Any half-decent couples therapist will tell you that open, honest communication is the key to a long, happy relationship. It is also the key to a short, amicable divorce.
Euroleague Basketball and IMG have spent eight prosperous, eventful seasons together. The competition’s revenues are thought to have increased from about €35m ($38m) per season to around €95m per season since the joint venture’s formation in 2016. In the 10th and final season of the deal, 2025-26, sources close to Euroleague Ventures expect to generate over €120m – a more-than-3.5x increase compared to its starting position.
This would put Euroleague Basketball in rarified air as one of the fastest-growing sports rights-holders in the world over the span of its work with IMG. Some rights-holders would happily sell large chunks of permanent equity for the chance to achieve this kind of growth. Some already have.
The deal has been wildly successful by any reasonable measure, but there is no such thing as a perfect couple. In fact, the relationship between the two parties has been strained over recent years, and continues to be due to the terms of how this partnership may end.
IMG has the right to extend the joint venture for another 10 seasons should the joint venture earn more than €100m in 2024-25 – which insiders believe to be a highly likely scenario. This will give the agency a significant amount of leverage to continue the deal on its current terms.
On the other side of the aisle, Euroleague Basketball wants to regain control over its commercial strategy and retain a far larger portion of the commercial rights revenue it generates.
How the two parties will proceed from 2026-27 onward has been a delicate topic of discussion for years. Neither side wishes to be locked into a decade of resentful marriage, nor do they want a messy separation. Open, honest communication will be the key to continuing their partnership on mutually beneficial terms, and Euroleague Basketball’s latest chief executive, Paulius Motiejunas, isn’t one for sugarcoating.
“When you say there are so many delicate issues – and I agree, this has been the picture – I’m not that kind of a CEO,” Motiejunas told SportBusiness in an exclusive interview. “I like things simple. I like things to be direct and easily understood. I don’t like the emotional side of things.”
Leadership change
Motiejunas knows Euroleague Basketball inside out. He spent 10 years as the general manager and director of Zalgiris Kaunas, Lithuania’s biggest basketball club and one of EuroLeague’s original ‘A-Licence’ clubs granted automatic entry into the competition each year.
Zalgiris directly benefitted from the IMG deal. The club went from strength to strength as a commercial entity, at least in part thanks to the increased revenue brought in by the partnership.
“If you go back to 2016, I was one of the guys who voted for IMG,” Motiejunas says. “It was a game changer for us. We had a huge uplift in revenue when they came in and they really helped us to become the league we are right now.”
IMG agreed to pay a minimum of €363m to EuroLeague clubs over the 10 seasons from 2016-17 to 2025-26, increasing their earnings from about €18m in 2015-16 to €30m in 2016-17. In addition, all profits made by the joint venture are split equally, with clubs set to earn their share of an additional €200m-€250m over the 10-season duration.
Motiejunas says IMG have been “a great partner”, but strongly hints that the time has come for a new direction. He does not like the agency’s level of control over Euroleague’s commercial strategy and execution. The clubs do not like the amount of money IMG has taken out of the joint venture.
In all, Motiejunas wants more control. “Not micromanagement,” he insists, but control.
“I want more things under our control because I want to empower the people in the office. This is what we are talking about with [IMG] right now. I want to be empowered to go and make decisions.”
Motiejunas is pushing toward a future in which Euroleague Basketball is autonomous, handling all of its sponsorship, digital content and marketing in-house, while also retaining the final word on all other commercial decisions that may or may not be advised upon by IMG. He is adamant about Euroleague Basketball’s independence.
“We want to do everything on sponsorship in-house,” he says. “Gawain [Davies, Euroleague’s new head of sponsorship] is here and he’s restructuring the packages and re-evaluating them.
“We are happy with [title sponsor] Turkish Airlines but the contract is running out at the end of next season. We have started discussing with them. I like to control things, so we will do it in-house. I’m not the kind of guy to give responsibility to an agency and have them bring us sponsors. I like to have a team, I like a direct approach. That’s not only on sponsorship – it’s also on digital where Alex [Ferrer Kristjansson] is working, and I believe this is the future.”
IMG, however, believes something very different. Beyond the current 10-season term of the joint venture, sources say the agency has ambitions to increase its involvement in Euroleague’s commercial verticals, particularly on sponsorship and digital.
Motiejunas does not envision an IMG-less future for Euroleague Basketball, but control – there’s that word again – is non-negotiable.
