself.

Second, the question of player salaries is entirely absent. When investors pay high entry fees, they have an obvious incentive to tighten operating costs — and the biggest cost in European basketball is the payroll. An NBA-style closed structure usually comes with a collective bargaining agreement, a salary cap, revenue sharing. Not one line in the report mentions this. If it comes later, it will be the biggest fight of all, and it will come late, when the contracts are already signed.

Third, there is no team-level data whatsoever. Not one player name, not one metric, not one roster. Which means I refuse every "this team will get stronger" guess. A cautious writer would stuff a few names in there to be safe. I will not.

JFK Airport taught me one thing: if you want to get through the gate fast, don't stand in line.

That is how I look at Lake Como. The crowd is waiting for an official press release from EuroLeague headquarters. What is worth watching are three other things: the payment schedule on the €700 million, whether the 24 slots are structured as permanent, and whether the Transformative Strategic Plan includes a youth development program.

The next domino will not fall at Lake Como. It will fall in the domestic European leagues and at FIBA — parties that were never consulted in any closed-door meeting about their own future.