Euroleague housewarming

Traditional Euroleague Board meeting took place a day before the regular season draw. The clubs' representatives including CSKA President Andrey Vatutin and Vice President Natalia Furaeva gathered in the new organization headquarters in Barcelona.

"The building is owned by the Euroleague so basically it is owned by all the clubs who are the Euroleague shareholders", - Natalia Furaeva said. "It hosts not only the offices but the meeting rooms also which can be used by any club. The headquarters presentation was the headliner of the day, but we also discussed several working topics during the meeting. The Euroleague speakers put an accent on improving the quality of the competition. The league's proposal is to unify all the aspects of game organization, from statistics and video replay systems to TV production. Games of the Week, produced by the Euroleague, are the examples. It was demonstrated that the worldwide Euroleague popularity grows thanks to this games. Club ranking system was also discussed separately. Our team was drawn as a first seed in previous years but it was ranked 8th this year. Despite the fact that CSKA is one of the leaders in results and in answering the league's requirements, it was noted unfortunately that CSKA is second to last in attendance from 14 License A bearers for second year in a row. It can be explained by bad results in last season but it is difficult to find the excuses for successful 2009-10 season. It is sad that if we will be unable to improve the situation the club the club can lose the 3-year license. One of the key regulation change was also the increase of the fines for the clubs. Many clubs preferred not to eliminate the shortcomings but to pay small fines instead - the term 'recidivism' was introduced for such a cases. The fines will be up to 100.000 euros and they will be considered repeated in the 3-year period. As for the essential sports factors the major change was the new qualification system which will make clubs play for the regular season spot in two groups in 4 days."

» Slideshow on euroleague.net