“I believe that as a league we should worry about our growth more than anyone else. I’m not saying we will not use help from outside to open doors, but everything we can control will be done in house. I don’t expect IMG to find a cash cow for us. That’s how I see the change in the future.”
Cash cows
Currently, IMG holds a 45-per-cent stake in Euroleague Basketball’s commercial rights entity. As such, it has roughly equal control over the commercial direction of the league and its decision-making, as well as being the competition’s service provider across media rights sales, production, digital transformation, hosting, ticketing and hospitality.
Regardless of Motiejunas’ expectations, a significant part of IMG’s current remit is to bring transformational deals into the joint venture. Ahead of the partnership’s ninth season, the agency may have brought in a pretty big cow: Abu Dhabi.
EuroLeague’s season-ending Final Four typically rotates between a host of core or growing basketball markets – places like Istanbul, Belgrade and Berlin. However, IMG is believed to be cooking up a hosting deal with Abu Dhabi for the Final Four that would, in the words of one source, “smash through” the €100m-per-season barrier that would trigger the option of an automatic extension for IMG.
It is thought the money involved in such a deal would exceed €20m per year – the kind of money EuroLeague clubs will find it very difficult to reject. Motiejunas admits that the Middle East presents “a massive opportunity” for Euroleague Basketball and that a hosting deal – rather than parachuting a new EuroLeague club into the region, as has previously been mooted – is a better option for the competition.
Along with the Middle East, the UK is another market EuroLeague has long wanted to break into, ever since the beginning of the joint venture in 2016. London has been the target city of choice for a team, and the 777 Partners-owned London Lions were keen to become EuroLeague’s first UK team.
Motiejunas is broadly against parachuting clubs into EuroLeague full stop, preferring instead to make newly-minted clubs in major markets such as the UK, France and Germany compete in the second-tier EuroCup to prove their on and off-court abilities.
The Lions were close to passing the on-court test, reaching the semi-finals of the EuroCup in 2023-24. However, the team went out of business shortly afterward due to the wider collapse of 777.
Naturally, Motiejunas is pleased with the decision not to rush the Lions into EuroLeague, despite the wishes of their owners to fast-track the process.
“We need the UK, but I don’t know how to say this nicely… it’s as if they think that as soon as they come in and say ‘okay, we are setting up a team in this market, give us our licence,’ that it will happen, because that’s what they wanted. It’s not gonna happen.”
He continued: “Don’t say give me the licence and then I will unlock everything. I’m not a believer that if we go to the sponsors and say ‘we now have a team in Paris, London and Berlin,’ the sponsors will go ‘oh, amazing, we will now pay you double’. It’s not that simple.”
Evolution, not revolution
Motiejunas’ vision for Euroleague Basketball is not markedly different from that of Jordi Bertomeu, the project’s founder and long-time chief executive and chairman. Bertomeu imagined a EuroLeague that expanded and grew in major European markets such as France, Germany and the UK. Motiejunas wants that, too.
“The direction is basically the same,” he says. “If we talk about the strategy surrounding France, Germany and the UK, it never changed. It’s backed up by the statistics that we have: we have mature markets and markets where we can grow. So the direction is not going to be radically different.
“On the other hand, I want many things to change. I think we have so much potential in these markets and if you add the Middle East and other events, there’s a massive opportunity. And that’s what motivates me. We are not expanding just to expand, it has to be well communicated, clearly understood, and with clear benefits to the league and its clubs.”
Communication was not Bertomeu’s strong point. Sources close to the competition say that by the end of his 22-year tenure, he had become almost autocratic, rarely informing clubs or partners of the decisions made at Euroleague’s HQ in Barcelona.
Nor was it the strong point of his temporary successor Marshall Glickman, whose radical ideas about the league’s growth opportunities in the US and beyond alienated those around him.
Speaking to SportBusiness in 2022, IMG’s president of media Adam Kelly had a clear idea of how the joint venture could improve their working relationship: “It’s the old challenge of communicating effectively, making sure you’re taking care of any issues that arise before they become problems, and then breaking through when there’s a bit of conflict and a bit of stagnation.”
Communication is still by far the weakest element of the Euroleague-IMG joint venture. The partnership continues to grow revenues, expand into new markets and keep the often politically-charged atmosphere among the competition’s clubs separate from the commercial mission.
Sources on both sides speak of the partnership needing to “evolve” in order to continue for another 10 seasons. Whether it blossoms or collapses, Motiejunas is ready to do his bit.
“It was a great start, it is no longer a period of explosive growth, and we obviously want to grow faster. We just have to sit down, discuss issues openly, and move forward.”